The question “How heavy is the Backblaze Cloud?” came up in a marketing meeting one Monday afternoon. “One million pounds,” someone guessed, “A hundred thousand pounds,” someone else said trying to sound sure. The truth is we had no idea. “Well, how much does a real cloud weigh?” someone else asked, and at that point….
Seagate just introduced a 60TB SSD. Wow. As Backblaze scurries about upgrading from 2TB to 8TB hard drives in our Storage Pods, we just have to stop for the moment and consider what a 3.6PB Storage Pod would look like and how much it would cost. Let’s dive in to the details… What we know….
Q2 2016 saw Backblaze introduce 8TB drives into our drive mix, kick off a pod-to-vault migration of over 6.5 Petabytes of data, cross over 250 Petabytes of data stored, and deploy another 7,290 drives into the data center for a total of 68,813 spinning hard drives under management. With all the ins-and-outs let’s take a look at how our hard drives fared in Q2 2016.
With over 250 Petabytes of data under management, Backblaze has grown to be one of the largest Clouds around. But with over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created daily, it seems we’ll need to keep on growing to keep up. With all that data in mind, the infographic below is full of facts, figures,….
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage 1.0 is out of Beta and available for organizations large and small to reliably, yet inexpensively, store their data in the cloud. B2 not only provides cloud storage at 1/4th the cost of leading providers, it also comes with a 99.9% Service Level Agreement (SLA), free and premium support options, and a growing list of partners who have created integrations to sync, backup, or archive data to the B2 cloud.
For Q1 2016 we are reporting on 61,590 operational hard drives used to store encrypted customer data in our data center. There are 9.5% more hard drives in this review versus our last review when we evaluated 56,224 drives. In Q1 2016, the hard drives in our data center, past and present, totaled over one billion hours in operation to date. That’s nearly 42 million days or 114,155 years worth of spinning hard drives. Let’s take a look at what these hard drives have been up to.
Storage Pod 6.0 deploys 60 off-the-shelf hard drives in a 4U chassis to lower the cost of our latest data storage server to just $0.036/GB. That’s 22 percent less than our Storage Pod 5.0 storage server that used 45 drives to store data for $0.044/GB. The Storage Pod 6.0 hardware design is, as always, open….
With the 20,000+ people that have signed up for B2, we have received a lot of feedback, and have been working diligently to incorporate it. If you like big files…really big files, you’ll really like this release — the B2 Big File Beta — but there’s a lot more to like. Let’s take a look.
