Some of you may have read about Backblaze's 67 TB of $7867 post. Maybe Linode could use something like this to roll their own and offer locally hosted SAN storage as an alternative to S3 and maybe allow things like NFS, etc?

That was quick!

Edit: Serious answer...we reviewed that box (I subscribe to BoingBoing personally, as does mikegrb). It has redundancy and design issues. Lots.

Good idea, though.

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

Hmm, I thought they took a similar approach Google did and pretty much expected things to fail at the hardware level (e.g., the power supplies) and balanced that out with redundant nodes so what when (not if) something failed in a node, they could fix it, but it didn't have to be fixed right away since there'd still be no down time.

Anyhow, I'm sure you all know how to handle larger scale infrastructure things better than I, SAN was just something I was interested here at Linode.

Thanks!

That was a pretty impressive little setup they made, but there are some interesting holes in it. I love the way you have to power up one PSU at a time to prevent overloading the mains

As a former submarine nuclear reactor operator, I admire and appreciate the no-load heat generation when all drives are idle.

James

Not quite that simple, you need a good deal of scale to make that kind of system viable in a high-availability environment. Google and Backblaze have it. Linode probably isn't that big.



That part is hardly unusual. Even when you're just dealing with a typical 1U server, it's not a good idea to power up everything at once, you're liable to blow the circuit. They're just externalizing logic that is usually contained within the big SAN units.

Stick it on a good smart PDU and stagger the startup per-outlet and you're good to go.

You'd be amazed how much time was spent by people just manually staggering server powerup on loaded circuits before those PDUs became widespread.

Really? Neat!

Not arguing that, I just love the way they've made it external in order to cut the costs