Today Backblaze announced that its B2 Cloud Storage is moving out of beta with its 1.0 launch. As the name implies, B2 is cloud storage for organizations of all sizes. Backblaze states that the two main benefits that they offer is that they are roughly one-fourth the price of similar competing cloud storage (AWS and Azure), it comes with a 99.9% Service Level Agreement (SLA), and B2 offers both free and premium support options. Moving B2 out of beta will open it up to all interested parties.
Today Backblaze announced that its B2 Cloud Storage is moving out of beta with its 1.0 launch. As the name implies, B2 is cloud storage for organizations of all sizes. Backblaze states that the two main benefits that they offer is that they are roughly one-fourth the price of similar competing cloud storage (AWS and Azure), it comes with a 99.9% Service Level Agreement (SLA), and B2 offers both free and premium support options. Moving B2 out of beta will open it up to all interested parties.
Backblaze first opened up its B2 Cloud Storage for beta in September 2015. The initial opening of the beta saw 15,000 users adopt it. Once the beta was opened to the public, BackBlaze saw yet another 15,000 users join. Backblaze states that since the beta began, B2 has stored up to 250PB of data and helped recover more than 12 billion files. Through the beta, Backblaze has worked with many users in an effort to improve the service by adding features and integrations.
Several companies have integrated with B2 during its beta. Backblaze states that this is a testament to B2’s abilities and attractiveness to customers (though it also makes since for companies to offer as many features as possible for their customers). Synology has integrated its Cloud Sync feature for its NAS devices. Synology users can select B2 for their cloud destination. Users of Cloudberry can encrypt and backup their Windows Server data before sending it to B2. When they need to retrieve it the data will be decrypted and restored through Cloudberry. Cubix has integrated with B2 to use it as a storage destination for its customers’ archival media data. And OpenIO has integrated with B2 to enable its customers the ability to intelligently mange where their data is stored and in turn lower storage costs.
Features include:
- The B2 service now includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for 99.9% uptime each month.
- WLarge file support to the API, dramatically improving uploads and downloads of individual files over 100MB in size.
- The ability for a user to prepare a Snapshot file up to 3.5TB in size and have it encrypted and placed on a USB hard drive and FedEx’d to the user. The cost is $189.00 for this service and the user gets to keep the drive.
- The ability for the user to prepare a Snapshot file up to 110GB in size and have it encrypted and placed on a USB flash drive and FedEx’d to the user. The cost is $99.00 for this service and the user gets to keep the flash drive.
- The B2 Command Line Tool includes “Sync” which will sync target folders between a PC or Mac and B2 when the command is run.
- Increased maximum file size of a file that can be uploaded/stored/downloaded to 10TB, twice the size of other services.
- The ability to create a Snapshot file up to 10TB in size.
- Load balancing restructured to improve B2 performance, along with speeding up everything else as well.
Availability and pricing
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage 1.0 is available now starting as low as $0.005/GB per month.
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