BackBlaze Published Third-Gen Storage Pod Design

Backblaze
Inc. announced and published the design of its third generation
Storage
Pod, a massive storage server.

The company open sourced the design in
2009, shaking up the storage community that was paying over 10 times
as much for similar amounts of storage. It increases storage capacity
to 180TB, adds anti-vibration drive bay assemblies, allows for the
inclusion of multiple boot-drives including SSD drives, makes the
chassis compatible with a variety of consumer drives, upgrades the
motherboard and CPU and reduces time needed to install and replace
any of the 45 drives. Once again, the company is making the design
openly available to anyone who wishes to build their own Storage Pod.

The products were born out of the
necessity for a way to run the company’s online backup service. In
order to fulfill the mission of providing Mac and PC users with
unlimited backup for $5/month/computer the company disrupted the
storage industry with their Storage Pod design. Today Backblaze
utilizes its Storage Pods to manage nearly 50PB of storage.

The design has also proven to be
popular with organizations requiring economic storage.

"We are using the Backblaze storage
pod design to add high volume storage for doing advanced phenomic
analysis," stated Wm Kent Kovac, research assistant, Plant
Biology and Plat Research Laboratory, Michigan State University.
"And with a few modifications we are getting fantastic throughput
on the pods to compliment the great storage capacity."’

Brandon Kruse, CEO of EdQuipped.com
adds: "Our company currently stores and analyzes millions of
student test scores to help build a tailored learning experience. Our
Backblaze inspired Storage Pod has enabled us to do this in a cost
effective way."

Because the design is available,
organizations such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and Heritage Auctions were able to have their
own Backblaze inspired Storage Pods to meet their diverse and
demanding storage needs.

"We designed the original Storage
Pod to make it possible to provide our unlimited online backup
service for just $5/month. When we open sourced the Storage Pod
design, we were surprised by how many people needed inexpensive, big
data storage," said Gleb Budman, CEO, of Backblaze. "With
the help of the community, we’re continuing to innovate the pod
design and are excited to release this new version that allows an
ever growing amount of data to be stored inexpensively."

Doug Milburn, VP of sales and marketing
at Protocase stated: "We’ve made Storage Pods inspired by the
Backblaze design for hundreds of customers, including universities,
government, law enforcement, as well as many innovative companies,
both large and small. What they have in common is the need for a
simple and cost effective way to deal with huge amounts of data.”

Protocase also offers services as
needed to design and build Storage Pods to meet a given customer’s
requirements.