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September 28, 2023
Pioneering Scalable, Affordable Cloud Storage with Backblaze | Episode #72
Backblaze is a leader in cloud storage and backup solutions, providing a transparent and open approach to safeguarding essential data. In this episode, we converse with Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze, a passionate advocate for data protection. We explore Backblaze's journey from bootstrapping to its successful NASDAQ IPO, and the role the company plays in the evolving data…
Backblaze is a leader in cloud storage and backup solutions, providing a transparent and open approach to safeguarding essential data. In this episode, we converse with Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze, a passionate advocate for data protection. We explore Backblaze's journey from bootstrapping to its successful NASDAQ IPO, and the role the company plays in the evolving data protection landscape. Backblaze is reinventing the industry by leveraging state-of-the-art technology, offering unparalleled storage solutions at a fraction of the cost of competitors.
Scalability and affordability, redefining Cloud Storage... Backblaze's self-built platform challenges the largest hyperscalers!
Backblaze is a leader in cloud storage and backup solutions, providing a transparent and open approach to safeguarding essential data. In this episode, we converse with Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze, a passionate advocate for data protection. We explore Backblaze's journey from bootstrapping to its successful NASDAQ IPO, and the role the company plays in the evolving data protection landscape. Backblaze is reinventing the industry by leveraging state-of-the-art technology, offering unparalleled storage solutions at a fraction of the cost of competitors. Backblaze was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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☑️ Technology and Technology Partners Mentioned: Backblaze, Cloud Storage, Scalability, Affordable Storage, Data Protection, Hyperscalers.
☑️ Web: https://www.backblaze.com
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Transcript
RAW RANSCRIPT
we actually enable the customers to get their data out of Amazon for free we will pay for them to get their data out hello and welcome to episode 72 of great things with great Tech the podcast highlighting companies doing great things with great technology my name is Anthony spiteri and in this episode we're talking to a company that without question has disrupted the storage Market catering to individuals and corporate data needs with an unwavering commitment to security affordability and unmatched performance all while being
importantly very transparent and outwardly honest that company is back players and I'm joined by Glenn budman the CEO and co-founder of backblaze welcome to the show thanks I didn't get to be honest with you excellent so just before we talk about all things storage and data and and disruption of a market that is so huge in this in this landscape of it I just want to give a shout out to the show if you love great things with great Tech and would like to feature in future episodes you can click on the link on
the show notes or go to jtwgt.com as a reminder you can keep up with all of our episodes on all major podcasting platforms Apple Google Spotify whatever you like um all host and distributed by Spotify podcasts as a reminder head to that YouTube channel you can see all of the previous 71 episodes on that YouTube channel as well hit the like And subscribe and go from there all right with that Glenn let's talk a little bit about back blade let's talk a lot about it actually not a little bit we want to talk a lot about it but firstly I'm just
interested in your background because you know backlays was founded in 2007 but before that you've worked for some companies that I think some of my listeners would actually know so give a little bit of background yourself and lead up into that founding of back players sure so I I've been doing some kind of tech some kind of Entrepreneurship since as long as I can remember I think when I was five my parents talk about how I wanted to disassemble their camera that they had and it just poke at it so um been been interested in technology my
whole life but interested in entrepreneurship my whole life I worked on starting a company in in the late 90s and then joined a couple other people who were working on something similar um that company was in the search and a little bit of early AI space uh that company uh got acquired by excited home which was uh competitor to Yahoo and Google later and so we did that worked there until and then left and we worked on another company called mail Frontier that did email security uh okay yeah and spam antivirus anti-fishing well that
company got acquired by SonicWALL um which does security uh for small medium businesses and then we left there and started backways wow so yeah so you've talked about I mean most people would know that Sonic will write in terms of a company especially if you're working in that IC space in the early 2000s everyone knew about Sonic Wars that's quite interesting it's interesting as well that you had you started with a well a male a filtering and anti-spam and security company as well because I know my background is
