Backblaze Announces B2 Compute Partnerships

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-cloud-compute-services/

209 109 8 years ago

budmang15• 8 years ago

We'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

toomuchtodo5• 8 years ago

Hey 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!

budmang15• 8 years ago

Thanks 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?

jlgaddis2• 8 years ago

Doesn'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.

gandreani• 8 years ago

This 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

budmang15• 8 years ago

Would 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

rayvd• 8 years ago

IBM'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

byranthector2• 8 years ago

Yes! Bare metal power and Backblaze affordability! I so need this!

budmang15• 8 years ago

Hey Byran - what do you hope to do with it?

menegattig• 8 years ago

Backblaze 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• 8 years ago

Redundancy? BackBlaze still only operates one (or two but in the same region) datacenters.

byranthector2• 8 years ago

Meh, for true redundancy you need separate vendors with different hardware and software infrastructure. Erasure coding and bitrot guard hit the 5 9s I need.

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Yev 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!

_Soulou• 8 years ago

Is there any plan for a European presence? (At least, for the storage part)

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Yev 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!

budmang15• 8 years ago

Just to add a bit more color - we're actively aiming to have a European region by end of year.

amq• 8 years ago

Frankfurt has the best peering overall, if you also consider Eastern Europe in the equation.

justinclift• 8 years ago

The CLOUD Act thing being discussed presently (re: Microsoft) sounds like it could make things tricky. :/

budmang15• 8 years ago

Does it matter where in Europe for you? And curious which of the various reasons does a European presence matter to you most?

chrisper• 8 years ago

For me it would be speed.

heipei• 8 years ago

Speed and latency for me as well.

alexkon• 8 years ago

Perhaps somewhere close to AMS-IX? For me, that would be network latency to non-US customers.

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Gleb's the CEO so he'd know these things :D

nolok4• 8 years ago

I 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.

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Yev 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) 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!

nolok4• 8 years 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 :)

ksec• 8 years ago

If Synology is moving up the chain into Cloud Backup and Storage. Will Blackblaze move down the Chain and make a simple NAS for Home user? ( With B2 services Integrated of coz )

saltandvinegar• 8 years ago

Same question but for QNAP. It's hard to figure out the right setup to make sure my QNAP is 100% backed up, safe from user error, etc. especially without dieing from sync fees.

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Yev from Backblaze -> Let 'em hear it! We'd love to be integrated, but as the integrator to B2 they would have to prioritize the project! QNAP is integrated with B2 in some ways already, you can take a look here -> https://blog.qnap.com/backup-data-backblaze-b2/.

jedberg• 8 years ago

Wow nice! They figured out a way to successfully compete with Amazon by slowly backing into little corners of their space. Love it!

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Yev from Backblaze -> We're just over here doing our own little thing hoping folks join in on the fun :)

lewis1028282• 8 years ago

Can 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• 8 years ago

Have you looked into TransferWise? I've used their debit card a few times to work around foreign transaction fees.

toomuchtodo5• 8 years ago

Their Borderless account debit Mastercard is in beta and hard to get unfortunately.

brianwski3• 8 years ago

Disclaimer: 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.

kemonocode• 8 years ago

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

At last. I actually did abandon B2 over DO's Spaces due to the lack of this feature, despite the far more competitive pricing on your end. That, and the lack of AWS API support, but that was mostly related to my particular use case, which was the need to mount cloud storage as disk partitions using s3ql which mainly supports AWS, OpenStack and compatible services. It does have preliminary B2 support [0] but it was really hacky and I ended up losing data because of it.

Having a prepaid credit option and the option to use PayPal for such payments like DO does would have tipped me towards Backblaze's favor to the point of trying to fix s3ql's B2 support, though. ;)

[0] https://hub.docker.com/r/zdce/s3ql-b2/

MattieTK• 8 years ago

Get a Monzo or a Revolut card and pay with that, top up in GBP, and transfer for free at the MasterCard rate.

rahimnathwani3• 8 years ago

"$0.50 but my bank charges fees for conversion etc so the total paid is often around £2.50"

Which UK bank charges £2.15 in fees or exchange rate loading, on a £0.35 transaction?

(In my experience the most a UK bank will charge for a foreign currency card transaction is 2.75%.)

kennydude2• 8 years ago

All of them seem to in my experience. They charge a "Non Sterling Transaction Fee"

guy_c• 8 years ago

Are you paying via debit card? Might be better to get a good credit card. Plenty offer decent exchange rates for foreign currency transactions https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/credit-cards/travel-credit...

Nullabillity• 8 years ago

Why single out these two providers? Shared parent company? Are they paying out of some marketing budget? Cheaper peering for some reason?

brianwski3• 8 years ago

Disclaimer: 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.

smoyer2• 8 years ago

Packet 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• 8 years ago

Where'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/

manigandham3• 8 years ago

They have "Pricing" right in the top menu which shows the cost for all of their products: https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Yev 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!

smoyer2• 8 years ago

Wow ... 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.

eropple5• 8 years ago

B2 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?

SteveNuts• 8 years ago

What happened with DO?

eropple5• 8 years ago

They 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

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Yev 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!

bzElliott• 8 years ago

Sysadmin at Backblaze here. Unless it's closer to 500+ and they all have 100Mbps+ connections, the clients will definitely be the bottleneck. Even in that case with smallish objects, it's unlikely that the TCP window will ramp up enough to put a dent in things. That number will of course continue going up with time as we expand and improve the infrastructure.

eropple5• 8 years ago

That's pretty awesome. Depending on how my DO Spaces tests go, I very much might try it out; it's a bummer that you guys don't support S3API, but I can deal with that. (I know Minio has a layer for B2, but I'd rather not go that way.)

Anyway, thanks a lot!

manigandham3• 8 years ago

This 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.

budmang15• 8 years ago

Agree - 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?

manigandham3• 8 years ago

Still doesnt work: https://i.imgur.com/g6HMbkA.png

e12e• 8 years ago

Was 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• 8 years ago

Hmmm, I've found their Slack channel to be a good spot to ask Qs and get answers relatively quickly.

https://slack.packet.net/

Icer5k• 8 years ago

None 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• 8 years ago

What kind of performance are people seeing against B2?

I wonder how realistic running analytics over stored data is.

budmang15• 8 years ago

B2 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• 8 years ago

I'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.

atYevP11• 8 years ago

Yev from Backblaze -> please stop by! :D

bburhans2• 8 years ago

If 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...

budmang15• 8 years ago

Which functions are you using?

baybal2• 8 years ago

Still can't beat a place in colo with few own transcode servers with FPGAs or transcoding asics.

Backblaze Announces B2 Compute Partnerships

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