How to add 5.5 petabytes and get banned from Costco - Dallas Cowboys Forum

Sam I Am · 10-09-2012

Hah good stuff.

===================================

How to add 5.5 petabytes and get banned from Costco during a hard drive crisis

“We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.”

Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year.

“Literally overnight,” Budman told me, “… all the places we would go to get drives said, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any drives.’”

People assumed it was just a blip, and while Backblaze watched cautiously in the beginning, it figured it had enough hard drives stockpiled to make it through. However, when months passed and the situation only got worse — some suppliers were offering 3TB drives that used to cost $129 for around $600 — Backblaze knew it had to act. If the company didn’t want to change its pricing model or throttle users’ capacity, something had to give.

“That’s an absolute, just last, last, last resort,” Budman said.

Complete Story

burmafrd · 10-09-2012

enjoyable story. Showing how you can just about always get around so called limits

Its why the Moron Bloomberg is going to be shown as a total failure with his stupid 16OZ BS.

Arch Stanton · 10-09-2012

Really good story. The nimbleness and ingenuity of a small business at it's finest.

Meat-O-Rama · 10-09-2012

Very cool. Not sure I get Costco's logic in denying them?

Sam I Am · 10-09-2012

Quote:

Originally Posted by Meat-O-Rama

Very cool. Not sure I get Costco's logic in denying them?

If they allow a single customer to buy up their entire inventory, they cannot provide hard drives for the rest of their customers. While Costco claims to be a wholesaler, they are only a wholesaler to the public which actually just makes them just a retailer. They are just a retailer that sells in bulk.