Several years ago a guy sent us an email saying he liked our service and was planning on recommending Backblaze on his newsletter, Photojojo. We’d never heard of him or his newsletter but we said, “Great!”

Shortly thereafter he wrote “Backblaze: Backup Software You’ll Actually Use” and almost 10,000 people showed up to try the service!

Amit was not only a fan and a great boost for us, he’s also just a great guy. Unfortunately, two weeks ago Amit was diagnosed with Acute Leukemia and is now in for a long slog of chemo and more.

He’s asking for South Asians to do a free bone marrow check by mail. (Just run a cotton swab on your cheek.)

Apparently, Amit also likes “colorful photos, pizza, crafty projects, and macaroni,” and, of course, photos. Send him some cheery thoughts by emailing ([current year] at amit gupta dot com).

And Super Amit, from a few of us at Backblaze: Get well!

One of our support guys sent an email to the company a few minutes ago saying Steve Jobs died. After a moment of disbelief there was some shock, then sadness. Steve Jobs wasn’t one in a million. He was one in a billion. And while we had never met him, he had a profound impact on our lives.

There will be plenty of tributes to Steve Jobs and the grand scale of his impact.
Here, I just want to share a few small stories:

Unbelievable Turnaround
In 1999, much of what is now the Backblaze team was working on another startup. Some of us loved Apple and pushed to build a Mac version, but at 1% market share, there was just no rationalizing spending time on it. In 2003, we were working on a new startup, but the story was the same: we just couldn’t justify building a Mac version.

Fast forward to 2007, we started Backblaze and decided the Mac would be a first-class citizen at the company. We wanted to support the Mac and believed it had a chance of making some small business sense. Perhaps it would be 10% of our sales.

Instead, the Mac platform is now more than 50% of our customer base. Our CTO, a former Apple employee during the non-Steve Jobs days, said the employees loved Apple, but knew where it was headed. Market dominance with products everyone loves was not that place. The turnaround that has occurred is nothing short of unbelievable.

Unbelievable Products
I vividly remember seeing the first iPhone. I thought it was fake. A mockup or “concept device” perhaps. It was too cool to be real. The iPhone has become a part of my life in a way that I am lost without.

My wife is not a gadget freak, nor a Mac “fanboy”. For a while she rolled her eyes when I would wax poetic about the iPhone. Now she can’t live without hers.

A couple months ago I purchased an Airport Express for our home and sent music via AirPlay from my phone. My wife’s eyes lit up and she said, “Ok, that may just be magic.”

—

And I guess that was the thing with Steve Jobs. He didn’t just build a reality distortion field; he made us believe magic was possible through his marketing and then really pulled the rabbit out of the hat with the products.

When Apple announced Steve wouldn’t keynote Macworld a couple years ago, we were bummed and handed out flyers showing our support for Steve, to show him he’s being missed. There isn’t much more to say beyond it is a sad day and he will be really missed.

Backblaze continues to grow and we want to help more people find out about our online backup service. We were inspired by the great “Y U NO USE HIPCHAT” billboard and would love for you to help us make our own!

Suggest a Backblaze billboard. If we use it, we’ll send you the new Kindle Fire!

Suggest ideas by any of these:
* Write them as a comment on this blog post.
* Write them on the Backblaze Facebook page.
* Tweet them and include (http://bit.ly/bzbillboard) to link to this post.

The rules:
* You can suggest as many ideas as you want.
* Suggesting the same idea twice doesn’t increase your chances.
* If multiple people suggest an idea we use, we’ll randomly pick one of those people.

Some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
* Backblaze Online Backup. $5/month. Unlimited Storage.
* Really, a billboard?!? Why?! Because you’re still not backing up.
* (No File Found) Should have backed up with Backblaze.
* Backblaze: because Google won’t ship G-drive.
* Diamonds might be forever, but your hard drive isn’t.

What is your suggestion?

A single Backblaze Storage Pod weighs nearly 150 lbs and takes two people to rack it. Each time Sean has gone to the data center to rack new pods (which happens every two weeks) he needed to bring another person for assistance. In the interest of giving Sean a hand, we bought him a friend. His name is Guido.

Guido is a $10k server lift and he works like a charm. He can lift the servers onto the very top rack and even has a special extender for the very bottom rack. Sean can now deploy Storage Pods without any help.

Meet Guido:

Sean working with Guido:

And a 3 second video of Guido doing the heavy lifting:

No, not 3 TB…3 GB. We stumbled across this scan of a Best Buy news ad from 1996. “30-Message Pagers”, “Motorola Cellular Flip Phone”, “28.8 kbps modem”…what a trip down memory lane.

