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Backblaze: Cloud Storage For The Rest Of Us

For organizations that are not enterprise class and size, there is a need for storage solutions tailored to their use case. Even at a small size, massive amounts of data are being created and it is difficult to keep up with the amount of storage and availability of that storage when keeping things on premises. Backblaze helps fill the void for customers who need cloud storage now.

The Evolution of the Storage Pod

Backblaze seems to relish providing transparency into their infrastructure. We’ve been sharing their annual drive failure reports whenever we come across them, because it gives a fascinating real world look into overall drive reliability.Now the company has given an overview of how their Storage Pod rack infrastructure has evolved over time.

Backblaze Releases 2018 Hard Drive Stats

Backblaze has been releasing an annual report of their hard drive reliability for five years now. It’s a rare look into real world performance of drives at pretty massive scale. For 2018, they had just under 105,000 data drives in operation for their cloud storage and backup services. 

Gestalt IT Rundown: November 1, 2017

Tom Hollingsworth and Rich Stroffolino discuss the news of the week, including public cloud earnings, fog computing, crowdfunded enterprise IT, and Backblaze’s hard drive reliability numbers.

CrashPlan Sunsets Consumer Service

While I’ve never used their service, CrashPlan was always on my radar as a competent home backup solution. I really liked the peer-to-peer element on top of their centralized cloud backup, the more options the better, right? Sadly, the company is leaving the consumer market. Dan Frith weighted his options, and opted to return his backups to Backblaze.

Backblaze Backup Survey Results

Backblaze just released their 10th annual survey results on backup frequency. As a personal and business backup provider, they have a clear interest in the responses. But, like their disk drive reliability numbers, it’s nice that they share the results publicly.

8TB disks still looking solid, seem to be some of Seagate’s best

Backblaze published their drive reliability figures. They’ve got a few drives to derive data from, having 300PB of data kind of requires it. The company recently upgraded from 2TB drives from HGST and Western Digital to new Seagate 8TB drives. There was some concern that if these had significantly higher failure rates than the 2TB drive they would prove less cost effective. Afterall, the the HGST drives had a failure rate of just 1.6%.