We have a secret. A 500 petabyte secret. Back in August 2012, Backblaze posted our need for a new data center. At the time we had about 40 petabytes of storage and our current caged facility in Oakland was bursting at the seams. After our post, proposals rolled in from around the US—Utah, Texas, California, and even Iowa to name a few. After several weeks of phone calls and meetings with several providers, we selected a winner and got busy. Electric had to be run, cabinets had to be built, and networks had to wired, all before we could install Backblaze Storage Pods.
The new data center is located just outside of Sacramento, California. For those of you who worry about such things, the data center is located in one of the most stable geographic locations in California and is outside of earthquake fault zones and flood plains. The data center location is a “very low risk” for tornadoes and to the best of our knowledge the data center has never experienced a plague of locusts. The data center also has SAS 70 Type II and ISO 9001 certifications and is PCI-DSS compliant.
Besides the lack of locusts, what attracted us to the Sacramento location? It was inexpensive from an operational point of view and also practical from a staffing point of view. You see, we like to keep our hands on everything, and Sacramento was close enough so that we could do just that. Yes, our operations staff logged a few I-80 miles between Oakland and Sacramento to make sure that everything went as smoothly as possible, but I think you’ll agree it’s been worth it. In the next couple of days we’ll post a position description for a data center technician at our new data center, so stay tuned.
The Sacramento data center started accepting customer data way back in February 2013 and by September 2013 all new customer accounts were being serviced there. You probably didn’t notice. We expect to be able to store about half an exabyte (500 petabytes) of customer data at our new data center. That should last us a little while but just in case, the operations folks are already scouting locations in Lake Tahoe for the next data center. After all, it is just a short ride east from Sacramento.
