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Backblaze Announces B2 Compute Partnerships
- budmang 8y agoWe're thrilled about this. In short, we've directly connected our storage and their compute to ensure fast connections, and made the data transfers free. We've heard some ways people want to use this (disaster recovery, transcoding, rendering) - but would love to hear ways that you might. Thank you! Gleb from Backblaze
- toomuchtodo 8y agoHey Gleb! This is awesome! Are there plans to accelerate this as an offering for other providers? I think there's huge benefit in partnering with other providers where you're enabling an agnostic storage layer (any provider that needs a durable object storage system without the complexity of operationalizing one themselves). Congrats, huge Backblaze fan!
- budmang 8y agoThanks for the kudos. We're open to supporting other providers as well, including other types of services beyond compute (e.g. databases and specific verticals.) Do you have some specific providers you were interested in having connected?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> Do you have some specific providers you were interested in having connected? Not off hand, but lots of colleagues in hosting, exchange fabrics, SaaS products, etc and I want to be able to recommend a partnership to them whenever a good fit appears.
- budmang 8y agoExcellent. We just created this Google Form to add/recommend partners: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdObw8HKH4uDexOg-flMbnOKTb47I5aiXEztt1dDSP3t3_r-A/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdObw8HKH4uDexOg-fl...
- prolepunk 8y agoI've been using b2 and linode and I would benefit from having those two services connected :)
- budmang 8y agoGreat - we'll try to connect with them.
- lukeqsee 8y agoI can second this. We run significant bandwidth from you guys to Linode, and this would help immensely in a few of our applications. We also use Digital Ocean, so they'd be our second choice; however, I doubt they'll be willing to integrate with a direct competitor to their Spaces product.
- budmang 8y agoI guess we can explore with DO, but certainly will with Linode.
- codingminds 8y agoWhen your European region exists: I'd love to see Hetzner(.com) connected.
- budmang 8y agoLooks like they're in Germany/Finland. We'll try.
- dx034 8y agoJust to second that. Hetzner has a great product in Europe for compute but they lack simple storage options. Connecting both would be great.
- chx 8y agoBe still my beating heart. Seriously? I would drop my Hetzner storage boxes in a heartbeat if I could connect to you instead on a fast link. I have, through the years, have used their auctions to snatch quite a few SSD only boxes and so I need external mass storage their network storage offer is ... ahem ... not the fastest! I would welcome something better :)
- lars_francke 8y agoI'll second what the others have said. Especially their new Hetzner Cloud would be a perfect fit. It's one of the cheapest (if not the cheapest) cloud option I could find. Combining that with your B2 storage would be a perfect match. And the best thing: They don't only focus on price but the quality is great as well. And for us being a german/european provider is a bonus (GDPR).
- timc3 8y agoYeah Hetzner would be awesome. We already run some stuff over there so I could foresee spinning up some transcoders if you have connectivity there.
- deadlyllama 8y agoVultr would be great!
- jlgaddis 8y agoDoesn't Backblaze just have a single datacenter? If so, I think they're pretty limited in who they can partner up with like this. That is, they could only partner with companies who are in the same datacenter as them (or very close, network wise, due to latency) that they can connect directly to.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoBackblaze has two facilities, one in California and one in Arizona. They're limited to anyone who can reach their network edge through a network port in their datacenters, but theoretically, you could ride fiber to their network ports from other facilities. I would expect that as this grows (and it will, cheap, reliable storage and all), their network footprint would extend into more facilities (scale is required for this to be cost effective though). Latency is not an issue until you're pushing GB/sec and crossing an ocean, and even that is feasible (lots of resources at https://es.net/ https://es.net/ for that use case).
- alexchamberlain 8y agoAre there any plans to expand this to a European location?
- jlgaddis 8y agoThe CEO mentioned in an another comment that a .eu location by the end of 2018 is a goal.
