Anyone who wants a Pod needs to build it themselves, or find a third-party vendor who picks up the design and sells versions of it. Because of this, Backblaze’s annual reports on drive reliability are a must-read for any hardware enthusiast.īackblaze, it needs to be stated, does not sell Pods directly: It’s a cloud company, not a hardware one. The company uses consumer-grade drives instead of enterprise ones, and accounts for drive failures by ensuring there’s enough redundancy to avoid data loss. Details like SATA cables needed to be obsessed over. Backblaze can build one of its units for under $9,000, which plays no small part of why it can offer unlimited file storage for $5 a month. The design crams 60 hard drives into a 4U chassis, yet still keeps factors like heat and performance in check. The Backblaze Pod 6.0 is new this week, and it’s impressive. Read on to the next page to find out why the company replaces one drive per week.A 3D look at the Backblaze Storage Pod 6.0 "It's still not 8 or 10 or 20x the cost," said Budman. Even tripling the build price to US$351,000 would still make the pod less than half the price of the next cheapest solution. "But for a lot of companies out there that just want to store a lot of data I think there's a lot more mark-up than value," said Budman.īudman said that a company could probably cover the cost of support and marketing by doubling or tripling the cost of assembly. But we don't need any one of these boxes to accept crazy amounts of data at any one time," said Budman.īudman said that the higher prices charged by IT vendors were "a combination of value and mark-up". The storage pods had a throughput of an "easily sustainable" 200Mbps. "We don't run databases on them," he said. We have just published the cost to build it," said Budman.īudman also pointed out that the Backblaze pods were designed for storage only and not for high-performance transactions. "Obviously there's no tax, there's no shipping, there's no mark-up for any sales team or marketing team, or the support infrastructure or warranties. A Sun X4550 retails for US$1 million, and the EMC NS960 is priced at US$2.86 million.īudman added that this was not a direct comparison, as the figure for the Backblaze storage pod was only the cost of building the box. The closest vendor to the Backblaze system's cost price of US$117,000 is a Dell MD1000 with a sale price of US$826,000.
In his blog post, Nufire compares the cost of assembling a petabyte of storage using Backblaze's storage pods to the retail prices charged by vendors for the equivalent amount of storage. Storage vendors would charge $1000 for a 1.5TB drive to put in a storage system," said Budman. "When we looked at for ourselves, I could go the open market and buy a 1.5TB drive for $150. And then we thought maybe we should share it with others."īudman did a Google search on the pod and found that in just a day and a half it had generated 30,000 hits.īackblaze spends "hundreds of thousands of dollars" on storage to support its online backup business, which targets individuals and small business.īudman said the company had decided to build its own storage units because the cost of assembly was up to eight times lower than the cheapest product sold by IT vendors. We went down this path because we needed cheap reliable storage, and we never intended to build our own storage - that's not our core business. "We literally had no idea what to expect.
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