How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco 273
concealment writes with this extract from GigaOm: "'We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.' Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year. Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army."
Re:Can't they just... (Score:5, Informative)
Skip the blogspam (Score:5, Informative)
Hear the story direct from Backblaze [backblaze.com] (bonus: goes into more detail).
Internet Archive (Score:5, Informative)
Several months ago I met someone from the Internet Archive (archive.org) who told a similar story. The weren't expanding their storage at the same pace as Backblaze, but they were also resorting to shucking external drives to build their rack mounted servers.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe they just wanted to prevent racketeering: a company buying up a temporarily rare commodity (making it even rarer) and reselling at a huge mark-up. Maybe Costco thought this unregulated free market needed some self regulation to help it remain healthy.
Re:Can't they just... (Score:5, Informative)
some hard drives (western digital, iirc) are now sold without the sata interface on the drive itself, for external models.
you rip it apart, and find out that you can't stick it onto a sata port...
Re:All on consumer grade drives..... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah. I'll bet they're not even using oxygen-free SATA cables either.
Who cares what they store it on? What's important is it adequately checked for consistency, and what are the backups like. Everything else is detail.
Guess what. Google bought off-the-shelf computer gear for years and some datacentres run things without "datacentre grade" cooling. They don't suffer because a) they do it properly (i.e. not RELY on those drives to never fail) and b) nobody notices because the service is still more than good enough.
"Enterprise"-grade drives are just warrantied for longer. It doesn't mean they won't die just as quickly. Like "RAID"-grade drives - same drive as every other one on the production lines.
It's like saying you can't use Intel Mobile chips in a datacenter. It might not be your first choice, but provided they fulfil all their service obligations (which includes response times, failover, etc.) then who notices and who cares?
Every single server I've ever installed used "consumer grade" drives. Every single desktop I've ever installed used "consumer grade" drives. Failures are actually FAR BELOW any stated MTBF and, who cares, because it takes seconds to replace and DOES NOT AFFECT THE OVERALL SERVICE for the user. And no-one I've worked for has ever lost data because of a drive failure. Ever. Even when servers have all but caught fire.
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, I wouldn't think twice about doing the same thing. They are purchasing the drives, not stealing them. For "some reason" costco is buying them in lots where they can distribute them at that price. I guess they were just leveraging Costco and Best Buy's buying power to keep their business afloat.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)