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How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco
concealment writes with this extract from GigaOm: "'We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.' Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year. Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army."
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
.. buy direct or maybe some wholesale? Is such deliberate effort worth the actual cost?
How does that company stay in the black? Whatever, just goes to show how creative some people can be to get around an obstacle.
SWEET. And i'll start working on a rapidshare Right-Away!
Seriously, what a bunch of assholes.
So instead of doing the capitalistic thing and gouging with insanely high prices, the shops instead started rationing drives for a sane price so everyone could get a little bit of the very limited supply.
That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.
Then a bunch of dicks like this figure that they're more important than everyone else and that they should be able to get more than enyone else.
Selfish bastards. Nothing but scum.
After reading this I will not be giving them my money.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Hear the story direct from Backblaze (bonus: goes into more detail).
The real litigious bastards...
I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?
I can't think of many good reasons that they would look at customers coming in and buying assloads of their merchandise and say "NO! Get out of here and don't buy stuff from us ever again!"
Porquoi?
They smurfed those hard drives, but obviously they didn't distribute the workload over a large enough number of individuals.
Maybe they could have hired meth addicts, but the annual cost of the costco membership would act as a pretty significant rate-limiter.
They're a start up. They're the little guys. So obviously there must be evil government regulations and taxes in place that work for big corporations but against them, had they gone that route. ...actually no, from TFA:
"Literally overnight," Budman told me, "... all the places we would go to get drives said, 'Sorry, we don't have any drives.'" ...However, when months passed and the situation only got worse â" some suppliers were offering 3TB drives that used to cost $129 for around $600...
I think they already tried, but that became unfeasible
... is pretty cheap (5$ is for a family account). But as BB itself says, you can only upload 2 to 4 GB per day.
They should be making a mint on that service! They use home-brew storage pods and are very open about it, too!
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
Anyway, be careful to read all the gotchas:
http://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html (hint: 'everything' for a certain definition of everything. No virtual machines, ISO's and NAS storage by default.)
http://www.backblaze.com/internet-backup.html (hint: not all OSes are treated equally.)
(Full disclosure: I work for a storage manufacturer that sells de-duping storage so I think I understand their cost model a bit better than most.)
Karma? What's that again?
A backup in your basement does nothing for you if your house burns down/gets flooded/has a catastrophic power surge/whatever.
Where else can you backup offsite?
--PM
Several months ago I met someone from the Internet Archive (archive.org) who told a similar story. The weren't expanding their storage at the same pace as Backblaze, but they were also resorting to shucking external drives to build their rack mounted servers.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
If you thin your data is safe with these people..... Well you deserve to get what you pay for.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The whole concept of online file storage makes no sense. Especially for consumes and especially in the U.S. where speeds are slow and costs are high. Getting your data into the "cloud" is extremely slow due to the fact that all ISPs severely restrict upload speeds. Then, once you finally get it all uploaded, getting it back will be difficult, even if you are fortunate enough to live in an area with decent speed, because you are probably one of the many millions of people whose only choice for broadband internet is the local cable monopoly, which means you probably have a monthly bandwidth cap, so good luck downloading all that data that will use up 2 or 3 months of your allowed quota.
Or you could just buy a couple of 2 or 3 TB drives and be done with it.
Come try it out!
If you're interested, they open sourced their hardware a few years ago.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
photography eh?
Nudge, Nudge, wink wink
Say no more
More of a feature than a bug.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Compression anyone?
No where did it mention a "ban from Costco". Not only that, I suspect the term "ban" is a bit harsh to use. These guys were hoarding a consumer product during a "drought". In order for the reseller/retailer to be fair to its customers they imposed limits, so everyone could buy the product. These guys were caught trying to take more than their fair share and were stopped. I see nothing wrong with Costco's behavior, nor do I believe these people were banned from Costco. Unless they made a huge stink and were being jerks.
Costco has a corporate policy that limits revenue from sales to 10% above their cost. This 10% covers their overhead costs (buildings,employees, distribution, etc). 100% of Costco's profit comes from their membership fees. Depending on the amount of fuel sold per quarter they may turn a very small profit on this 10% or they might not.
