![]() Backblaze’s storage environment is based on Storage Pods, which is comprised of 60 hard drives. The cloud storage provider, which has both consumer and enterprise customers, stores more than 500 petabytes of data in its 85,000 hard drives, which vary in size from 3 TB to 12 TB (the 10 TB and 12 TB Seagate drives are relatively new, coming into the datacenters in the second half of last year). Now, Backblaze collects data from each drive every day, in large part to determine the annualized failure rates of the devices and to discern any pattern that might emerge. However, understanding the insights that could be gleaned from the information, the company eventually decided to keep it. At the same time, the company invited others in the industry to perform their own analytics on the data.Īccording to Andrew Klein, director of product marketing at Backblaze, before 2013 the company would collect the hard drive statistics, but would delete the information after 30 days. It was with this idea that cloud storage vendor Backblaze almost five years ago began to keep the statistics it collected on the more than 85,000 hard drives the company manages in its datacenters, and then make that data available to the industry at large through quarterly reports that track the performance and annualized failure rates of the devices from Seagate, Western Digital, and HGST, Hitachi’s former storage business that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital. The data collected on the infrastructure itself can give businesses a window into the future direction of datacenter technologies. IT administrators also can look into these datacenters to see trends that are emerging in the industry, such as whether servers with a particular number of processors are growing popularity, which hardware accelerators are being asked for or how much capacity enterprises are looking for in their storage systems. Some hardware systems are homegrown or built atop open designs.Īs such, they are good places to compare and contrast how the components of these systems work, which workloads run best on them, how much power they consume, and how reliable they are. Their components come with different speeds, capacities, bandwidths, power consumption, and pricing, and they are powered by different processor architectures, optimized for disparate applications, and carry the logos of a broad array of hardware vendors, from the largest OEMs to the smaller ODMs. ![]() ![]() The massive facilities hold a broad array of servers, storage systems, and networking hardware that come in a variety of sizes. Cloud datacenters in many ways are like melting pots of technologies. ![]()
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