One of my favorite ads, for obvious reasons, is for for hard drives:

At those prices, a Backblaze Storage Pod today would cost $18,000,000!
(45 drives * 3 GB * 1,000 GB per TB * $400)

The roughly 220 pods that we have at this point would cost nearly $4 billion!

I love the progress of technology.

Ok, actually it was Chloe that built the first pod. And Greg that built the second. But those pods were built to store the geospatial information data for GINA – the Geographic Information Network of Alaska.

When searching for pics of Backblaze Storage Pods, I stumbled across Chloe’s Picasa album, and asked her why she needed boatloads of storage. Here’s her story:

The pod you stumbled upon in my Picasa album was one of two that I helped build for the Geographic Information Network of Alaska (GINA) in 2009/2010 when I was still a CS student. (I built the first pod, and finished up the build on the second, which was assembled by my colleague, Greg Wirth).

GINA is a small research group affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. We operate on grants mostly, so we have to be conservative and wise with our spending. That’s why my boss, Dayne Broderson, chose to use the open hardware that you so generously provide schematics to.

At GINA, we have many years worth of spatial and sattelite imagery, and we keep it all saved away for GIS specialists, cartographers, professors and students at the university to use. We also provide the majority of this data online through Web Mapping Services (WMS) on our website. It’s basically our own Google Earth, so millions of image tiles need to be stored. Given those circumstances, we needed something that would allow the data to be readily available for viewing. That’s where the pods came in.

Our pods are the first (that I’ve heard of, anyway) to be used as High Availability cluster nodes. That means if one pod goes down, the other pod takes over its IP and web services, without the users ever noticing. Since robustness is important to us at GINA, we also altered the design a little to allow for a RAID1 system partition. Otherwise, losing that one system disk could lead to unexpected downtime.

My colleague, Greg, made a mounting bracket that mounted something quite similar to this IcyDock inside our pods. It let us use two 2.5″ hard drives, which we then installed with RAID1 for the OS.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994087

Here’s the finished product:

The only issue we ran into when building these was the PSU. The Modu 87 was cheaper and more readily available than the other PSU listed on your site, so we tried the Modu first. Here’s a picture of the problem we encountered:
https://xanth.gina.alaska.edu/pod/IMG_8289.JPG

From there, we tested it out with some molex adapters, which helped with the connector angle problem, but didn’t hold up under testing. (I let out the Magic Smoke! >_>)

We finally got our hands on the Plexton PSUs with the custom cabling, and everything from then on was smooth. It cleared up a lot of space inside the cases too, since the cabling was much neater.

It went so well, in fact, and has been running so reliably since, that my boss is considering implementing the V2 design next. I’m kind of jealous that I wont be there to help them build it this time, since I moved away recently to study more high-availability clustering at LINBIT. But that pod build was one of the most fun and interesting projects I’ve done yet!

Thanks for inquiring about our pods,

Best regards,

Stefanie “Chloe” Edgar

Congratulations Chloe on building a high-availability cluster version!
And thank you for sharing the story!

It’s been over a year since Backblaze revealed the designs of our first generation (67 terabyte) storage pod. During that time, we’ve remained focused on our mission to provide an unlimited online backup service for $5 per month. To maintain profitability, we continue to avoid overpriced commercial solutions, and we now build the Backblaze Storage Pod 2.0: a 135-terabyte, 4U server for $7,384. It’s double the storage and twice the performance—at lower cost than the original.

In this post, we’ll share how to make a 2.0 storage pod, and you’re welcome to use the design. We’ll also share some of our secrets from the last three years of deploying more than 16 petabytes worth of Backblaze storage pods. As before, our hope is that others can benefit from this information and help us refine the pods. (Some of the enhancements are contributions from helpful kindred pod builders, so if you do improve your Backblaze pod farm, please balance the Karma and send us your suggestions!)

Quick Review – What makes a Backblaze Storage Pod

A Backblaze Storage Pod is a self-contained unit that puts storage online. It’s made up of a custom metal case with commodity hardware inside. You can find a parts list in Appendix A. You can also link to a power wiring diagram, see an exploded diagram of parts, and check out a half-assembled pod. The two most noteworthy factors are that the cost of the hard drives dominates the price of the overall pod and that the system is made entirely of commodity parts. For more background, read the original blog post. Now let’s talk about the changes.
Continue reading…

While Apple just recently announced their newest operating system, OS X Lion (10.7), Backblaze has been working with developers and beta testers for a while to ensure our online backup service is fully compatible.

When you rush out to upgrade to Lion, know that your Backblaze online backup service will work seamlessly. The new OS has 250 new features, but I wanted to call out a few:

Download the latest version (v.1.5.5) by clicking the Start Backing Up button on www.backblaze.com and enjoy the service on Lion! (All users will be automatically updated within a few weeks.)