Petabytes on Budget: 10 Years and Counting at Backblaze

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Petabytes on a Budget: 10 Years and Counting
Storage Pod 6.0 was introduced in April 2016 and quite frankly it’s been crickets ever since as it relates to Storage Pods. Three plus years of non-innovation. Why?

1. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Storage Pod 6.0 is built in the US by Equus Compute Solutions, our contract manufacturer. Production costs are well understood, performance is fine, and the new higher density drives perform quite well in the 6.0 chassis.
2. Disk migrations kept us busy. From 2Q16 through 2Q19 we migrated over 53,000 drives. We replaced 2, 3, and 4TB drives with 8, 10, and 12TB drives, doubling, tripling and sometimes quadrupling the storage density of a storage pod.
3. Pod upgrades kept us busy. From 2Q16 through 1Q19, we upgraded our older V2, V3, and V4.5 storage pods to V6.0. Then we crushed a few of the older ones with a MegaBot and gave a bunch more away. Today there are no longer any stand-alone storage pods; they are all members of a Backblaze Vault.
4. Lots of data kept us busy. In 2Q16, we had 25PB of data storage in production. Today, we have 950PB.