like I say almost every show is in hosting and service providers and you know I was riding the weeds of leveraging a service when we had our mail server what do we front it with we front it with a mail service that screens and protects it so kind of a similar service right and getting acquired by Sonic all so you then said that you started um backlays in 2007 so interestingly enough when I did my research here you seem to have the the longest list of co-founders of any company that I've definitely had on the show um but that
I've seen in Industry right so just explained how how come on how that came to be and number there's three questions to this actually number one how it came today number two you know how what you did to actually make that happen um because I know that you guys basically took a lot of risk in stopping what you were doing maybe not getting paid for you or whatever it might bend and do this and then how does that work moving forward because that's a lot of co-founders to deal with within a company yeah so the so I was very lucky uh I uh
when I worked on the company that I met up with in 99 I met uh two people at that company um one is Brian Wilson who's a technologist and one was Casey Jones who's a designer and both of them were excellent at their crafts and when our company was acquired by excite I met two more people there one was Tim newfire who's also a technologist in in Billy Eng who's also one of the Architects there and um all of us then went on to work on building male Frontier and all of us worked at sonic wall and melfinter was
acquired and so when uh we were starting to work on back Blaze we basically brought the band together again and um what I'll say is um the way that back boys got started was actually um my then co-founder Brian did it for friends and family the way that many of us do yep yeah it also as a side note it's why I don't do it now but that's uh we all sampled in that when we were a bit younger right it's impressive that you've been able to yank yourself out of it because I feel like in my contract or in your contract I feel like
uh uh the the contract with the friends and family and others um is that social contract is hard to break um so so he did it for just friends and family obviously you know no payments involved but um and one of his friends uh had a computer crash and she called him up in a panic and said you've got to help me my my you know my computer crash helped me out and he said no problem we'll get you set up I'll get you a new laptop I'll get your applications installed where is your backup and she starts pounding the table and
says look what I don't need now is a lecture what I need is for you to get my stuff back and he's like how is that possible what do you mean you don't have a backup and uh he's like I can't help you if you don't have a backup and he had always been absolutely religious about backups and religious I mean to the level of um for our prior company even though we had an I.
T Department whose job it was to ensure we had backups of all the servers he would burn a CD and burn a DVD like the source every week stick it in an envelope and mail it to his brother in a different state and then do the same thing and stick them in his own closet and he did that every week the whole time and it turned out when the company got acquired we had uh some of the systems were raided uh were protected by raid and one of the I.
T people pulled the wrong drive out when one of the drives died and um blew away the raid array and ended up losing the data and we had to recover from Brian's Personal Collection of CDs and DVDs so he was religious about it um and so we just started talking about that and saying okay this is 2007. everything is going digital everyone's getting laptops everything's going to be um digital and and if no one's backing up their data it's all going to vaporize and so we just started talking about
that and then saying this is a problem that should get fixed and so he had quit SonicWALL and then I quit Billy uh and then Tim joined and Casey joined him and all five of us got together to work on that problem yeah that's that's awesome because that's that's number one I think that's one of the coolest uh 321 rule of backups that I've heard in terms of you know burning with CD burners another CD and storing at different locations and it was actually used but I think the main thing there is that the the the
spark for the company was started by a necessity here and and some something where you know there was a hole like how do how do these people that just have laptops and whatnot that aren't part of corporate I.T that are thinking this way and even back then backup wasn't even really front of mind like it is today um you know how do we protect and help these people so that's that's quite interesting there so what was the original idea of the like how did you go and say okay well we're going to go and
start back Blaze but when you sat down and had that first sort of discussion about a company like this what what did it look like what were you trying because at the same time um like I said it was evolving we definitely had AWS endless public clouds coming up with public cloud storage with S3 which you know was a roughly around the same time so it's pretty um interesting that you go well you know what I see Amazon and maybe that back then they were still pretty big in the Juggernaut was there but maybe they
weren't as big as today but you said we're going to go and do this because we feel that we can fill a hole so what was the original idea behind the company and how you'd actually take that problem and make it into a actual company with services yeah so so you know to today we compete with Amazon at one-fifth of their price point and we have large scale and we have lots of customers um but it didn't start there um we when we were starting we were looking to solve actually the laptop desktop backup problem and that that
