This week Backblaze introduced its rapid ingest service, Backblaze B2 Fireball. The Fireball allows customers to easily upload 70TB of data onto a device and ship it to be uploaded to the cloud. This announcement comes on the heels of Backblaze lowering their download costs of data to $0.01/GB.
This week Backblaze introduced its rapid ingest service, Backblaze B2 Fireball. The Fireball allows customers to easily upload 70TB of data onto a device and ship it to be uploaded to the cloud. This announcement comes on the heels of Backblaze lowering their download costs of data to $0.01/GB.
It seems that nowadays everyone and their brother is moving to the cloud. However, taking years and years of data and trying to upload it to the cloud can be expensive, from a bandwidth perspective. And assuming one has the budget for the upload there is the time it takes to upload. The example Backblaze gives is that at 80Mbps 50TB would take 50 days. If a company has been around for a while they can have backups and even tape that needs to be uploaded. A better solution is a rapid ingest device that companies get delivered, directly attached to upload data, and shipped to a cloud provider. While AWS and IBM have ventured into this territory, Backblaze is using a few twists and turns to make Fireball more attractive to customers.
Backblaze ships customers a 70TB NAS device that can be ordered from within their Backblaze B2 account. Users can connect to their internal network, fill up the device, and send it back. Where Backblaze changes things is that their device is a 30-day rental (versus 10 days for the other popular devices) for $550 and $75 shipping. While the initial price is higher, their cloud storage is only $0.005/GB/month and, as stated, $0.01/GB/download. Once one commits to a device, they commit to the cloud service as well.
The initial price is higher but storing the same amount of data with Backblaze B2 is overall more cost-effective compared to AWS or GPC.
Availability and Pricing
The Backblaze B2 Fireball is available now and 70TB is $550 plus $75 shipping for 30days.
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