4 ms·

Hey, this is totally off-topic, but I have a humorous question for you guys: whenever I try to say the name of your company, about 75% of the time I flub it and

Hey, this is totally off-topic, but I have a humorous question for you guys: whenever I try to say the name of your company, about 75% of the time I flub it and say "Blackbaze" or "Blackblaze". Does this happen to you too? Do you have a swear jar for when people get it wrong? :)

Scorponok 10y ago
http://www.blackblaze.com/ http://www.blackblaze.com/
- atYevP 10y ago
  Yea, as a result of -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-site/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-s...
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    That's hilarious. Especially it ending up in your own marketing material. Lmao. Appreciate the link. I'm aware of this kind of issue having done plenty of customer service with disaster caused by misheard or misspelled things. So, I occasionally suggest a title change to some OSS projects that get posted here that might go big. Better to help them avoid the inevitable early on. :)
    - atYevP 10y ago
      > Especially it ending up in your own marketing material EVERYTHING can be marketing materials if you try hard enough :D
atYevP 10y ago
Analemma_ -> It happens to everyone (except me, because I have a lot of practice). But I wrote a little something about it -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-site/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-s...
- iheartmemcache 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, is there any reason why you haven't tried to tackle the EMC demographic? Components are so cheap right now, you can offer hospitals, banks, telecom, avionics terabytes of data in something like a 8u form factor with in a master-master multi-pathing configuration (no consensus problem or anything because both arrays have to message to the filer that the persist was successful on writes), then offload using cheap "commodity" PCI-e Intel DC PC3700s? (Alternatively, you could go cheaper and target the 'all flash' VNX-F market and still easily offer five-nines (i.e. fault-tolerant "Big Iron" style, rather than just HA.) You guys have the chassis manufacturing experience (your article on one of the pod designs had FEA simulations IIRC, so I'm thinking you have at least one engineer with graduate level expertise in fluid dynamics), presumably enough direct contact with vendors to source whatever you need to get upstream distribution (who do you guys use for your white label racks?), at least a few customers who have the budget and need for a solution like that, and I'd imagine you have at least one EE on your team with design experience to cobble together what you need. Either way, you guys have a great blog. Always a great read, keep it up!
  - atYevP 10y ago
    > Out of curiosity, is there any reason why you haven't tried to tackle the EMC demographic? We didn't want to be in the hardware market. We outsource all of our "builds" to companies that are willing to bend the metal and assemble most of the pods for us. You can buy the pods directly from them as well (like from backuppods.com or 45drives.com). Backblaze was started by software people who were forced to look at hardware to solve a price-to-density problem. Which is a really long way of saying - we don't want to sell hardware, if folks want to back up or store their data with us, that's awesome - but if they want hardware and support for that hardware - there's folks out there that are more in to that sort of thing :)

Scorponok 10y ago

http://www.blackblaze.com/ http://www.blackblaze.com/

atYevP 10y ago
Yea, as a result of -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-site/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-s...
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  That's hilarious. Especially it ending up in your own marketing material. Lmao. Appreciate the link. I'm aware of this kind of issue having done plenty of customer service with disaster caused by misheard or misspelled things. So, I occasionally suggest a title change to some OSS projects that get posted here that might go big. Better to help them avoid the inevitable early on. :)
  - atYevP 10y ago
    > Especially it ending up in your own marketing material EVERYTHING can be marketing materials if you try hard enough :D

atYevP 10y ago

Analemma_ -> It happens to everyone (except me, because I have a lot of practice). But I wrote a little something about it -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-site/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-s...

iheartmemcache 10y ago
Out of curiosity, is there any reason why you haven't tried to tackle the EMC demographic? Components are so cheap right now, you can offer hospitals, banks, telecom, avionics terabytes of data in something like a 8u form factor with in a master-master multi-pathing configuration (no consensus problem or anything because both arrays have to message to the filer that the persist was successful on writes), then offload using cheap "commodity" PCI-e Intel DC PC3700s? (Alternatively, you could go cheaper and target the 'all flash' VNX-F market and still easily offer five-nines (i.e. fault-tolerant "Big Iron" style, rather than just HA.) You guys have the chassis manufacturing experience (your article on one of the pod designs had FEA simulations IIRC, so I'm thinking you have at least one engineer with graduate level expertise in fluid dynamics), presumably enough direct contact with vendors to source whatever you need to get upstream distribution (who do you guys use for your white label racks?), at least a few customers who have the budget and need for a solution like that, and I'd imagine you have at least one EE on your team with design experience to cobble together what you need. Either way, you guys have a great blog. Always a great read, keep it up!
- atYevP 10y ago
  > Out of curiosity, is there any reason why you haven't tried to tackle the EMC demographic? We didn't want to be in the hardware market. We outsource all of our "builds" to companies that are willing to bend the metal and assemble most of the pods for us. You can buy the pods directly from them as well (like from backuppods.com or 45drives.com). Backblaze was started by software people who were forced to look at hardware to solve a price-to-density problem. Which is a really long way of saying - we don't want to sell hardware, if folks want to back up or store their data with us, that's awesome - but if they want hardware and support for that hardware - there's folks out there that are more in to that sort of thing :)