came from the specific situation that Brian ran into and what we what we said was there are solutions out there right there are computer backup Solutions out there but for some reason what we found when we asked around they weren't being used very few people used all of those services and most people were just losing data left and right and so we said what is the issue and what we found was that there were two problems one problem was every single one of those Solutions asked the the person hey what do you want to back up tell us
which files which folders do you want to back up and the other was they said we'll charge you per gigabyte and at the time especially focused on consumers what we realized was can consumers have no idea where their files and folders are and they didn't know what a gigabyte was and so that approach was just way too complicated and so we came up with this idea where we flipped it upside down we said we're gonna back up everything on your computer if it's not explicitly excluded we're gonna back it up it
doesn't matter where the files are where the folders are you don't have to know anything the entire experience that we wanted was that you pick an email address and a password you click download that's it you're done you're safe and you can sleep peaceful at night that's what we wanted to build yeah and when we started thinking about that our plan was actually to not compete with Amazon at a time but to use Amazon we were going to use Amazon S3 as the underlying storage for our computer
backup service and then we did the math and said well that's interesting I think we're going to lose money on every customer yeah not the best not the best business sort of scenario when you're looking at profitability and a return right the best business structure and so we said you know it's it's weird because if you look at a hard drive the hard drive itself is not that expensive but Amazon was very very expensive and we said some way there's got to be to attach hard drives to the internet and if we could
figure out how to do that there might be a way of making this cost efficient and so we actually started by trying to attach hard drives to a whole bunch of USB hubs okay and daisy chaining uh hard drives off of one server to a bunch of USB hubs turns out doesn't work uh at scale um we tried um you know firewire we tried a variety of different solutions we finally came up with a a hack that would work where we took a variety of direct attached storage devices and attached nine of them to one motherboard and that worked but it was very clunky
and clumsy yeah and so we ended up designing a plywood server like a little plywood box server and we deployed that in a data center in San Francisco and tested it and it worked and so then we and they let you put the plywood in a data center you know let um so uh so we so then we just we got a company that would cut us sheet metal in in units of one and they cut us the shape that we needed that was basically this plywood box but with for the hard drives and we we ended up uh having it and we called it Furniture it was
furniture for the hard drives um we didn't want to expect anything from the hardware and we basically set down this path of Designing and building our own storage cloud and the only reason for that again it wasn't to compete with Amazon it was because we needed storage that was efficient and affordable uh and durable for our computer backup service which at that point was a consumer computer backup uh cloud service um and that's where we started yeah so yeah so I mean and that was servicing you know literally like Max and windows
desktops effectively right and Max and windows yeah exactly and I guess when you're talking about the concept of or the theory of backing up everything then and exclusions can come into play but if you're thinking about everything and making it easy people almost don't want to exclude because they feel they don't have to which means they're going to pump up stuff that they don't necessarily need a backup but they're backing up anyway which in effect means you need to back up more more storage
more data and nothing that's part of the problem that you were trying to solve there so you have got a very distinct design and um you know people that know back players know they're the fire red it's it's a beautiful red color that you guys have on your bezel and I guess this was the first foray into what was the storage pod architecture at the time to be able to build this out so how what did that if you've got this you've got the plywood and the sheet metal and then effectively these storage pods
effectively become like a bank of of I guess chassis with a lot of drives in them to a motherboard there's got to be some software or whatever that sits on tablet it's a manager did you did you use off the shelf stuff or did you guys design your own sort of management software to be able to handle the storage and the redundancy and the resiliency and whatnot we wrote it all basically from scratch I mean we had Linux so there was definitely some things that were um that we were built on but we we literally
