Is the Backblaze Cloud Bigger than iCloud?

Possibly.

A customer yesterday asked, “Do you have any idea how big iCloud is?” I thought it was an interesting question and poked around.

Two months ago it was reported that Apple ordered 12 petabytes of storage rumored to be used for its new North Carolina data center.

Certainly Apple already has significant storage for their existing iTunes and MobileMe data and the North Carolina data center has room for much more than 12 petabytes, but is this the storage that Apple expected to need to support the iCloud offering initially? Apple would not confirm, of course, but it does seem plausible now with iCloud announced and Steve Jobs talking about Apple’s massive new datacenter:

Image source: Data Center Knowledge

At Backblaze we hit 10 petabytes of customer cloud storage by the end of 2010 and now we just crossed 15 petabytes!

It’s becoming challenging to take a good photo, but here is what 15 petabytes of Backblaze Storage Pods looks like:

So does Backblaze have more cloud storage than Apple for iCloud? Perhaps.

About Gleb Budman

Gleb Budman is a co-founder and has served as our chief executive officer since 2007, guiding the business from its inception in a Palo Alto apartment to a company serving customers in more than 175 countries with over an exabyte of data under management. Gleb has served as a member of our board of directors since 2009 and as chairperson since January 2021. Prior to Backblaze, Gleb was the senior director of product management at SonicWall and the vice president of products at MailFrontier, which was acquired by SonicWall. Before that, he served in a senior position at Kendara, which was acquired by Excite@Home, and previously founded and successfully exited two other startup companies.