- gandreani 8y agoThis is awesome. I personally only use B2 for personal backups but I know my company is looking for storage of 4k media footage. This makes it more compelling for them :) Also this opens up the possibility for someone to make a SaaS on video storage and transcoding for great value
- budmang 8y agoWould love to help your company with their storage needs. Feel free to email me: gleb.budman at backblaze BTW, this person is figuring out how to do transcoding of files their files in B2 as well: https://twitter.com/orlandoferrer/status/981205299532124163 https://twitter.com/orlandoferrer/status/981205299532124163
- rayvd 8y agoIBM's GPFS+LTFS (tape-based) is also a very low cost way to go on this and a commonly used solution in M&E as well as Geospatial Imagery space (I work in the latter). Assuming you have the facility and staff to run it, of course. Ray
- byranthector 8y agoYes! Bare metal power and Backblaze affordability! I so need this!
- budmang 8y agoHey Byran - what do you hope to do with it?
- menegattig 8y agoBackblaze B2 is awesome and the future looks very promising. Their team is also very open to new ideas and projects. We have few PB of data there and never had any problem. I honestly don't see any reason for anyone to use AWS or Google Cloud for object storage, except for the outbound network transfer issue from these providers.
- dna_polymerase 8y agoRedundancy? BackBlaze still only operates one (or two but in the same region) datacenters.
- byranthector 8y agoMeh, for true redundancy you need separate vendors with different hardware and software infrastructure. Erasure coding and bitrot guard hit the 5 9s I need.
- atYevP 8y agoYev from Backblaze here -> we actually have datacenters in California and Arizona so they aren't too close together! That said, we're also working on multi-region support so that you could move data between regions (no ETA on that yet). Hoping to get more datacenters online in the coming year! But you're correct - we do recommend diversification, having data in multiple locations is always a best practice, and if you can have it in different vedors, all the better!
- discodave 8y agoWill my data in BackBlaze get replicated to two separate buildings automatically? Or do I have to pay to store it in both California and Arizona? S3 always stores your data in at least 3 availability zones, for instance.
- atYevP 8y agoWe're still working on the spec so hard to say, though even if we did make you pay for it you could store it in 4 regions before hitting S3 pricing :) That said, we try to be fair in most things we do.
- _Soulou 8y agoIs there any plan for a European presence? (At least, for the storage part)
- atYevP 8y agoYev from Backblaze -> Yes! We do hope to have a location in Europe and are on the hunt for one! That said, it's a bit of a long process, so there's no ETA for now - but it's something we're actively pursuing!
- budmang 8y agoJust to add a bit more color - we're actively aiming to have a European region by end of year.
- sgtfrankieboy 8y agoIs it possible that it will be hosted in a similar fashion to how Azure does their German datacenters?
- budmang 8y agoBy 'similar' do you mean having a German trustee or something else?
- sgtfrankieboy 8y agoYea, I mean having a German (or other European) trustee.
- amq 8y agoFrankfurt has the best peering overall, if you also consider Eastern Europe in the equation.
- justinclift 8y agoThe CLOUD Act thing being discussed presently (re: Microsoft) sounds like it could make things tricky. :/
- nolok 8y agoI see people from Blackblaze here, so let me ask: any chance we could get B2 integration in Synology's Hyper Backup ? I know you're in Cloud Sync, but that's really not the same thing (a one/two way sync is not a backup service). I'm not sure if you need to give Synology a nudge or something, and I would even pay a fee for it if need be, but until then I can't use B2 as one my main backup destination for all those businesses NAS I have at various small sized companies I administrate.
- atYevP 8y agoYev from Backblaze here -> We'd LOVE for that to happen (and there's ways to make Cloud Sync work as a one-way street) but it looks like they are pushing their own C2 service for Hyper Backup - so it's looking unlikely that they'll add us in. There's a thread about it on their forums (https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=120647 https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=120647) so our hope is that if they see value in adding 3rd party platforms to the Hyper Backup service we'd be high on the list!
