We have ~8PB of spinning storage that we built with the backblaze storage pods, and use Openstack's Swift Object Storage for the software layer. Works like a champ.
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This sounds very interesting and is something that I'm thinking about doing as well. One "limitation" that I see with the BackBlaze pods is the possibility that they don't perform well in heavy everyday use. They were designed to be mostly write-only devices, but my use case would be very read heavy and I'm not sure how they would hold up.
Do you have any information on what/how you went about building your storage system? If not, would you be so kind as to create some text (blog, how-to's, etc.) that detailed your setup and how it performs under your workload?
Before my current startup, I worked at Fermi National Accelerator Lab on the CMS detector data taking team for the LHC. I spent a year there getting to admin the spinning storage (~5PB) on Nexsan Satabeasts (very nice, but very expensive for ~48-96TB of disk per enclosure) and ~17PB of storage on Storagetek tape silos (also, of less consequence, ~5500 nodes that reconstructed collider data from raw data we streamed over 40Gb/s optical links from CERN).
After my experience there (both technical and political), I left to do big storage. We settled on the Backblaze enclosures due solely to cost (cheap is cheap); read performance is sub-optimal, but we try to compensate with heavy caching in memory and intelligent read assumptions ("what might someone request next based on past read requests") at the app level (sitting on top of Nova).
I could do a blog post, but I have to check with my partner to make sure they're cool with me spilling that much info =)
Hope this has helped a bit. If you haven't guessed yet, I love object storage.
A blog post would be really interesting, even if you couldn't disclose everything.
What are your startup and blog URLs? You don't have any profile info.