'We don't run databases on them,' he said. We have just published the cost to build it,' said Budman.īudman also pointed out that the Backblaze pods were designed for storage only and not for high-performance transactions. 'Obviously there's no tax, there's no shipping, there's no mark-up for any sales team or marketing team, or the support infrastructure or warranties. A Sun X4550 retails for US$1 million, and the EMC NS960 is priced at US$2.86 million.īudman added that this was not a direct comparison, as the figure for the Backblaze storage pod was only the cost of building the box. The closest vendor to the Backblaze system's cost price of US$117,000 is a Dell MD1000 with a sale price of US$826,000. In his blog post, Nufire compares the cost of assembling a petabyte of storage using Backblaze's storage pods to the retail prices charged by vendors for the equivalent amount of storage. Storage vendors would charge $1000 for a 1.5TB drive to put in a storage system,' said Budman. 'When we looked at for ourselves, I could go the open market and buy a 1.5TB drive for $150. And then we thought maybe we should share it with others.'īudman did a Google search on the pod and found that in just a day and a half it had generated 30,000 hits.īackblaze spends 'hundreds of thousands of dollars' on storage to support its online backup business, which targets individuals and small business.īudman said the company had decided to build its own storage units because the cost of assembly was up to eight times lower than the cheapest product sold by IT vendors. We went down this path because we needed cheap reliable storage, and we never intended to build our own storage - that's not our core business. 'We literally had no idea what to expect.

Backblaze storage pod for sale