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Backblaze Scales Storage Cloud
- drdecentralize1 2y agoanother solution is to distribute the task of drive maintenance. see storj for example.
- aitchnyu 2y agoAre the participants in this systems bare metal professionals? Prices seem suspiciously low.
- PaywallBuster 2y agodoes that mean that they run hardware as long as it lasts? and in this case made sense to proactively move to "denser" storage?
- pstrateman 2y agothe server to support the hard drives is quite a large part of the total cost, so replacing drives is probably an economical solution to increasing storage
- tracker1 2y agoWas going to say the same... A relatively modest server in the past 5 years can handle a few dozen SATA drives without issue. Going from 8tb drives to 16tb doubles capacity. IIRC they tend to cycle out drives around the 5 year mark.
- banish-m4 2y agoI'm wondering if they've experimented with higher endurance lifecycles risking larger % of failures relying on redundancy and replication to migrate data, or encountered increased OpEx costs.
- tracker1 2y agoGenerally really appreciate how much information Backblaze publishes. I also liked when OKCupid did similar before they were bought out.
- atYevP 2y agoYev from Backblaze here -> I LOVED the OKCupid data dumps, they were so fascinating! Pornhub used to do a great job of surfacing their data as well, but obviously the subject matter was much different.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoIt's amazing to see the magnitude of declining storage prices laid out so clearly.
- jszymborski 2y agoTheir prices do seem to continue to increase though https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2023-product-announcement/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2023-product-announcement/
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoI'm sure they like money as much as the rest of us do.
- sosodev 2y agoBackblaze is not profitable
- sophacles 2y agoWhat type of "not profitable"? By itself that's not a useful statement. Do they have a bunch of cash in the bank? Do they have higher revenue than Cost of Business? Do they have free cash flow? Is it growing? A business that isn't profitable and also isn't growing is a much different beast than a company that is investing its cash reserves to grow the business.
- gruez 2y ago> What type of "not profitable"? By itself that's not a useful statement. They're a public company so you can check for yourself: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1462056/000146205624000033/blze-20231231.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1462056/0001...
- sgerenser 2y agoThey're definitely growing, and will likely be profitable at some point in the next few quarters: https://ir.backblaze.com/news-releases/news-release-details/backblaze-announces-first-quarter-2024-financial-results https://ir.backblaze.com/news-releases/news-release-details/... But even on a non-GAAP basis (which excludes stock-based compensation), their net income for the most recent quarter was a loss of $5.5 million.
- ec109685 2y agoThey mention transferring data over “encrypted dark fiber connection”. What does that actually mean? I thought fiber was dark until it was plugged in.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoIt means they are running a private network over a dedicated fiber line that carries only their traffic.
- ec109685 2y agoOkay, that’s a different meaning than this: https://enterprise.spectrum.com/support/faq/internet/what-is-dark-fiber.html https://enterprise.spectrum.com/support/faq/internet/what-is...
- tinco 2y agoYeah, they misused the term. They bought dark fiber, after you've bought dark fiber it's obviously no longer dark.
- jeffmcjunkin 2y agoFWIW I've heard the term "dark fiber" used in both ways as well. Whenever there's ambiguity in jargon, I just avoid that jargon and use more words to describe the actual concept.
- dilyevsky 2y agoNo, they didn't misuse it. You can buy lit fiber too. The difference with dark is that you get a lot more control in terms of what transmission tech you use, link-layer capabilities, etc
- derefr 2y agoYour point does not address the thing the person you're replying to said. After you buy (really, lease) some dark fiber, and run traffic through it yourself, now that fiber can no longer be sold to anyone else as dark, because it's been lit up, by you. Dark fiber is only dark fiber for its first subscriber. Whether that first subscriber themselves considers the thing they've bought "dark fiber" or "lit fiber" once they light it up, depends on if they're made an exclusivity agreement with the provider. If they have, then the fiber is still "dark fiber" from their own perspective. If they haven't, then the fiber should be considered "lit fiber", because now that it's been set up for their use, the provider has likely put it on the market for others to lease as well, so it's not going to stay "dark" for long. But really, these are silly terms. Customers don't care about buying "dark fiber" vs "lit fiber"; they care about buying "dedicated fiber" vs "[dedicated throughput on] shared fiber." (A lease on dedicated fiber allows for nearly-arbitrary throughput scaling over time at no additional OpEx — just the CapEx of upgrading the transceivers on either end once-a-generation or so.) The only two things that you know by buying "dark fiber" from a peering provider, are: 1. Demand for that path was lower than predicted at the time you requested it, so there existed at least one fiber-infrastructure developer who had run some fiber along the path but not managed to sell it off to any particular peering provider yet. (Peering providers don't tend to buy-and-hold fiber without either immediate or predicted base-load demand; rather, they index available-to-purchase fiber from infra developers, offering those to their customers at snapshotted rates; they then buy the fiber from the developer in response to a customer Purchase Order, eating any loss from purchase-price volatility.) 2. You might have to pay the peering provider you're leasing from, for the initial set-up work of lighting up the fiber: routing a secondary fiber link from the optical switch in the fiber-infra developer's overland or shoreside termination point, over to the peering provider's cable hotel; terminating that fiber into a [maybe fresh] optical switch or transceiver in the cable hotel; etc.
- riku_iki 2y agoThey operate for many years on 30% net loss. How company can last for so long without going bankrupt?..
- rs999gti 2y ago> How company can last for so long without going bankrupt VC money and other investors.
- nine_k 2y agoAsk Uber. E.g. https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/31223/net-income-loss-of-uber-technologies/ https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/31223/net-income-loss-of-... Somehow people may finance an utterly losing operation for a decade or more. I wish Backbkaze stays around though, even if they charge more. They'd still be charging less than AWS, and they seem to have a good culture / attitude.
- riku_iki 2y agoI am reading Uber report: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001543151/bbb206f1-a6ba-4521-82cf-ae2d4011057f.html# https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001543151/bbb206f... and my understanding is that they are profitable in timeframe since IPO(, 2020+, meaning revenue is about or larger than R&D, Sales and infra), but they have some large "other expenses" entry, I speculate it could be some acquisition.
- moimikey 2y agoit's nuts that Backblaze is still around. I used to use them for my backups more than a decade ago.
- latchkey 2y agoI still use them for my backups.