{"id":43761,"date":"2015-10-21T09:14:05","date_gmt":"2015-10-21T16:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=43761"},"modified":"2022-07-14T13:53:01","modified_gmt":"2022-07-14T20:53:01","slug":"back-to-our-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/back-to-our-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to Our Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blog-back-to-future\"<\/p>\n

As you\u2019ve probably already read, today is that day. October 21st, 2015. The day Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to the future to help the McFly descendants. If you haven\u2019t seen the “Back to the Future” series, I highly recommend it (though to many people\u2019s dismay I like the third film, the Western, best). It\u2019s an unpopular opinion, but something about a time locomotive makes me really happy.<\/p>\n

In honor of “Back to the Future,” I wanted to take a brief moment and call out our own \u201cBack to the Future\u201d moment. Some of you may have seen this before, but if you\u2019re new to our blog, you might get a kick out of it. Anyway, reminiscing about Back to the Future got me thinking, as many things do, about the Backblaze Storage Pods<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Backblaze first had the idea to build our own Storage Pods, we created several prototypes. Being somewhat cash-strapped at the time there wasn\u2019t money to actually use a contract manufacturer so we had to build the first few prototypes ourselves using the skills we had in-house. In other words, we had to get creative. The original concept behind Backblaze Storage Pods was to wire a bunch of drive bays (like Drobos) together.<\/p>\n

\"p29b_2008_05_28_datacenter_configured_on_table\"<\/p>\n

From there, we decided we could just use bare (internal) drives\u2014but how would we hold them? Our answer was was to build a server out of wood. Yes, wood. I\u2019ll let you process that for a moment.<\/p>\n

\"p35b_2008_08_26_pod_made_out_of_wood_inside\"<\/p>\n

No, wood is not one of the most commonly used materials in a data center. In fact, as a fairly flammable object, it\u2019s quite heavily frowned upon. Yet, we soldiered on and even got one of the wooden prototypes in to the data center to test it.<\/p>\n

\"p33b_2008_08_26_pod_made_out_of_wood\"<\/p>\n

Since then we\u2019ve moved to metal, and sometimes aluminum (mostly for the marketing department, so we can lug one around). Today we have over 1,000 Storage Pods deployed as we\u2019ve built our entire data storage infrastructure around Storage Pods and now, Backblaze Vaults<\/a>. Added to that, countless others around the globe have followed our blueprint for Storage Pods<\/a> to build media servers, medical data storage, and more. As we look back from the future, it is hard to believe that our wooden prototype would beget 150PB of data storage and counting. It really is the future, at least ours. Thanks for reading, and for taking a moment to go back to the future with us. Puns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you\u2019ve probably already read, today is that day. October 21st, 2015. The day Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to the future to help the McFly descendants. If you haven\u2019t seen the “Back to the Future” series, I highly recommend it (though to many people\u2019s dismay I like the third film, the Western, best).… Continue reading Back to Our Future<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":43781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[131],"tags":[469],"class_list":["post-43761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-backblaze-bits","tag-consumerbackup","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBack to the Future: a Look Back at the Beginning of Backblaze Storage Pods<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A look back at the original Backblaze Storage Pod and how it begat the future that is the Backblaze Vaults.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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Yev has a degree in business and communications from the University of Iowa, where he developed an alliteration affinity. Yev enjoys writing in an amusing way about the \"why\" of things and how decisions are made, so that readers can learn and be entertained all at once. 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