blocks and files spoke with Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of cloud storage provider Backblaze, known for providing useful reports detailing reliability statistics for the drives used in its infrastructure. We spoke to Budman about cold storage tiers, regional expansion, Wasabi competition, decentralized Web3 storage, and shingled magnetic media drives.

Their responses may surprise you, as this cloud storage provider seems to stick to its single-tier fabric, no SMR, with a firm dominance.

Blocks and files: Would Backblaze consider providing cooler storage backup, eg using tape media? If you can design disk-based modules, perhaps you could design tape-based modules as well.

Gleb Budmann: [O]Our products are designed to offer a single tier of active storage in B2 Cloud Storage and unlimited, automatic backups through Backblaze Computer Backup. Adding tiers adds complexity, price, and forces customers to make decisions about what to keep easily accessible. At 1/5 the price of most hot cloud storage providers, we allow customers to keep and use everything they store at cold storage prices. Additional tiers of storage are not something we are considering at this time. Although posting “Tape Stats” would be a nice addition to the blog…

Blocks and files: How does Backblaze view and respond to Wasabi’s competition for backup and cloud storage?

Gleb Budmann: Over 15 years, we’ve grown Backblaze Storage Cloud to provide high-performance, reliable storage solutions to more than 500,000 customers. We basically kicked off our road to going public – only getting about $3 million in external funding through 2021, making us extremely efficient, built for the long haul, and affordable for our clients. We celebrate everyone working to bring the benefits of cloud solutions to more businesses and individuals, but we never want to surprise customers with removal fees driven by storage duration requirements, quick access fees, or other unpredictable expenses. .

We believe our long history of building infrastructure at zettabyte scale, serving half a million customers, and doing it with radical transparency along the way is valuable to current and future customers, and that’s a value that’s hard to replicate. .

Blocks and files: How does Backblaze view the idea of ​​expanding their regions to cover more of the world’s geography?

Gleb Budmann: We recently announced that Backblaze has expanded its cloud storage footprint with a new data region in the eastern United States. Our new US East region offers more overall location options, especially for businesses that want to easily store replicated data sets across two or more cloud locations. Backblaze also announced that it is providing free data egress for Cloud Replication across the entire Backblaze platform, making its cost-effective object storage even more attractive. We serve customers in more than 175 countries: Deploying exabyte-scale data centers and regions gives them better value and better serves the use cases we enable.

Blocks and files: What is your take on Web3 ideas of decentralized distributed storage? How would you describe the pros and cons of such storage vs. Backblaze?

Gleb Budmann: In fact, we considered creating a peer-to-peer backup service as our brainchild 15 years ago. Since our goal is to make it amazingly easy to store, protect, and use data, we decided against it because it would ultimately be too complex for most users to adopt. There still doesn’t seem to be much customer demand for storing data on decentralized platforms.

Blocks and files: What is Backblaze’s take on the pros and cons of shingled Magnetic Media Recording (SMR) drives? Could we see them having a role in the Backblaze pods?

Gleb Budmann: We do not use SMR units. We experimented with them a couple of years ago, and while they may be a bit less expensive at first, in practice they didn’t meet our cost, performance, and operational metrics. SMR drives are best suited for data archiving purposes, while application storage, media and entertainment, and backup customers need to be able to use their data. Furthermore, we believe that customers should be able to use their data however they want, including deleting it without having to worry about deletion fees generated by the use of SMR units.

starter note

Backblaze has just added a new data region in the eastern United States, providing faster access speeds for customers residing there and greater geographic separation for backup data stored by companies operating in other regions. It also helps provide an additional destination for companies looking to store copies of their data sets in two or more cloud locations to meet continuity needs. A free data egress cloud replication service is provided, allowing customers to copy data to the Backblaze platform at no cost.