Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#1

Post by SudoAlex » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:09 PM UTC

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
backblaze.com

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#2

Post by jcreedon » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

The biggest shortcoming I see compared to the other big players (AWS, Azure, Google), and it is something they don't mention, is that they only have one datacenter, compared to the several from the other big players. The pricing is quite incredible though. I suspect if enough people hop on board with this they will probably look into setting up another datacenter.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#3

Post by brianwski » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

jcreedon wrote: post #2

The biggest shortcoming I see compared to the other big players (AWS, Azure, Google), and it is something they don't mention, is that they only have one datacenter, compared to the several from the other big players. The pricing is quite incredible though. I suspect if enough people hop on board with this they will probably look into setting up another datacenter.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We do mention that we only have one datacenter! We're very transparent, we also tell you that it is 17+3 Reed-Solomon error correction across 20 separate machines in 20 separate locations inside that one datacenter.

We are already looking for another datacenter, but mostly because we're running out of space in the current one due to our traditional business (online backup) doing so well.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#4

Post by budmang » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:39 PM UTC

I'm thrilled that we can offer this raw cloud storage for just $0.005/GB/month. Would love to hear from the Hacker News community what you do with storage today & what you might do with B2.

Here are my thoughts on our announcement today: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/

Gleb

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#5

Post by jrnkntl » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:40 PM UTC

cmd+f redundancy, availability, durability, 99: 0 results.

Only on https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html it is that I can cite the following: "the B2 Cloud Storage service has layers of redundancy to ensure data is durable and available". What that exactly is or what it translates to is nowhere to be found. If you want corporations or developers to use your storage services for their precious data, I'd be a bit more specific.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#6

Post by ck2 » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:42 PM UTC

Now we know why the sub-$200 6TB drives keep going out of stock.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#7

Post by brianwski » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:44 PM UTC

jrnkntl wrote: post #5

cmd+f redundancy, availability, durability, 99: 0 results. Only on https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html it is that I can cite the following: "the B2 Cloud Storage service has layers of redundancy to ensure data is durable and available". What that exactly is or what it translates to is nowhere to be found. If you want corporations or developers to use your storage services for their precious data, I'd be a bit mo…

Brian from Backblaze here: We're really transparent about our redundancy. We use 17+3 Reed Solomon across 20 computers in 20 different locations in our datacenter. You can read about it here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#8

Post by atYevP » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #6

Now we know why the sub-$200 6TB drives keep going out of stock.

Yev at Backblaze here -> WHERE ARE YOU FINDING THEM? We want...a couple...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#9

Post by brianwski » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #6

Now we know why the sub-$200 6TB drives keep going out of stock.

Brian from Backblaze here. We can't find them either. We buy either 4 TB or 8 TB right now, and we're experimenting with 10 TB drives. We don't know why the 6 TB drives appeared and then disappeared...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#10

Post by ComputerGuru » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

In 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 anyone who's used their software can tell you, it's throttled. I don't know how many users they have to tell you how much bandwidth they're actually handling, but can they handle people using B2 as a distribution point for large files for customers? For example, I have a huge S3/CF monthly bill from customers downloading ~400MiB ISO images tens thousands of times a month. Amazon CloudFront is ~$0.085/GB for the first TB, while BackBlaze B2 is an incredible $0.05/GB - but at what performance? Will my technical support representatives be getting angry phone calls about halting download speeds or do they have the capacity for something like this?

Hosting the world's data is no tiny task, I hope they're ready for it and I do, truly, wish them all the luck. I've been a BackBlaze customer for a few years now (at least 5 or 6, I imagine) as a tertiary or quaternary backup (haven't had to restore... yet), and B2 looks and sounds promising, but as far as technical details go, this post is nothing.

EDIT: In response to the reply below, I believe it's throttled by default in the client, though that can be turned off in the application settings. Also, you've replied to my claims of throttling but have ignored my question regarding backbone capacity and network readiness...