How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco

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How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 9, 2012 @02:50AM from the you-need-the-executive-membership dept.

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."

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Wow by taktoa · 2012-10-09 02:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
1. Re:Wow by vlm · 2012-10-09 03:10 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
  Run the numbers. 50 TB a day sounds like a lot, if they've only got one customer. But they're probably got "a zillion" which would imply your very thin slice of the upload bandwidth is going to be choked to like a gig per day. The upgrade in my basement from (full) 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives took around overnight, less than 24 hours anyway, but over the net at a gig per day would be about 3 years to fully convert. Even if they're not limited I would have serious problems shoving more than 100 gigs/day thru my cablemodem, so thats at least 10 days.
  Another interesting thing to analyze is $5/month is $60/yr, so subtract $5/yr for electricity to spin a drive, assume a drive lives 2 years (probably much longer) that means if you can buy a drive big enough to hold everything you want for less than $110, just stick a drive in your basement. Better bandwidth and latency too, I have gigE at home but only ten or so megs of cablemodem. $110 at tiger direct will get me 2 TB. So 2 TB is approximately the tipping point, use less and you're better off "self hosting" in the basement, use more and you're better off using their service (and they're likely losing money if you use more than 2 TB).
  Also I'm curious if its "unlimited" like cellphone or internet access is "unlimited" in other words they'll cut you off if they're losing money on you.
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
2. Re:Wow by wonkey_monkey · 2012-10-09 03:20 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Who says Slashvertising doesn't work?
  
  --
  systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
3. Re:Wow by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-10-09 03:25 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
4. Re:Wow by JTsyo · 2012-10-09 08:25 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I have a BLACK camera, what does that have to do with anything?
What a bunch of douche bags by serviscope_minor · 2012-10-09 03:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
1. Re:What a bunch of douche bags by serviscope_minor · 2012-10-09 03:29 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
2. Re:What a bunch of douche bags by AlgUSF · 2012-10-09 03:52 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Honestly, I wouldn't think twice about doing the same thing. They are purchasing the drives, not stealing them. For "some reason" costco is buying them in lots where they can distribute them at that price. I guess they were just leveraging Costco and Best Buy's buying power to keep their business afloat.
  
  --
  
  I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Re:Can't they just... by 140Mandak262Jamuna · 2012-10-09 03:03 · Score: 4, Informative

There was flooding in Thailand. Factories were disturbed. This company tried to grab as much of the drives already in the pipeline as it could.

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sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Skip the blogspam by maztuhblastah · 2012-10-09 03:03 · Score: 4, Informative

Hear the story direct from Backblaze (bonus: goes into more detail).

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The real litigious bastards...
I don't get it by JobyOne · 2012-10-09 03:06 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?
1. Re:I don't get it by xlsior · 2012-10-09 03:14 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
2. Re:I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-09 03:15 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
3. Re:I don't get it by localman57 · 2012-10-09 03:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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? by PeterM+from+Berkeley · 2012-10-09 03:28 · Score: 4, Insightful

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
1. Re:House burns down? by philipmather · 2012-10-09 03:40 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I would say at your parent's house but this being slashdot that's probably not offsite.
  
  --
  Regards, Phil
2. Re:House burns down? by xaxa · 2012-10-09 03:53 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I would say at your parent's house
  That's exactly what I've done. I set up some scripts to rsync data from my computer to a server in my mum's garage, and also the reverse.
  That way, we both have important data (mostly photos) backed up off-site in different cities, and the photos are available to browse through a web interface.
  
  but this being slashdot that's probably not offsite.
  A friend went with an encrypted backup program, and set up more-or-less the same thing with another friend.
3. Re:House burns down? by JazzLad · 2012-10-09 05:41 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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).
  
  --
  "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Internet Archive by dr_leviathan · 2012-10-09 03:28 · Score: 4, Informative

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
Re:Can't they just... by the_B0fh · 2012-10-09 03:46 · Score: 5, Informative

some hard drives (western digital, iirc) are now sold without the sata interface on the drive itself, for external models.
you rip it apart, and find out that you can't stick it onto a sata port...