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."

Comments

Wow

[taktoa]

Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.

Re:Wow

[wonkey_monkey]

Who says Slashvertising doesn't work?

Re:Wow

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.

Website says $3.96/m for unlimited data.

Something tells me this business model will not survive without some serious bandwidth limitations. After all, if you upload is limited to 100mb then you ability to (non commercially) fill Terabytes of data is limited.

My impression(from friends who use them) is that they aim pretty heavily at home-user backup scenarios who are likely to be comparatively light users and have severely limited upstream bandwidth. They also don't do Big Serious SLAs and similar. Nor do they support things like backing up mounted NAS volumes or non Windows/OSX systems(I haven't check to see if the client is smart enough to recognize a mounted iSCSI device... It isn't exactly rocket surgery to distinguish a block device hanging from the Windows iSCSI initiatior from a block device hanging off the Intel whateverchipset SATA 2 port; but if you go with 'NAS = SMB/AFP" you'd miss it.

Still, convenient and cheap, if not as robust as solutions that cost more.

Re:I don't get it

[xlsior]

Many companies reserve the right to limit quantities. Making one customer happy by selling them every drive in stock means ticking off hundreds of others that wouldn't be able to buy the single drive they need.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

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!"

A valid question, but one which some logical thought should provide an answer to... I'd suspect Costco prefers to have many content customers (a customer who ends up at an empty shelf every day is going to go elsewhere, potentially even for other stuff) than one deliriously happy customer. The profit margins on those things are going to be minor anyway, so its not Costco were raking in the profits by selling all their harddrive stock. Presumably, this added profit did not offset all the other customers being unhappy with Costco that they couldnt buy they harddrives they advertise.

Re:I don't get it

[localman57]

I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?

There's a difference between selling at a loss, and selling below market value. For instance, if Costco signs a contract for delivery of a million drives in Feburary, the factory floods in March, and Costco gets delivery in April, their drives are suddenly worth substantially more. They can either sell them at the previously intended prices, or they can raise prices to market value. In the first case they still sell them for more than they paid, but less than market value. In the second case, they take the customer for all they're worth, and make much more profit. Rationing is the only way the first one can work, otherwise someone will come in and buy all your drives, then resell them at market value.

House burns down?

[PeterM from Berkeley]

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

Re:House burns down?

[JazzLad]

3 words:

Safe Deposit Box.

I have 3 drives (that are archive only, not OS), 2 in my PC and 1 in my bank. Every couple weeks or so I take one out of my PC & swap it at the bank & update the bank's drive to mirror the one still in my PC. Cost is ~30/yr for the box except that I already had it for documents anyway (so no adtl cost to me).

Re:What a bunch of douche bags

[serviscope_minor]

BackBlaze did what they should have done: solve the business problem at hand.

Ah, choice use of the word "business". That must mean that it's OK to suspend all morals as long as it's "business".

Basically no.

BlackBlaze did nothing. Do not pretentd otherwise by using the word "business" to hide the acts of individuals.

The _people_ at balckblaze figured that they they would be selfish and put their needs above the needs of everyone else. That's selfish, douchebaggy behaviour.

One that Costco, by not gouging with insane prices, wasn't engaing in.