- nolok 8y ago> and there's ways to make Cloud Sync work as a one-way street Sadly it still means if the source gets corrupted for whatever reason the backup is done, for business files sync is really not backup (I don't think I'm teaching you anything there, but really this sadly doesn't fit my needs at all). Also Hyper Vault is all about the intelligent versionning. While it's possible to trick it by doing the backup somewhere and then syncing THAT to B2 (and I do it for my personnal NAS), it's too much of a hassle and "complex" setup that I can't see myself pushing that to my customers. OVH managed to get them to add HubiC in there so clearly there is a way. Hope you will keep pushing them until they move on it ! And thanks for making such a great product :)
- atYevP 8y ago> OVH managed to get them to add HubiC in there so clearly there is a way. Hope you will keep pushing them until they move on it ! And thanks for making such a great product :) They know we'd like it in there, think that OVH was there before C2 was ready so they are "grandfathered in". Best way to let them know you want it is to add your voice to the thread!
- jedberg 8y agoWow nice! They figured out a way to successfully compete with Amazon by slowly backing into little corners of their space. Love it!
- atYevP 8y agoYev from Backblaze -> We're just over here doing our own little thing hoping folks join in on the fun :)
- lewis1028282 8y agoCan the people from Backblaze answer when they are going to accept payement in different currencies? My Backblaze bill is around $0.50 but my bank charges fees for conversion etc so the total paid is often around £2.50 or so. Would love if they’d accept bitcoin or Paypal/Amazon or charge British pounds.
- fny 8y agoHave you looked into TransferWise? I've used their debit card a few times to work around foreign transaction fees.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoTheir Borderless account debit Mastercard is in beta and hard to get unfortunately.
- tibu 8y agoI got within weeks from them after being a Transferwise.com client for a month.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoDid you have to specifically request it in their interface?
- brianwski 8y agoDisclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > currency conversion is expensive Backblaze probably won't accept other currencies in 2018. However, we definitely have heard about this issue, and we have a feature in the works to allow you to "load up" your account with an arbitrary amount of pre-paid cash so that you pay ONE transaction fee to deposit (as an example) £250 pounds at once (incurring the £2.50 conversion fee exactly once) and then as Backblaze deducts from this account balance instead of a credit card there are zero transaction fees. Would that help? The OTHER reason this is a requested feature is some customers want a "reserve fund" to be used if their Credit Card payment fails, as a hedge against Backblaze deleting their data for lack of payment.
- Nullabillity 8y agoWhy single out these two providers? Shared parent company? Are they paying out of some marketing budget? Cheaper peering for some reason?
- brianwski 8y agoDisclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > why single out these two providers? They are the first two. We are very open to more! > Shared parent company? Backblaze is owned by employees. 100% of the board of directors work at the company every day. We have no parent company. :-) > Cheaper peering for some reason? Yes. We made sure any candidate partner has a direct cross connect with our locations and the data goes over pipes we own so our costs are "fixed". After you own/lease the fiber line the bandwidth is "mostly" free inside of it. I say "mostly" because we still have to pay a tiny amount for each network port on each end, some electricity, etc. But it's negligible compared to paying for bandwidth at market rates.
- smoyer 8y agoPacket wants me to contact them for a quote? I like BackBlaze's transparent pricing but won't be pairing Packet's compute service with it. Sorry.
- atonse 8y agoWhere'd you see that? I'd never heard of Packet before today but I was able to see their pricing without any issues: https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/compute/ https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/compute/
- manigandham 8y agoThey have "Pricing" right in the top menu which shows the cost for all of their products: https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/ https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- atYevP 8y agoYev from Backblaze -> that's very interesting! What was your workflow to have them request a contact for a quote? One of the things I really liked about them was that their website is similar to ours in that it's easy to see what everything is - so very interested to hear!
