Think about the customers for bare drives and external drives. Meanwhile, John Rose alleges profiteering: Then this is the story of the jerks who ruined your Christmas. It's a story packed with ingenuity-unless you were trying to buy a 3TB external hard drive last holiday season. Basically, the answer was to buy the drives, rip them open, and stick their guts into the 135TB "pods" that the company uses-like shucking an oyster.employees started driving out and buying 50 or so 3TB externals at a time.ġ900 bargain basement hard drives later the company is doing just fine. So what were they doing with external drives? Kyle Wagner explains: If you wish to help, please consider a donation through Give2Asia or the relief organization of your choice. The tragic flooding in Thailand began in August 2011 and by early-October.800 people died and many more were homeless and hungry.even though we at Backblaze weathered the drive challenge it pales in comparison to the challenges faced by the people of Thailand. the call went out to friends and family – buy hard drives and send them to Backblaze, NOW. Other Backblaze employees were also asked to leave. In late November, Brian was banned from buying drives on Costco’s online store, and Billy was banned from purchasing them at any Costco in the Bay Area. To survive this crisis without raising prices.Backblaze deployed every last employee, as well as friends and family, to acquire drives in what became known internally as “drive farming”.
by mid-October 2011, violent floods in Thailand had crippled the factories that helped produce nearly half of the world’s hard drives.
#BACKBLAZE RAISES PERSONAL BACKUP FULL#
the company retains some secret sauce - its techniques for de-duplication, encryption, and managing a data centre full of Pods.īackblaze's Andrew Klein picks up the story:
The entire hardware design is open source. But it.provides huge amounts of storage on a bootstrapped startup budget. It’s not an incredible performer, nor will it offer the ultimate in reliability.thanks to its consumer-class hardware. At today’s prices, could provide 90TB a typical 19 inch rack containing nine Pods could store more than ¾ of a petabyte. In the end, Budman tells me, its ingenuity meant Backblaze was able to procure.about 5.5 petabytes worth of capacity in the three months it was actively farming them.īut why were they buying cheap, consumer drives? Your humble editor recently described the Backblaze storage "Pod" like this:Ī 4U rackable server, containing as many cheap, desktop-grade SATA drives as could be squeezed in. buy up the external hard drives sold for consumer backup at stores.remov from their protective enclosures. some suppliers were offering.drives that used to cost $129 for around $600.something had to give.behind the scenes, the company was working like crazy farming hard drives from the only places it could still get them at a reasonable price. “Literally overnight.all the places we would go to get drives said, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any drives.’” are the single biggest cost in the entire company.” Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman. the company had to get creative to keep up its 50TB-a-day hard drive habit. The story illustrates the kind of plight that can hit a smaller company that may not know all of its risks. One early trip.yielded 52 drives, enough to accommodate about two or three days' worth of Backblaze's.data needs. The first plan: Buying external drives at Costco andīest Buy. Extremely labor-intensive procurement of 1,838 hard drives with more than 5.5 petabytes of capacity - and a business that averted its own price-hike disaster.
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