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Interesting, with this information and some idea of what they pay for electricity +support staff/drive replacements/maintenance you could probably figure out t
by howeyc 11y ago
Interesting, with this information and some idea of what they pay for electricity +support staff/drive replacements/maintenance you could probably figure out their break-even mark.
Their cost for the pod (which they say includes labor) comes out to 0.044/GB. The cost of redundancy is 3/20 drives, which would place the cost to 0.0517/GB of data. They are planning to charge 0.005/GB on the B2 service this is made for. That's 10-11 months to break even on the initial cost. Add electricity + maintenance costs (of which I have no idea what it is) and you get the break-even number. My guess is that it'd be 1 year. So however long each pod lasts past 1 year is gravy (aside from the electricity + maintenance costs).
Amazon S3 must be making a killing. As a customer you must be paying for the cost of the "pod" every 2 months.
Please excuse me while I buy stock in Amazon/Box/Dropbox/Backblaze/etc....
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As a aside, as a personal user if you store over 1TB you are getting storage at a cheaper cost than B2 users. If under 1 TB you'd be better of using B2.
Seems to me that the average storage per user must be well under 1 TB on their unlimited plans.
- budmang 11y agoExcellent analysis. There are some other costs involved (bandwidth, switches/cabinets, non-pod servers, etc.), but pods & drives dominate the costs, so your math is good. You're also right that 1 TB is the approximate breakeven between Backblaze per-GB cloud storage & unlimited online backup by cost and most people are below that. However, the main reason for people to use the backup service is that we take care of all the backup functions (encryption, dedup, compression, restores, etc.) > Please excuse me while I buy stock in Amazon/Box/Dropbox/Backblaze/etc.... Alas, Backblaze stock isn't yet available for sale ;-) BTW, thanks for being a customer! Gleb
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- atYevP 11y ago> Alas, Backblaze stock isn't yet available for sale ;-) YET...or is it? /runs over to SecondMarket.
- bwilliams18 11y agoAny chance you're thinking about a B2 based backup client for Synology or the like? I'm eager to backup those sorts of things to backblaze without going through the ISCUSI route Marco is taking.
- tomcam 11y agoPlus depreciaton on equipment. While the drives are probably long gone over 5 years, it's possible the racks could survive much longer.
- benjaminl 11y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that Backblaze keeps 1.15 copies of your data, while Amazon S3 and the like keep multiple full geographically redundant copies of your data. For example Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage keeps 3 to 6 copies of your data, depending on the tier, [1] when you compare that to the 1.15 copies in Backblaze B2 you start to understand where the pricing difference comes from. For most use cases this doesn't matter and the price saving are well worth the reduced redundancy, but Backblaze B2 isn't well suited for being the canonical store of your data. [1] - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/
- basch 11y agogiven block level dedupe, Microsoft might have 6 copies of your data, but that block is shared between 50 users in each region. Adding a 51st person calling on that block costs nothing.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agofull geographically redundant copies of your data In the case of Amazon, I wouldn't be so certain that they're geographically redundant copies. I raised this issue on HN a few months ago and someone replied that within an availability zone the data is "a bunch of (datacenters) that are close to each other". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10231677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10231677 I like how for GRS Microsoft specifically says "a second datacenter hundreds of miles away". I have yet to find such clear statements from Amazon.
- Spooky23 11y agoAmazon plays games with terms like "durability", meaning that the data exists. That doesn't mean that it is accessible by you or available in its entirety. Microsoft is definitely more straightforward in its claims. O365 for my org was in Midwest, midatlantic, and southwest, giving us a really good continuity story.
- Twirrim 11y agoAround about here in the talk: https://youtu.be/JIQETrFC_SQ?t=14m38s https://youtu.be/JIQETrFC_SQ?t=14m38s James Hamilton talks precisely what the definitions of AZs and regions are :)
- sneak 11y agoThis seems obvious, as the largest MacBook or MBAir one can buy is 512GB. Also, the B2 service doesn't come with a backup client, AFAIK.