- smoyer 8y agoWow ... mea culpa and apologies! I appear to have taken some weird path through the top-level "Product" menu - I'd love to say that the "Pricing" link wasn't immediately to the left of the "Product" link but at this point I'm going to have to simply claim insanity. Now that you've all steered the raving lunatic to the very transparent pricing, I'll shut up and try to find a project to justify bare-metal.
- eropple 8y agoB2 is interesting, and the price for object storage is pretty competitive. I wrote my stuff against S3's API, particularly for DO Spaces, but DO's fairly epic pants-crapping this week has me nervous. My use case is download-heavy, though, and a little bit bursty (but with a long tail, a CDN doesn't really address my needs); what sort of bandwidth speeds can I expect from downloading B2 when a decent number of clients, let's say 100-500, are hitting a single object concurrently?
- atYevP 8y agoYev from Backblaze -> We've found that the majority of folks hit bottlenecks on their ends or latency issues before they hit any performance issues on our end!
- SteveNuts 8y agoWhat happened with DO?
- eropple 8y agoThey blew up a Ceph cluster yesterday that was serving block storage (and they use Ceph for object storage, too, hence my concern). It was down for over thirty hours. https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/8sk3mbgp6jgl https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/8sk3mbgp6jgl
- manigandham 8y agoThis is great news, looks very interesting for data warehouse scenarios now with something like Spark or Drill. Are there any specs on throughput available to compute on Packet? Side note: never heard of SlicingDice before but their website doesn't seem to be working, getting a cloudflare site offline page.
- budmang 8y agoAgree - would love to connect some data warehouse services. (Seems Spark & Drill are not hosted, but a customer could run those in a compute provider.) SlicingDice worked for me. Are you still getting an offline page?
- manigandham 8y agoStill doesnt work: https://i.imgur.com/g6HMbkA.png https://i.imgur.com/g6HMbkA.png
- e12e 8y agoWas anyone able to figure out what bandwidth/data is included with the packet.net "tiny"? It's roughly 50 usd/month and lists dual 1gps uplink - but I couldn't see anything about bandwidth. Eg hetzner will include ~30tb/month with a gbps uplink - or roughly 45 gb/hour or 100 mbps sustained. Given the other prices packet.net lists for bandwidth (Starting at 0.05/gb) i assume it's not unmetered (that's about 300 tb for 1 gbps for a month).
- Rafuino 8y agoHmmm, I've found their Slack channel to be a good spot to ask Qs and get answers relatively quickly. https://slack.packet.net/ https://slack.packet.net/
- Icer5k 8y agoNone of the servers on Packet.net include any bandwidth - it's all usage based if it leaves the datacenter. Internal bandwidth is free from what I can tell.
- byefruit 8y agoWhat kind of performance are people seeing against B2? I wonder how realistic running analytics over stored data is.
- budmang 8y agoB2 is object storage. Similar to any object storage you generally want to use it for storing the data, not running heavy analytics directly on it. Usually you'd want to move the data to the directly attached block storage (which our compute partners offer) to run the actual analysis.
- biasforaction 8y agoI've been a big fan of Backblaze for several years now. I'll make sure to stop by your booth at NAB and express my nerdy appreciation for your service.
- atYevP 8y agoYev from Backblaze -> please stop by! :D
- bburhans 8y agoIf Backblaze added simple, cheap functions-as-a-service, I'd switch everything away from the Big Three cloud providers and Auth0 except for fallback microservices. The biggest reason is bandwidth costs, which are disproportionately huge for small and medium businesses if there are more than a couple kilobytes of transfer per invocation. That said, I am not super impressed by these first two compute providers, and probably would not trust them to give me enough nines even if they started doing FaaS. I can spin up something similar with Kubernetes on Hetzner for considerably less money...
- budmang 8y agoWhich functions are you using?
- baybal2 8y agoStill can't beat a place in colo with few own transcode servers with FPGAs or transcoding asics.