After shutting down its cloud storage business last month, today Iron Mountain sold the entire Iron Mountain Digital business to Autonomy.

Why did Iron Mountain shut down the cloud storage business and sell off its Iron Mountain Digital business? According to ZDNet, Iron Mountain “is exiting the digital business because it can’t keep up with developing technology.” This is backed up by StorageMojo who says that for it’s cloud storage by “selecting EMC – a premium-priced provider – suggests that IM got off on the wrong foot and never recovered.”

Iron Mountain Digital offered online backup to its customers and charged approximately $60 per computer per month for 30 GB! That is 12 times more than Backblaze charges for its online backup for unlimited storage. Backblaze was able to offer this service profitably at the $5 per month price point by focusing from day one on developing our own cloud storage system which at 10 petabytes five months ago already stored 2x more data for our customers than Iron Mountain.

Are you using Iron Mountain for your online backup needs? Worried about where your service is headed? Interested in a more cost-efficient offering?

We’re ready to help with your business online backup needs.

Twitter turned 5 years old yesterday. The service now has 200 million users (including @backblaze) who post over 1 billion tweets per day.

One interesting tidbit they recently mentioned was that all of those billions and billions of tweets compiled over the course of half a decade took a mere 20 terabytes of storage space!

In other words, you could archive all of the last 5 years of Twitter in just 1/3rd of an original Backblaze Storage Pod.

Happy Birthday Twitter! We wish you an amazing next five years!

These last couple days there has been much discussion in the media about whether the days of unlimited backup are over. Our answer is: No.

Backblaze is committed to unlimited backups.

There are 1 billion computers on this planet and less than 1% of them are backed up online. We provide an online backup service that is unlimited, unthrottled, and backs up all data automatically for one reason – it makes it a no-brainer to use online backup to protect data.

Some of our customers store a few gigabytes of data. Others store multiple terabytes. We make money on some customers and lose money on others. Our goal is not to specifically provide storage at a money-losing price to some customers, but it is to keep it simple for all customers.

To this end, we are focused on innovating on the cost efficiencies of cloud storage; an example of this is our purpose-built Backblaze Storage Pod. These innovations enable us to run Backblaze profitably, without raising venture funding; thus ensuring we will be able to continue providing our unlimited backup for the long-term.

Will Backblaze continue to provide unlimited backup?
Yes. We firmly believe this is the right approach and are committed to it.

Can Backblaze support this model?
Yes. We are profitably offering unlimited backup.

Won’t users store more data in the future?
Yes. Users have been creating more data since people started chiseling stone tablets. We are sure users will store more data in the future.

Will Backblaze be able to offer unlimited backup if users store more data?
Yes. Hard drive prices have been dropping about 4% per month per GB over the last 30 years. Thus, if users data grows at 50% per year, costs will stay relatively fixed for cloud storage companies. Moreover, cloud storage companies can benefit from innovating on the density of storage, compression, deduplication, power efficiency, and more. Users will store more data in the future – and unlimited backup will continue to be a sustainable model.

If you are looking to partner with a company to protect your digital photos, music, movies, and documents, give us a try free: www.Backblaze.com.

As we approached the end of 2010, our vp of engineering sent an email:

Backblaze crossed the 10 petabyte mark in data storage for our customers.

While l see us constantly adding storage for our online backup service, it was one of those moments that made me think, “Wow, that’s a lot of storage.” Ten petabytes is roughly double the entire archive of the Internet.

We tried to visualize what 10 petabytes of storage looks like. Here are three takes on it:

#1: 10 Petabytes in Backblaze Storage Pods

#2: 10 Petabytes in Pixels by Drive Size Used

#3: 10 Petabytes of Drives Stacked Vertically (my favorite)

How would you visualize ten petabytes of storage?

For the third year in a row, Om Malik and team put on a fantastic event about cloud computing last week. The GigaOm Structure 2010 event was bursting at the seams as people filled the main room to capacity (with a recurring plea by MC Joe Weiman asking people to try and find seats before the fire marshall drags them away for blocking the doors and aisles.)

