Awesome. Can't wait to see this added to Déjà Dup as a backup destination.
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
31–40 of 237 posts
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#32In addition to the good point raised by @jcreedon regarding their single datacenter (which I think is a bit of a bigger deal than he does, primarily because I don't think it scales linearly per-GB for the first few datacenters, though it might thereafter), I'm more concerned about the bandwidth. There's no talk about their backbone or their network capacity. I get that they have terabytes of upload coming in, but as…
> as anyone who's used their software can tell you, it's throttled Brian from Backblaze here: no it is not throttled (by us). If you only have a 10 Mbit/sec upload capacity you are throttled by your ISP. Also make sure you visit our "Performance" tab in the online backup client and tweak a few settings, like increase the number of threads.
I have 100/100 up and down, and I barely push any more than 3MB/s when uploading. and in that time the client is easting all cores alive. I appreciate that it may not be the ISP. but the client does seem to end up being a major bottle neck.
I moved to Linux a few months back, and was going to basically cancel my Backblaze sub when I got around to it since you have no interset in making a Linux client. Maybe B2 can act as a solution to this at a price penalty.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#33In addition to the good point raised by @jcreedon regarding their single datacenter (which I think is a bit of a bigger deal than he does, primarily because I don't think it scales linearly per-GB for the first few datacenters, though it might thereafter), I'm more concerned about the bandwidth. There's no talk about their backbone or their network capacity. I get that they have terabytes of upload coming in, but as…
Sorry about skipping your network capacity question. I just got over-excited about throttling. :-) We currently have about 100 Gbps symmetric capacity into our datacenter on a couple of redundant providers, but the key is we have open overhead and we'll purchase more as our customers need it. But here is the best part (if you want OUTBOUND capacity) - our current product fills the INBOUND internet connection, but cur…
But if your inbound capacity is pretty full these days, how can you manage to onboard _large_ new clients at this point? Can you scale your inbound bandwith as fast (and at the same cost) as adding a new vault a month?
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry about skipping your network capacity question. I just got over-excited about throttling. :-) We currently have about 100 Gbps symmetric capacity into our datacenter on a couple of redundant providers, but the key is we have open overhead and we'll purchase more as our customers need it. But here is the best part (if you want OUTBOUND capacity) - our current product fills the INBOUND internet connection, but cur…
But if your inbound capacity is pretty full these days, how can you manage to onboard _large_ new clients at this point? Can you scale your inbound bandwith as fast (and at the same cost) as adding a new vault a month?
Not to speak for brian, but as someone who used to do physical datacenter operations, most facilities have a bunch of fiber already provisioned (in the ground). Its just a matter of getting the networking gear and provider provisioned. Turnup can be done as quickly as 24-72 hours, depending on the provider and the dollar amount involved.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as anyone who's used their software can tell you, it's throttled Brian from Backblaze here: no it is not throttled (by us). If you only have a 10 Mbit/sec upload capacity you are throttled by your ISP. Also make sure you visit our "Performance" tab in the online backup client and tweak a few settings, like increase the number of threads.
I have 100/100 up and down, and I barely push any more than 3MB/s when uploading. and in that time the client is easting all cores alive. I appreciate that it may not be the ISP. but the client does seem to end up being a major bottle neck. I moved to Linux a few months back, and was going to basically cancel my Backblaze sub when I got around to it since you have no interset in making a Linux client. Maybe B2 can ac…
Or a price savings! If you do the math, I think the break even is at 1 TByte. If you only need to backup 500 GBytes from your Linux server then you'll save 50%.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have 100/100 up and down, and I barely push any more than 3MB/s when uploading. and in that time the client is easting all cores alive. I appreciate that it may not be the ISP. but the client does seem to end up being a major bottle neck. I moved to Linux a few months back, and was going to basically cancel my Backblaze sub when I got around to it since you have no interset in making a Linux client. Maybe B2 can ac…
Or a price savings! If you do the math, I think the break even is at 1 TByte. If you only need to backup 500 GBytes from your Linux server then you'll save 50%.
Not server, desktop, Hence my annoyance you don't have a client for it.
I can understand your biz reasons for not having one though.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#37Is anyone aware of an enterprise(ish?) product that does encrypted off-site backups from a Windows environment to something like Glacier or B2? We're 75/25 Windows/Nix, and our backups (VMWare, NetApp) are all managed on the Windows side. We'd like to just fling weeklies at B2.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#38Took a quick look at the API. For context, I was involved in the early days of Google Cloud Storage.
It is surprising that they didn't make it compatible with the S3 API -- at least for common object/bucket create/delete. This will require more code to be written and it will be harder to adapt client libraries.
The API documentation is here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/
Other notes:
* The lack of scalable front-end load balancing is shown by the fact that they require users to first make an API call to get an upload URL followed by doing the actual upload.
* They require a SHA1 hash when uploading objects. This is probably overkill over a cheaper CRC. In addition, it means that users have to make 2 passes to upload -- first to compute the hash and then another to upload. This can slow uploads of large objects dramatically. A better method is to allow users to omit the hash and return it in the upload response. Then compare that response with a hash computed while uploading. In the rare case that the object was corrupted in transit, delete/retry. GCS docs here: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#che...
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#39Whether or not I decide to use this service, this is one of the most useful announcement blog posts I've read in a while. The tone is not just "ok we released this" but instead "we released this, and here are some practical use cases if you are already doing X, Y, or Z" -- nice job.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry about skipping your network capacity question. I just got over-excited about throttling. :-) We currently have about 100 Gbps symmetric capacity into our datacenter on a couple of redundant providers, but the key is we have open overhead and we'll purchase more as our customers need it. But here is the best part (if you want OUTBOUND capacity) - our current product fills the INBOUND internet connection, but cur…
But if your inbound capacity is pretty full these days, how can you manage to onboard _large_ new clients at this point? Can you scale your inbound bandwith as fast (and at the same cost) as adding a new vault a month?
Our inbound is not completely full, and we always try to have extra capacity/headroom for new customers. But if you plan to upload more than 5 petabytes at a rate of faster than 15 Gbps sustained, you probably want to contact us ahead of time to let us know it's coming and we'll increase our capacity for you. We can absorb anything less and it won't cause us any issues.
As somebody else mentioned, since we're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it.