I find these breakdowns fascinating. As an enthusiast PC builder I occasionally consider running my own data-systems or servers... In the end though I'm glad I have guys like you putting these together: clearly an enormous amount of thought going into it. Thanks for the write-up.
Yev from Backblaze here -> You're welcome! We're always pretty stoked to do these, even though it does indeed take a lot of man-power to put together. The nice thing is, it's actually helpful! A lot of organizations, companies, and research labs use them, and that makes us feel warm and fuzzy.
Do you find any internal benefits from this stuff as well? For example, having it be better documented, or finding areas of improvement as you go through the write-up, or things like that? Not that you need it to be directly helpful, warm and fuzzy can certainly be enough....
Good question! As part of the process for developing these we spend months and months using AGILE/SCRUM to iterate and come up with a "final answer" (though we're constantly still iterating). So it's not so much that we gain anything from writing the posts, the posts are more of a culmination of months of effort. We do end up talking about the pods more closely when we're writing the posts and as part of that some minor changes do happen, but not that many.
The sinister benefit is that the more folks read the posts, the more it gets shared (presumably) and we hope that can lead to some new folks finding out about our online backup service, and therefore signing up. Which would make our finance department feel warm and fuzzy too!
I imagine the marketing angle must be pretty big. Not only making people aware of your service, but convincing people to use it. A big question when selecting any online backup service is, "are these people I'm trusting with my data complete idiots?" Your posts should really help convince a lot of people that you are, in fact, not complete idiots.
For what it's worth, I've been a happy customer for years and try to spread the love whenever I can. My mantra is: data that's not backed up doesn't exist, and data that's not backed up off-site is not backed up. Thanks for providing a great service for cheap.
We have gotten some other benefits as well. One of our senior support reps decided to join us after reading an IAmA where we talked about the Storage Pods. We just recently hired a senior sys admin and the head of Facebook's Prineville data center, both of whom were a result of reading our storage posts.
Also, when we work with contract manufacturers on building storage pods, talk with data centers about space, etc., it's really convenient to point to public posts to explain what we're talking about rather than having to put NDA's in place.
Overall it results in a lot of awareness and goodwill. It's incredibly gratifying after the team spends many late nights putting these together.
The way you guys keep blogging, it's simply an enormous positive experience. I've been a vocal advocate of BackBlaze online and offline. Lots of even cheaper services come and go, but I keep relying and pointing to BackBlaze.
You'd think it would be HUGE but it's not, just a side-benefit. We'd love for it to be bigger, but, it's kind of up to the people. If you're a happy Backblaze customer though...might I refer you to our handy dandy referral program: https://www.backblaze.com/refer.html
/MarketingOff
*Edit -> man, we have to optimize that page for our new design layout...
Thanks for the link. I was actually going to write something in my comment like, "hey, you guys should have a referral program." Then I realized I ought to check to see if you already did first.
Does it got any kind of integration with stuff you've uploaded through the regular Backblaze app? (e.g. moving stuff over to B2 once it has been uploaded as a regular BB backup).
We're treating them like two different products, so no integration yet, but if we see that a sizeable of folks would want to do both or transfer their data over, we might go down that path.
Arq says they have no plans to do it in the near term at the moment, but hopefully once we open it to the public they'll want to integrate. Worst case, if we make a bajillion dollars, we'll hire some more devs to whip something together :P
Very cool. I remember an article I read about a veteran music journalist who applied for a job and was told he had no experience. Turned out every magazine he worked for over 10+ years had shut down and there was not a single online reference of his articles.
Love that you're fighting the good fight (along with the Internet Archive) to keep a history of the Internet.
From 2000 through 2006 I freelanced for a middle tier publisher of computer magazines. Wrote 4-5 articles a month, probably 1/2 million words. The publisher had a paywall for their online versions of the print magazines, but really didn't put much effort into promoting it since print had been so lucrative. Over the last three years they shuttered the majority of the print magazines (and their corresponding online editions), and now it's all gone. The wayback machine/Internet Archive only has a limited number of pages available. Sad to realize that a lot of the work we do (whether it's writing or creating systems) is ephemeral...
It looks quite an enjoyable process too. Design iteration is a fantastic time to really question assumptions, and reducing the number of fans for example does just that.
The best I have is 9 addressable disks plus a ludicrous CPU and GPU in a Silverstone desktop case, not very exciting but still going against the grain.
