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Shuffle sharding in Dropbox's storage infrastructure

Volumes are spread somewhat-randomly throughout a cell, and each OSD holds several thousand volumes. This means that if we lose a single OSD we can reconstruct the full set of volumes from hundreds of other OSDs simultaneously. This allows us to amortize the reconstruction traffic across hundreds of network cards and thousands of disk spindles to minimize recovery time. » about 300 words

Claim chowder: cloud storage

Ten years ago Apple was still doing MacWorld Expo keynotes, and that year they introduced Time Capsule.

My response was this: forget Time Capsule, I want a space ship:

So here’s my real question: Why hasn’t Apple figured out how to offer me a storage solution that puts frequently used items on local disk, and less-frequently used items on a network disk? Seamlessly.

Ten years later: cloud storage is definitely the norm. Dropbox is about to IPO. And iCloud is the glue that unifies the Apple experience across all its devices (and which you’re perpetually out of space on, unless you pay).

Saving Backup Space With Time Machine and iPhoto

Three things that, when mixed, can consume a surprising amount of disk space: Backup automatically with Time Machine Use iPhoto and take a lot of photos Sync photos to one or more iOS devices like iPhones and iPads I do all three, and on top of that I have three current computers backing up to […] » about 500 words

Backblaze Storage Pod

Backblaze is a cloud backup service that needs cheap storage. Lots of it. They say a petabyte worth of raw drives runs under $100,000, but buying that much storage in products from major vendors easily costs over $1,000,000. So they built their own. The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes […] » about 100 words

Drobo: Sweet Storage, One Big Flaw

I’ve been a fan of Drobo since I got mine over a year ago. The little(-ish, and sweet looking, for stack of disks) device packs as many as four drives and automatically manages them to ensure the reliability of your data and easy expandability of the storage. However, Thomas Tomchak just pointed out one major […] » about 300 words

ExpanDrive FTP/SFTP/Amazon S3 Client

ExpanDrive makes FTP, SFTP, and Amazon S3 connectivity dead easy.

ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac. Open, edit, and save files to remote computers from within your favorite programs—even when they are on a server half a world away. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.

Solaris’ CacheFS Could Be The Space Ship I’ve Been Looking For

Joerg Moellenkamp‘s post explaining CacheFS has me excited: Long ago, admins didn’t want to manage dozens of operating system installations. Instead of this they wanted to store all this data on a central fileserver (you know, the network is the computer). Thus netbooting Solaris and SunOS was invented. But there was a problem: All the […] » about 400 words

Forget Time Capsule, I want a Space Ship

Apple’s Time Capsule is great. Seriously. When has backup been easier? But I need more. The MacBook Air‘s small storage highlights a problem I’ve been suffering for some time: there’s never enough storage. The slower processor and limited RAM expansion are sufferable, but storage isn’t. The 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro now is stuffed […] » about 500 words

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service

Ryan Eby got me excited about S3 a while ago when he pointed out this post on the Amazon web services blog and started talking up the notion of building library-style digital repositories. I’m interested in the notion that storage is being offered as a commodity service, where it used to be closely connected to […] » about 200 words