Backblaze is Bay Area-based a startup that provides unlimited online backup for laptops or desktops to its customers for $5 per month, which is similar in many ways to cloud storage services such as Carbonite, Mozy and Amazon S3. To make his business commercially viable, founder Gleb Budman had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way and still keep his costs low. After looking at several commercial solutions that he considered overpriced, Budman told eWEEK that he and his team decided to build their own custom Backblaze Storage Pods with commodity hardware. They constructed 67TB worth of capacity in a 4U-sized server array. Total cost: $7,867. Budman isn’t afraid to document everything about this project. The new cloud storage system is now working well for Backblaze, Budman said.
However, he and his crew didn’t stop at that. They have since decided to share their development recipe and parts list for this low-cost storage system in an open-source manner. They figure that if companies can build their own cloud storage for a lot less up-front money, then perhaps those same companies will consider utilizing Backblaze’s cloud storage management software.
Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us, Budman said. Evolving and lowering costs is critical to our continuing success at Backblaze.
In this slideshow, we’ll show a general overview about how to make one of these storage pods yourself and save thousands of dollars. Backblaze has made the actual blueprints available in a free download.
You can view a more detailed blog post and a short 3D video illustrating the storage box.
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