Need a few petabytes of Mac storage? Build your own BackBlaze Storage Pod

Funny
I wonder if anyone has ever used or hear of isilon ? http://isilon.com . They already do this and provide a fault tolerant culstered setup. The best part is they Do it all with FreeBSD .

This solution might be just what I'm looking for, but things like "Chyang Fun Industry (CFI Group) CFI-B53PM 5 Port Backplane" can't simply be ordered from NewEgg.

If I wanted to build 100 of these, I might be able to get a case custom made and deal with international parts manufacturers, but I want just one.

Tim, I appreciate your sharing this, but I wonder how you expect anyone to benefit from it when it is not really made with commodity parts?

"...a huge collection of vinyl albums and singles that he painstakingly digitized, cleaned up, and catalogued in iTunes."

Any chance you can tell us the process he used (hardware/software) for doing this? I'm hoping the way he did this is an improvement on the attempts I've made so far.

Building a new one is a tough task, dont you think to buy one that too if available with heavy disount up to 30%
http://www.kvmstuff.com/server-management/kvm-drawers.html

zfs support that isn't crazy buggy would be nice.

I am glad to see that the BackBlaze Storage Pod uses IBM's JFS File System. JFS is just awesome. In all my tests it outperforms ext3/4, XFS and ReieserFS. It also runs great on slow PC's.

IBM has done a great job with JFS (which IBM uses on it servers). I believe IBM has even open sourced JFS.

I am always so surprised that it is rarely used as the default file system on Linux / BSD systems.

Don't overlook JFS. Give it a try if you are running Linux or BSD. (I run it on all my Linux and BSD boxes).

One day, I hope Apple adds support for JFS to Mac OS X. But I fear with all the hype surrounding ZFS, it may never happen.

As a college student I stay productive by treating college like a 9 to 5 job so tath i'm always on top of my work.

Ummm...did anyone talking about the fact this isn't a "real world" solution actually follow the link? If you had, you couldn't have missed a couple facts:

1) The only non-diagram pictures show this in a rack. The box is described as "4u box". Clearly, this isn't meant to be connected to your home network.

2) While the redundancy is a little weak inside the unit, you could buy and run roughly 10 of these vs the next cheapest option, giving you pretty decent opportunities for redundancy.

3) No this doesn't offer every storage option. I believe that's the point of open sourcing it - you can add your own options. Personally, I'd love to have a few of these to play with to see how good a solution I could come up with using FibreChannel and ZFS, and how a PostgreSQL db would run using these as primary.

I guess this is a nice solution, but it would be better if it was ZFS. I really wish Apple could have gotten ZFS support working for Snow Leopard (or Leopard before it) even if it was just read/write support without boot support.

So I have to ask -- how many GB did your client's iTunes library take up?