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Blackblaze rolls out new storage plan at half a penny per gigabyte ($5 for 1TB/month)
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Blackblaze rolls out new storage plan at half a penny per gigabyte ($5 for 1TB/month)

pbgbenpbgben Member, Host Rep
edited September 2015 in General

In a bid to compete with Google and Amazon, Backblaze today announced "a new service offering as much storage as you want for half a cent per gigabyte per month," according to Computerworld. The new service is called B2 Cloud Storage and offers raw cloud storage, where "data is not encrypted or manipulated in any way" – users can encrypt their own data before uploading it. Computerworld reports the first 10GB are free. - source

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

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Comments

  • 1TB for $5 some people here would call that an unstable offer.

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  • singsingsingsing Member
    edited September 2015

    IgniteServers said: 1TB for $5 some people here would call that an unstable offer.

    Unstable? You mean unsustainable. Hassium is unstable, storage under $5/TB is (probably) unsustainable.

    But, really, it depends on how much redundancy is being used. Cheap HDDs are now $25/TB or so to buy individually, and probably available slightly cheaper in bulk.

    The only claim I could find on their site is that they have "layers of redundancy", which could mean something as bone-basic as RAID-5/6 with block layer integrity checks.

    Money back in 6mo is not so bad. And HDDs shouldn't be consuming all that much power once they're full and you just have the occasional read. Ideally, one should have background scrubbing running from time to time though so power and bandwidth will cost some.

    OTOH, if they are replicating everyone's data three times on different parts of the globe for disaster resilience, then, yes, that sounds distinctly unsustainable.

    Thanked by 1Jonchun
  • IgniteServers said: 1TB for $5 some people here would call that an unstable offer.

    If that offer come from you, then you right.

  • @IgniteServers said:
    1TB for $5 some people here would call that an unstable offer.

    They make their money on outgoing transfer. $5/TB to store, $50/TB to recover ($0.005/GB to store, $0.05/GB to recover).

    singsing said: OTOH, if they are replicating everyone's data three times on different parts of the globe for disaster resilience, then, yes, that sounds distinctly unsustainable.

    I'm pretty sure they only have one presence (Sacramento, California). Now they may replicate multiple times in-house, but you don't get the geographical redundancy.

    Thanked by 1IgniteServers
  • lbftlbft Member
    edited September 2015

    Nice to know the LET's community's still got its head stuffed quite far up its arsehole.

    IgniteServers said: 1TB for $5 some people here would call that an unstable offer.

    singsing said: storage under $5/TB is (probably) unsustainable.

    This is a company that stores over 150 petabytes of data. You know what they're saying to people who want to join the beta?

    Yes, we currently have deployed 100 Gbit/sec symmetric where the DOWNLOAD side is almost completely empty (this is a strange side effect of having an online backup business for 8 years). 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. (Source)

    But no, I'm sure they can't afford to store your terabyte of cat pictures because you don't know what scale is.

    singsing said: The only claim I could find on their site is that they have "layers of redundancy", which could mean something as bone-basic as RAID-5/6 with block layer integrity checks.

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/

  • JonchunJonchun Member
    edited September 2015

    @lbft said:
    Nice to know the LET's community's still got its head stuffed quite far up its arsehole.

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/

    Yes, it's unsustainable if you're going strictly by how most of us here operate. However, their revenue model is based off charging people to recover their data, not store it. They wouldn't be able to offer those prices if it was high outgoing bandwidth included per plan.

  • lbft said: Nice to know the LET's community's still got its head stuffed quite far up its arsehole.

    IgniteServers said: 1TB for $5 some people here would call that an unstable offer.

    singsing said: storage under $5/TB is (probably) unsustainable.

    Well, I wrote that before I did the math, and then forgot to edit. Thanks officer, I'll get that blinker checked out by my mechanic in the morning.

    lbft said: But no, I'm sure they can't afford to store your terabyte of cat pictures because you don't know what scale is.

    singsing said: The only claim I could find on their site is that they have "layers of redundancy", which could mean something as bone-basic as RAID-5/6 with block layer integrity checks.

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/

    Well, thanks for digging that up. Some of that should probably be included, or at least linked, from the pages where they try to sell you their service without explaining what it is (i.e., "click here for more details on how our 'layers of redundancy' work"). After all, I'm not paid to review the Internet, so there isn't time to find content that isn't within a few obvious clicks from their main page.

    As I understand it, it's still not as redundant as replication of data. If you split into larger number of shards, the chances of some drives failing obviously increase. It is a step up from RAID though, so I give them points for that.

    Also, I don't see any "layers" of redundancy. There really isn't anything that smacks of more than one "layer" to their solution :/

    Also, their blog states:

    A Vault can lose up to three drives in the same tome at the same moment without losing any data, and the contents of the drives will be re-created when the drives are replaced.

    That's doing it wrong. As soon as a drive failure is noticed, the software should start copying onto hot spare drives to repair redundancy without waiting for intervention.

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  • edited December 2015

    Just got accepted into the beta.

    Took a look around, and uploaded some files. I've been using s3 as a CDN origin for a while now, and was looking for something to keep costs down.

    The deal breaker for me is that it isn't S3 compatible and uses it's own API. As much as I would like lowering costs, there were only a few CLI clients that supported Backblaze b2, and all of them could only upload one file at a time. Support in applications was basically nonexistant as well.

    I think Ill wait a while.

    Meanwhile, I'm going to install minio/skylable on a few servers and create a cluster.

  • I also got in the beta and looking forward to trying it out - its a shame it doesn't seem to fully support the S3 API (like swift does), but I guess that one of the things you sacrifice for buckets of space for (almost) no money.

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