budmang

So are you actually running a VM image somewhere and using B2 as a virtual disk drive from it?

Should be a fine use case. B2 is fine for backup, but designed to be used for all sorts of storage use cases. Would be happy to have someone on our team explore with you the specifics of your use case (performance, etc.); You can shoot me an email at gleb.budman at backblaze.

I don't know much about Amazon's retail business, but you're spot-on about us focusing on meticulously managing costs. Sometimes people ask how we do it and the hardest part to explain is that the culture of the company is built around that.

Thanks. Will get that fixed today.

Running Elasticsearch would require compute, which we don't have. However, how often do you run analysis on the data? Would it make sense to move the data to B2 and put back on s3 when it's needed?

Curious - if we open a region in Europe, do people care where?

Got it. Transcoding & making image thumbnails are two common use cases we hear. Thanks.

Sure. A bit hard to do as a table here, but here it goes:

                    B2              Glacier

Storage: $0.005/GB/mo === $0.004-$0.005/GB/mo (by region)

Upload: Free === Free + $0.05/1000 transactions

Download: $0.02/GB === $0.05-$0.09/GB

Retrieval Fee: Free === $0.003-$0.03/GB + $0.003-$0.03/1000 requests

Retrieval Time: Milliseconds === 1 min - 12 hours

In short, unless you only upload very large individual files, do nothing with them, and don't access any of them for at least 10 years...B2 is lower cost. (And, of course, doesn't required you to wait to get them out.)

If you're looking for a NAS, Synology boxes support Backblaze B2 directly via Cloudsync. I know some of their models support Gig E; not sure if all do.

After you signed up for B2? We're dropping prices for everyone - you too then ;-)

Tell me more please... is support for the S3 api because you use a product that you want to use with B2? Or you've written your own code to S3 apis?

Interesting. "rename" is generally not supported by object storage, but an API to "copy with a new name & delete" often is, which allows the same result. I presume that would work? (We're planning to add that in the future.) Pagination is on the list as well...

What software do you use to actually do the backups/manage them? (Wondering if we'd need to work with someone else to integrate to make that easier for you.)

Thanks for the suggestion (and for being a customer.) We've contemplated adding functionality to send the Backblaze laptop/desktop restore to your Backblaze B2 account. Then you could put multiple restores in a 'snapshot' and get that delivered on a drive. Useful?

BTW, rclone, duplicati, duplicity, and others now support Backblaze B2: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html

Thanks for the kudos!

Backblaze has a backup service for laptops/desktops, but our B2 service is actually more like S3 - the data is available without delays or penalties for access. (Unlike Glacier.)

I would love to do this. Cross-connects aren't free, but they are certainly less expensive than going out across the Internet. And enabling compute/storage use cases by (possibly) partnering with other providers would be excellent. I'll reach out to a few of those compute providers and explore.

Can you tell me more about how you use/would use cloud storage? (with or without compute)

We have always tried to squeeze costs out of storage. That required a ton of tech/ops work. Bandwidth it turns out isn't that expensive - seems to just typically be overpriced. Hopefully lowering the price will enable people to do more with their data.

I'd love to hear what you haven't done in the past due to bandwidth/download pricing that you'd have wanted to...?

Gleb @ Backblaze

Yes, single data center. (Not in an earthquake area, flood zone, etc.) We're currently in the process of signing a second data center close by and expect to have multi-region support in about six months.

What are you considering using B2 for & where is the data stored now?

We're incredibly excited to launch our cloud storage offering out of beta. It's been 9 years since we started Backblaze, 7 since we open sourced our Storage Pod design, 2 since we started working to open the API, 8 months since we announced the beta, and 30 minutes since we declared the beta done ;-)

However, don't be misled...this is the beginning, not the end. So please give us feedback on our APIs, what features/functionality you need, what other products you want to integrate B2, what information do you want to know, and basically how else we can help!

And thank you for all the support over the years,

Gleb (ceo, backblaze)

This was the original blog post where we analyzed hard drive reliability and saw that it followed a bathtub curve: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

I actually am blown away by the reliability of hard drives. We've found that after 4 years, nearly 80% of hard drives are still working, and the median life is about 6 years: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

Considering a 4 TB hard drive has to track 32,000,000,000 individual bits, allowing reading and writing repeatedly of each one, on platters that are spinning 120x per second, spaced a hair's width from their heads...I think it's actually incredible.

As for SSDs, we keep wishing that we could switch to them, but they're still 10x more expensive on a $/TB basis. That may change in the next few years, and if it does, we'll look forward to sharing data on SSD usage at scale as well.

Gleb (CEO, Backblaze)

From our experience, we've found 5 SMART stats that are useful in predicting failure: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/

Many SMART stats aren't particularly useful in predicting failure as they simply correlate to the age of the drive in some fashion.

Also, here is our data on every single SMART stat for all of the drives we have: https://www.backblaze.com/blog-smart-stats-2014-8.html

Gleb (CEO, Backblaze)

You can also email b2contact at backblaze.

Good feedback.

It's an excellent point. Everyone has to look at their particular use case. If your bandwidth between compute/storage is very high, and the amount you store is very little...staying inside of a provider that offers compute & storage makes sense.

If your cost of storage is high on a relative basis, B2 may be a cost efficient alternative.

Gleb from Backblaze

Those are great services and we actually mention them just a bit lower on the page. In the chart, we're comparing apples-to-apples: real-time cloud storage services.

Nearline, S3-IA, and Glacier are all made for 'infrequent access'. All charge you for deleting files and retrieving files (on top of bandwidth.) Near line has a 3 second latency to first file and Glacier has a 4 hour wait. S3-IA has a minimum file size they charge for.

All of those restrictions might be fine...just depends on the use case. But B2 is designed to be used not only for 'infrequently accessed' files...but also for frequently accessed ones.

And all of other services are still 40% - 250% more expensive for their base storage costs.

Hope that helps. Not trying to hide anything and we'd love to have you give Backblaze B2 a try. (And to provide us feedback or ask us questions about anything else!)

Gleb from Backblaze

Some of the cost-efficiencies are achieved by architecting the software somewhat differently. The most important one is that the user requests and upload URL and then posts to that, which saves us from needing big, expensive load balancers.

At the same time, we're working with partners who will abstract our B2 API to make it akin to the S3 API.

Gleb from Backblaze

We're definitely reading this ;-)

Appreciate the feedback and we'll take a look at that rsync utility. We're also working on a simple client app that will do rsync with B2.

We're also starting to work with partners to offer a variety of other integrations. Duplicity and HashBackup have integrated B2, and Duplicati has an early alpha version. Someone is working on a FUSE integration. So hopefully soon there will be many ways to use B2. We'll list them here: https://www.backblaze.net/b2/docs/integrations.html

Please keep sharing feedback of what you need and how you'd use it!

Gleb from Backblaze