Smart and Cheap and 135 Terabytes- BackBlaze

THIS is cool. 135T Raid-6, Http accessible storage for $7k+ - Phenomenally Disruptive price compared to standard storage practices (e.g. SAN).



Not only that but TCO is low:

One guy (Sean).. maintain[s] our fleet of 201 pods, which holds 9,045 drives.(16 petabytes!)

Philosophy:

to plan for equipment failure and build a system that operates in spite of it. 

BackBlaze's Online "Cloud" system backup stack:
desktop computer -> client app ->HTTP -> custom tomcat app ->memory cache-> LVM -> ext4 -> (md?)raid 6->Linux -> Sata

I think Google was a frontrunner in the idea of reliable infrastructure on top of cheap commodity hardware and linux/opensource +test and  engineer improvements yourself (e.g. Paper  and Summary) with  principles like:

•  Instead of a  3x +  premium for "Enterprise hardware" - design your system to expect failure and fail gracefully. 
• Instead of a  premium for "Enterprise hardware"--  do your own engineering. (e.g. Backblaze uses Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630 drives - Doesn't it make more sense to have someone test drives and find the best one, rather than pay a bunch of very high paid managers to sit through sales presentations for the privilege of paying a lot more for an "Enterprise" solution which is less reliable?)
• Instead of heaping all of the redundancy requirements on your infrastructure (which costs bigtime because its those smaller .9's which cost the big bucks) : Tune your infrastructure to support your app and build your app for redundancy and  component failure.

Why does backblaze give away their trade secrets??? Well they don't really give it all away.  It's the freemium thing. 

If you need to build a reliable, redundant, monitored storage system, you’ve got more work ahead of you. At Backblaze we’ve developed software that manages and monitors the cloud service.

And that software stack is proprietary :)

Android Dev links

Taking mobile development class. Working HARD,  but loving it. I haven't done much Java for almost two years AND it is an ECE class - much different type problem set than MIS. Bye bye pain points, COGS and Data mining. Hello state diagrams.

Fascinated by the idea of using ad-hoc wifi, or other p2p 802.11 wireless with android devices.  It looks like there is a new standard from  API for android
WifiDirect

Some other interesting links:

LAN-Based peer to peer using Adobe Air
and this http://blog.immanuelnoel.com/2011/08/11/p2p-apps-for-mobile-devices/

Frostwire Peer-to-peer filesharing for android via WiFi https://github.com/frostwire/frostwire-android

This is not exactly in same class but awesome I want to explore more: http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox_DIY

And some EXTREMELY INTERESTING stuff - people I would really like to work with:
serval project - phone, sms, collaborative mapping over peer-to-peer ad-hoc wireless mesh network.

This is just the coolest thing ever. crowdsource your net -.  http://www.servalproject.org/

  I think the more narrow focus is more productive, in that serval has a target customer and thus easier to make design decisions, etc.

Open Technology Initiative is trying to do something similar, (commotion) without the more narrow product focus, + at an earlier stage.

The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative (OTI) an open source “device-as-infrastructure” distributed communications platform that integrates users’ existing cell phones, WiFi-enabled computers, and other WiFi-capable personal devices to create a metro-scale peer-to-peer (mesh) communications network. supports human rights advocates and civil society organizations around the globe since 1) a distributed infrastructure eliminates the ability of governments to completely disrupt communications by shutting down the commercial or state-owned communications infrastructure. 2) device-as- infrastructure networks enhance communications security among activists by eliminating points for centralized monitoring..