1.6 Petabytes of Storage in One Day

Sometimes I’m just amazed how much data we store for our customers—pictures, videos, documents, spreadsheets, and more. It takes a lot of storage. Yesterday Kirk, Sean, new guy Dave, and Guido, from our operations group, outdid themselves. They racked and powered up 12 new Storage Pods in one day; that is freakin’ awesome and it’s a new Backblaze record. Over the next couple of days the RAID arrays will be synched, the Pods will be load tested and then they will be added to the hundreds of other working Storage Pods. As I write this, five of these new Pods have already come online and are busy backing up customer data.

How much data can you store on 12 Storage Pods? A little over 1.6 petabytes. And how much is 1.6 petabytes? A little over 800,000,000 photos (2MB each). That’s a lot of memories safely tucked away.

So, as you sit down at your computer and upload your photos, update a spreadsheet, or just edit your latest cat video, take a minute and thank Kirk, Sean, new guy Dave, and the entire operations team for making sure there’s plenty of room for your data in our data center. And don’t worry, there are more Pods arriving next week…

About Andy Klein

Andy Klein is the Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller at Backblaze. He has over 25 years of experience in technology marketing and during that time, he has shared his expertise in cloud storage and computer security at events, symposiums, and panels at RSA, SNIA SDC, MIT, the Federal Trade Commission, and hundreds more. He currently writes and rants about drive stats, Storage Pods, cloud storage, and more.