Costco has NO profit incentive to sell one customer more of a product if that means pissing off other customers. Their profits come almost exclusively from membership fees, hence the drive to get everyone signed up for executive memberships.
and finding out that I haven't been able to buy drives because of them pisses me off even more
The intent is not to backup all your porn and movies remotly. It's to backup critical data as well as provide remote access to some files. I strongly believe in a combination of local backups and remote backups. E.g. I backup my project data, programming files and emails to a remote storage. I also have a local backup wich is everything. My remote backup is just over 35gb and is synched and keeps a file version history so I can even go back in time.
I hear stories like this all the time, though they rarely pan out. Granted, it is slightly more likely at a warehouse club where you need a member ID to make a purchase, but it still doesn't seem that likely. I'm no particular fan of costco, but I would love to hear their side of the story.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm surprised no one mentioned recently started Amazon Glacier service.
They do the same thing - probably more reliably.
The pricing is $0.01 per GB / month. pricing
But there is a 'gotcha': the service is ideal for archival storage and long term backup. It is not just for random cloud storage. Retrieval request takes 3-5 hours to fulfill and if you start downloading/retrieving too much, too often, you pay substantially more.
witold.org
Costco generally limits markup to 15%, not 10%. Also, certain state laws require that Costco apply minimum markups to the selling prices for specific goods, such as tobacco products, alcoholic beverages, and gasoline. Of course, some products are marked down for quick sale. However, the resultant average gross margin target is around 10%.
They do, however, attempt to control their SG&A (overhead) to match their gross margin target of 10%. The net corporate profit is from membership fees which is why they try so hard to get you to sign up for executive memberships...
Yeah, it's a cute story but I wouldn't trust them with my backup data.
These people didn't have a risk plan for their business that included hard drive shortages?
Their product isn't worth $10/mo ? (raising price)
Can you imagine an airline that doesn't factor in changes in fuel prices? Or a farm that doesn't have a plan for drought?
Bone for tuna!
I'm a 2000 man.
Most online businesses eventually find that 'unlimited' = 'bankrupt once the VC cash runs out'
I use Amazon S3 via Jungledisk (still waitinbg for Google Drive on Linux). I use it in preference to all cheaper options as I understand its profitable therefore will probably still exist if I ever need to do a full reinstall due to some disaster wiping out my onsite copies.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
(Lower Manhattan, September 11, 2001. 10:27am.)
IT guy #1 (breathlessly): I can't believe it, the South Tower's gone! We had off-site backups, right?
IT guy #2: Of course we did. Do you think I'm a complete idiot?
Guy #1: Whew, that's a relief. So, where is it?
Guy #2: Over there (points). In the North Tower...
(fade as crescendo of screams are heard, and the remaining tower starts to fall...)
From the link within TFA:
We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully.
Let's see... $5/month to have my data stored by a dozen overworked guys pinching pennies to keep their startup going by calling their Moms to go to Costco to buy some hard drives for them. Or I can pay $4/month to store unlimited data from one computer (or $10/month for all my computers & NAS's) at a reliable, well-funded, long-lived company with enterprise storage experience, with a sophisticated, well-proven desktop client and real-time restore from a web client. Oh, and encrypted at the client so they can't see my data. (No need to mention any names here, just look around and you can find them.)
Hmmm... not a tough decision...
It is never going to back up any of my terabyte drives.
Dude, you're giving Godwin's law a bad case of blueballs. I hear you loud and clear. Genocide is good for business. Or they wouldn't be doing it. This view that rationality is whatever people do is tantamount to Godwin's Stargate.
Pretty much the whole of where we need to focus our attention in this messy world is the universal patina in human affairs of lapsed rationality.
The economic premise of "expressed preference" (that the discrepancy between stated goals and actions lies in the verbal blather) was a viable (if narrow and naive) hypothesis so long as the brain remained an inscrutable black box. We have fMRI now. The underpinnings of a consistency of expressed preference are barely detectable under the junk heap of cognitive artefact.
Yet your little sermon remains a popular sermon. I'd be very interested to know what mental glee button it activates in the sermonizer. I'd also be interested to know why my mental "sigh" reflex is more powerful than most. Long ago I was attracted to Brouwer's intuitionism, where reasoning from contradiction is prohibited (this makes the enterprise less brittle to error, but also greatly impedes progress).
Hilbert famously retorted "Taking the Principle of the Excluded Middle from the mathematician ... is the same as ... prohibiting the boxer the use of his fists."
I guess my fists don't give me a hard-on.