Cloud Storage Needs Disruption And Backblaze Has Delivered The Goods

Announced in a blog post this week, the public beta of S3-compatible APIs for B2 cloud storage is now available. If you want the advantages of cloud storage, without breaking the bank with AWS, the Backblaze B2 service may be for you.

While Backblaze has long offered consumer accounts -- I've been a customer for years and currently have about 8TB stored -- the B2 service is aimed at businesses. B2 currently hosts more than an exabyte (1,000,000TB) of client data with over 100,000 customers.

If your organization has data it wants to save at low cost -- back up and archive data; host files online; offload costly NAS, SAN, and other storage systems; replace tape systems; an application store -- B2 could be for you.

Pricing

Unlike the Byzantine pricing structures of the big cloud vendors, Backblaze strives for simplicity and predictability. The cost for Backblaze B2 is $0.005 per gigabyte per month for data storage and $0.01 per gigabyte to download data. 

No cost uploads. And you can download 1GB per day for free, if you're counting pennies.

Compared to Amazon, Microsoft, and Azure, that's about one-fourth of the cost. If you do a lot of downloading, it's even more.

The take

When I left the storage business for the storage analyst business, I felt that most companies were being ripped off.

The 60% to 70% gross margins, the highly commissioned salespeople, the dismal utilization rates, and the fact that most of the improvements came from disk drive vendors, were, to me, symptoms of a sclerotic industry ripe for disruption.

On my now quiescent blog, StorageMojo.com, I focused on the technologies and companies that were doing just that. Cloud storage, SSDs, scale-out, advanced erasure codes, and direct, web-based sales models all merited a mention.

It worked so well that a $15 billion storage company threatened me, a one-man consulting shop, with ruinous litigation. And it wasn't the only bully in the industry -- just the largest.

Despite the fact that Backblaze's co-founder and CEO Gleb Budman never hired me (pooh on him!), I still admire what it has accomplished. Cloud storage needs disruption just as much as storage arrays did 15 years ago.

And Backblaze is providing it.

Comments welcome. What's the best deal you've found in cloud storage?