The article talks about how it is not intended as a complete solution. They do not go into, or intend to, describe their redundancy features, their performance issues, or anything else.
From the Article:
A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block
We have been extremely happy with the reliability and excellent performance of the pods, and a Backblaze Storage Pod is a fully contained storage server. But the intelligence of where to store data and how to encrypt it, deduplicate it, and index it is all at a higher level (outside the scope of this blog post). When you run a datacenter with thousands of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, you are going to have hardware failuresâ"itâ(TM)s irrefutable. Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesnâ(TM)t allow for a single point of failure. Each pod in itself is just a big chunk of raw storage for an inexpensive price; it is not a âoesolutionâ in itself.
If you did want to attack this concept, it would be based on the fact that I cannot think of a good general storage use for this besides serving static webpages.
The only access method is through https.
There is only 1gigabyte bandwidth per 67 terabytes. 67 Terabytes is duh, 67000Gigabytes... Thats 536000 gigabits. a 1gigabit/s interface needs 6 days to move all that data. Oh and it can only be accessed through https. So its somewhat questionable that you can actually move nearly that much data. I don't really know what the limitations of the harddrives or SATA are, but no matter how much speed any of that has, the network link and latency are going to be significant if you are really moving large scale data. I can only assume their applications don't require speed, or that by duplicating it over a large number of systems they are going to get some load balancing. So then one asks... HOw many of these pods equal a redundant system with reasonable performance? And what is the power usage involved?
There is Raid6 based on 15 drive sets with 2 parity drives spread across between 1 and 3 controllers but there is no hot swappable drive, fan, or controller.
Essentially a single drive failure requires you to take down the entire system. Now I assume there is a replicated system, so you can just take down any of these boxes with no planning.
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Honestly I am sure this suits their purpose. I can't imagine what purpose it would suit for me.