How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco 273
concealment writes with this extract from GigaOm: "'We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.' Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year. Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army."
Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Can't they just... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:interesting. (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a link in TFA to an older article about them starting up and how much it costs them to run their storage: apparently it costs them $94,563 for hardware, space and power for a petabyte over 3 years. That's about $0.0026 per gigabyte per month, so if users are charged $5 per month then they just have to gamble that the average user is going to use less than about 1.9 terabytes per month.
Obviously that doesn't include a lot of other stuff like wages, but you're still gambling that a user isn't gonna have more than a terabyte of data in the system, which doesn't seem like an unreasonable gamble for now.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?
I can't think of many good reasons that they would look at customers coming in and buying assloads of their merchandise and say "NO! Get out of here and don't buy stuff from us ever again!"
A valid question, but one which some logical thought should provide an answer to... I'd suspect Costco prefers to have many content customers (a customer who ends up at an empty shelf every day is going to go elsewhere, potentially even for other stuff) than one deliriously happy customer. The profit margins on those things are going to be minor anyway, so its not Costco were raking in the profits by selling all their harddrive stock. Presumably, this added profit did not offset all the other customers being unhappy with Costco that they couldnt buy they harddrives they advertise.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?
There's a difference between selling at a loss, and selling below market value. For instance, if Costco signs a contract for delivery of a million drives in Feburary, the factory floods in March, and Costco gets delivery in April, their drives are suddenly worth substantially more. They can either sell them at the previously intended prices, or they can raise prices to market value. In the first case they still sell them for more than they paid, but less than market value. In the second case, they take the customer for all they're worth, and make much more profit. Rationing is the only way the first one can work, otherwise someone will come in and buy all your drives, then resell them at market value.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Website says $3.96/m for unlimited data.
Something tells me this business model will not survive without some serious bandwidth limitations. After all, if you upload is limited to 100mb then you ability to (non commercially) fill Terabytes of data is limited.
My impression(from friends who use them) is that they aim pretty heavily at home-user backup scenarios who are likely to be comparatively light users and have severely limited upstream bandwidth. They also don't do Big Serious SLAs and similar. Nor do they support things like backing up mounted NAS volumes or non Windows/OSX systems(I haven't check to see if the client is smart enough to recognize a mounted iSCSI device... It isn't exactly rocket surgery to distinguish a block device hanging from the Windows iSCSI initiatior from a block device hanging off the Intel whateverchipset SATA 2 port; but if you go with 'NAS = SMB/AFP" you'd miss it.
Still, convenient and cheap, if not as robust as solutions that cost more.
House burns down? (Score:5, Insightful)
A backup in your basement does nothing for you if your house burns down/gets flooded/has a catastrophic power surge/whatever.
Where else can you backup offsite?
--PM
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:5, Insightful)
BackBlaze did what they should have done: solve the business problem at hand.
Ah, choice use of the word "business". That must mean that it's OK to suspend all morals as long as it's "business".
Basically no.
BlackBlaze did nothing. Do not pretentd otherwise by using the word "business" to hide the acts of individuals.
The _people_ at balckblaze figured that they they would be selfish and put their needs above the needs of everyone else. That's selfish, douchebaggy behaviour.
One that Costco, by not gouging with insane prices, wasn't engaing in.
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:-1, Insightful)
That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.
- no, it was a stupid move by Costco. They got exactly what was expected to happen with this:
Then a bunch of dicks like this figure that they're more important than everyone else and that they should be able to get more than enyone else.
What Costco should have done (what is the correct thing to do) is to maximise efficiency in the market by raising the price to the level where the customers who truly needed the drives for productive reasons would be still willing to buy them, while those, who are not being as productive with the new drives would just have to wait.
It's the same exact thing as rationing, except it basically queues up the people who need the drives by priority, and those who need the drives most would buy them at a higher price, because those drives even at higher prices would be a justified purchase, because it would make the buyers more productive.
Those who are not being as productive with the drives wouldn't be able to justify the purchase at higher prices and would just wait until the prices come down.
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:4, Insightful)
The hard drive sellers weren't doing this altruistically. They made their call, figuring that rationing drives was the best for their businesses and best fulfilled their duty to their shareholders.
they almost certainly could have got away with upping the prices by much more than they did. They chose strict rationing instead.
It does not benefit us as individuals to assign a moral motive to the actions of a company. Whatever they do, it's for a business purpose.
And this is a real problem. They're just Soylent Corporations: made of people. It's the people that act. Pretending otherwise is an attempt to justify imorral action.
Taking that to its illoigcal conclusion could lead to hypotheticals like
Well, it's OK that they kidnapped babies, murdered them and sold them for dog food. It was a really cheap source of meat and so the profit margin was immense. Excellent for business.
We must realize that they are all "selfish bastards" by the very nature of the capitalist system and not be fooled into personifying them.
No: you have been fooled into believeing that companies act independent of people. They do not and they cannot. Only people can act and people can and do choose to do immoral things for money.
The fact that they're doing it for money is no justification whatsoever.
Re:House burns down? (Score:5, Insightful)
Safe Deposit Box.
I have 3 drives (that are archive only, not OS), 2 in my PC and 1 in my bank. Every couple weeks or so I take one out of my PC & swap it at the bank & update the bank's drive to mirror the one still in my PC. Cost is ~30/yr for the box except that I already had it for documents anyway (so no adtl cost to me).
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:2, Insightful)