Low Cost Petabyte Storage

In a time where I - myself - am still looking for a reliable, simple, and cheap way to keep my data safe (my main computer crashed a few days ago, and I'm still painstakingly slowly recovering data from it) this blog post jumped to my attention: talking about BackBlaze solutions to its large-scale storage needs.

To start with, lets analyze how much a petabytes costs these days (if you don't know what a petabyte is, its 1000 Terabytes, and 1TB equals 1 Gigabyte; to put it in perspective, 1PB equals about 227 thousand DVD-R discs.)

As you can see, the cost difference between the raw hard drives and what most companies charge you is substantial - which is why BackBlaze decided to build their own storage solution (just like Google does) and now shares their secrets with all of us.

The solution they come up with is their BackBlaze PODs, each holding 67TB and costing just $7,687.

The access to all this data is done - not via iSCSI, NFS, SQL, or Fibre Channel - but *exclusively* via HTTPS.

For all the details and a complete hardware and price list for these pods be sure to read the full post on how to build a petabyte storage solution at low cost.



I wouldn't need that many space for myself... but I'm glad they decided to share it with us so we can use some of their ideas. :)