Backblaze launches for businesses

Online backup service targeting business computers

Backblaze, an online backup service announced on Tuesday it launched its unlimited storage solution for businesses.  The company has been offering a consumer-focused online backup service since the middle of 2008, which costs $5/month/computer for unlimited storage.

The service is a response to the statistic that reveals 60% of all corporate data resides on the computers of employees, according to IDC.  These could be either laptops or desktop computers.  Backblaze said the current problem is employees do not properly back their machines up due to outdated solutions like external hard drives or backing up to local servers.  Basically with those types of solutions, employee computers have to be grounded for a bit while backing up, requiring extra effort or a change in behavior.

Being that Backblaze is a cloud-based service, enables this backing up process to be done automatically.  The files get backed up to Backblaze's servers as long as the computer has an Internet connection.  

How Backblaze differentiates itself from other online backup solutions is that it will offer unlimited storage space for $50/computer/year.  Other services usually charge on a per gigabyte basis, which could add up to hundreds of dollars per month.  Backblaze said its service is straight forward and users would never receive 'surprise bills.'  

One of the main reasons Backblaze is able to offer such inexpensive prices is due in part because it's built its own server technology.  Backblaze can build a Petabyte cluster for $117,000, whereas giants like Amazon and EMC are paying around $2.8 million per petabyte.  Backblaze actually recently 'open-sourced' storage pods so anybody could build one.

Although the company would not share any exact numbers of how many users it currently has, Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze told me his company has three petabytes of storage and is adding half a petabyte of storage per month for new users that sign up.  To put this in perspective, Budman told me all of the photos on Facebook take up about 1.5 petabytes.

A couple of Backblaze's first business clients include Betterplace and Paraccel.