BackBlaze Goes 500 Petabytes

You know your terabyte external hard drive that probably sits on your desk? Well, Backblaze's newest data center essentially has 500,000 of those.

Backblaze just unveiled its new 500 Petabyte data center in Sacramento after a fairly high-profile search for a second center to offset its 40 Petabyte facility in Oakland that was “bursting at the seams,” says Backblaze's Gleb Budman. The storage amount is gratuitous, but Gleb says it's necessary to meet the growing demand for its backup services. Backblaze targets consumers and small companies to completely backup everything on a personal computer hard drive. And that's everything. Not just select files.  And with today's exponential growth in data needs (think of all your music, your Vines, your documents, your online game files), “most people really don't know where everything is on their computer,” he says. 

After a search in other states East of California, Gleb says the firm settled on Sacramento for a number of reasons – namely, low power costs and that it was outside many natural disaster zones, including the much-feared Big One (as seen in this company graphic) and plagues of locusts, as demonstrated in The Old Testament (the company states in its blog, “to the best of our knowledge the data center has never experienced a plague of locusts.”)“Right now we are actually hiring local staff in Sacramento” Gleb says. 

Believe it or not, Backblaze already is planning for future expansion, possibly even outside California. “At this point, I think we're probably two years out from needing another space,” he says. “I swear I think we have every wedding photographer and videographer on the planet.” And Backblaze's average customer data use is growing up to 50% each year, so much of its growth can be attributed to existing customers as well as capturing new business.