The schedule included a main room with two days of panels and three breakout sessions during each of the breaks and lunches. Far too much information was shared to be conveyed in a blog post, and you can watch the full videos online, but I will summarize some of the takeaways I gleaned. Also, here is a link to people’s Tweets using the hashtag #structureconf using Searchtastic since search.twitter.com only goes back about a week.

Cloud is Here
For those of us in the space, this seems like a comment from yesteryear. But this year, the cloud has leapt from the believers to the masses. Discussions about “What is the cloud?” or “Isn’t the cloud just a return to the mainframe?” were nearly non-existent. Instead, the discussions were “How do we move our applications into the cloud?”, “How do we manage a blend of using the cloud and internal systems?”, “How do we scale our cloud?”, etc.

Even the federal government has become a huge proponent of cloud computing with Federal CIO Vivek Kundra making it one of his primary initiatives. Vivek started Apps.gov (a cloud computing resource for federal government agencies) and even Treasury.gov and Recovery.gov are built on cloud services.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Services said, “Talk becomes action – because people have understood that it will be a competitive disadvantage not to take advantage of the cloud.”
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What do Google providing search, Coca-Cola operating its systems to track inventory, and Backblaze backing up your data have in common? The computers that handle all of this live in data centers. And those data centers use power – lots of it.

In the U.S. alone there are over 20,000 data centers – each of which houses thousands or tens of thousands of servers. Combined, these data centers make up 3% of all U.S. energy consumption (not just electricity) – more than the entire domestic air fleet.

So when I went to an event on Wednesday called:
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE DATA CENTER:
CLOUD, COLOCATION, & DATA CENTER REAL ESTATE
it should be no surprise that the focus was on power, power, power.

And lest you think this is people getting wrapped up in the green movement or just jumping on a marketing trend – let me dissuade you. Datacenters in the U.S. spend $23 billion a year on electricity according to KC Mares of MegaWatt Consulting. In fact, electricity can often cost over 50% of the purchase price of a server over it’s lifetime. Minor improvements can have massive implications not only on global warming but also company bottom lines.

KC provided a fascinating overview of innovations and experiments that operators of data centers and the companies building out large server deployments are pursuing. Some examples:

* VFDs – variable frequency drives to adjust the speed of blower fans that adjust to need rather than spinning at a constant rate.
* Natural cooling – using outside air and fans rather than air-conditioning to keep data centers cool; it turns out most servers are perfectly happy running at temperatures much higher than what data centers attempt to keep them at.
* Shorter cooling regions – having air flow almost directly around a server in the process of cooling it rather than through the entire building; shorter distances mean less air friction and less energy spent moving it around.
* Eliminating UPS systems – getting rid of the backup power systems and assuming servers will go down…and having backup servers or data centers instead.
* Using 480 volts – higher voltage means lower amperage and thus less heat loss and higher efficiency. More of today’s server systems are capable of handling this voltage.
* Higher efficiency power supplies – switching to 90% efficient power supplies on servers rather than using 70% or 80% ones; these are more expensive upfront but can still pay off fairly quickly.

A number of these items pay for themselves in a couple months and then generate savings ongoing from then on. KC has a variety of information on his site and blog.

Last month’s blog post about building our Backblaze storage pods generated a ton of interest and many people are building their own pods! Our post also generated a ton of questions so below we answer the common ones and provides more detail about where to get components.
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Three weeks ago we published how to build a Backblaze Storage Pod, the cloud storage hardware we use for our unlimited online backup service, and gave away the design to anyone who wished to build their own. We thought a few people might find it interesting. Perhaps some might even want to try to build one. We never expected would happen next.

Om Malik wrote about it at GigaOm, as did Robin Harris at StorageMojo, and Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. Soon after, CrunchGear, VentureBeat, ZDNet, Mashable, TUAW, Electronista, MacWorld, Vator.tv, NetworkComputing, On-Storage, PSFK, Enterprise Storage Forum, eWeek and dozens of others picked it up. After digging in, SmallNetBuilder did a thorough breakdown for its DIY audience.
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