Build your own 180TB NAS for $US1,942.59 (plus disk)

Cloud storage company Backblaze may not quite have the cachet of the folks playing in the Open Compute Project, but that hasn't stopped the company open-sourcing the design it's cooked up for the JBOD-like rigs it uses to power its service.

And after receiving a million page impressions for the release of its first design, the company says “several companies have built businesses selling Storage Pods … to hundreds of organizations around the world who are storing hundreds of petabytes of data on their own Storage Pods.” Backblaze itself is now back with a third-generation design.

A complete list of parts can be found here. The list appears very comprehensive: even $0.02 screws are listed. There's also a set of design files for the taking.

What can you do with a Storage Pod once you've built it? The boxen can run OpenFiler or FreeNAS if you want a simple storage device. CentOS, Windows Server 2008 and Debian are also options, although the device's Core i3 processor i3-2100 won't excite for many workloads.

Each storage pod can hold 45 drives, which in this age of 4TB units means 180TB can be put into operation within its 4U chassis.

One thing the company hasn't revealed is the secret sauce it uses to keep its own fleet of 450 storage pods bubbling along and preserving its customers many petabytes of data. Not everything, it seems, can be open-sourced.

There's also no word on whether Netflix will again use Backblaze's designs as an influence on its own storage kit. ®