built the entire file system the the this internet scale file system from scratch so we built all the Erasure coding the durability the redundancy the performance the availability all of that code is our code um it's you know it's millions of lines of code that's now been written over 15 years uh yeah to do that but we we ended we had to build all that and you know the you know you talk about the you know the the evolution of the pods um and the whole idea with the pods for us was we wanted Hardware that would just have these hard
drives and no one was selling Hardware that was inexpensive so we looked at Dell and we looked at EMC and we looked at NetApp and all of those systems were 10 times the price of the storage for the hard drives and we said we can write all of that in software so if you if we can do all that in software all the performance all the durability all the availability all we need is furniture for the hard drives and so the pods were that and um like you said we we ended up making them this this backblaze red and so we have these photos of just rows
and rows and racks of back boys red pods um which is which is fun it makes for fun imagery um and we had we had interesting um we you know we open sourced that Hardware design so in 2009 we actually wrote a blog post called petabytes on a budget wow and it was all about um here's what we've designed we've designed This Server and it's really inexpensive if you want to store a whole bunch of data um and we will open source the hardware not the software the software is all of our secret sauce it's yes
file system but um but we open source that and it was it was a really uh eye-opening moment for us because I I as one of the co-founders I started blogging for us when we started I just started writing about storage and about backup and whatever I could find it that was interesting and maybe four or five people would read my blog posts um two of them would probably relatives of mine yeah I'm sure more but yeah I know I know you feel sometimes when you write this stuff you don't know who's reading it but yeah I get that
understanding but it was out there we're creating content and it was good content thank you and it was but you know it wasn't you know there wasn't anyone in Mass reading it and then we published this one blog post about the storage pod and a million people read that one blog post um it it went absolutely viral it was it and um it really kind of opened our eyes we said how many people are gonna actually care about a big storage server and uh turned out a lot and so um we had all kinds of inbound interest
of um Netflix reached out to us and wanted to understand how we did it so that because they wanted to you do a caching um uh server for all their um video footage we had the internet archive uh reach out to us and talk to us about how we did that because they were looking for um newer ways to store uh all of that data and just there's a lot of interesting conversations that that spurred yeah and I think at that time as well if I think about my career at that point when I was you know very much full into UI platform design architecture
trying to work out how to spend some money efficiently but also I mean that we your head efficiency on the other end with storage it was always it was always a problem and you know going with the the major vendors of the day was was okay and they offered a certain amount of security and when I say Security in terms of you you knew what you were getting but you also knew that you were potentially getting performance issues at certain amounts of data or a right controller might fail or you know then in some cases you know you want to be in
a couple of racks but some solutions will be over 20 racks right so there was all these permutations that you if you didn't want to go on off on a limb and do what you guys did and try and solve the problem of you know big scale storage at in an efficient way you just kind of have to sit with the incumbents and I think a lot of people struggled with that and I know that we we when I was in a particular role looked to try and do something differently and we we did but we didn't do it as open as what you guys are doing it and it failed
miserably because we got sold down a river and the architecture didn't work and it all caused all sorts of problems so I think during that time period there were a lot of organizations a lot of service companies a lot of service providers looking to try and solve this problem of scale and data because it was just starting to explode it was just starting to get to a point where you know all of a sudden a VM or a virtual machine wasn't consuming 10 gigs it was consuming 100 and now if you think about that today that's that's a 10x or a
thousand x what it was then right so it's even more incredible today but I think that's what's really interesting about you guys that you went out on a limb initially and did this and you're very committed to this uh open computer is it like open Cloud project as well which sounds to me like that's in your particular DNA as well it it is I mean I think it's one of the things that we from the early days we said that you know the internet is a is a big place and this is a big opportunity and we're
not going to do everything for everybody but we can help a lot of people in a lot of ways so early on one of the ways that we helped was we opened sources design and said whoever wants to use it here's here's a design you can use and we certainly felt like we had we're standing on the shoulders of giants we were we got to use Linux and we got to use SSL and we got to use all these things that other people in other companies and other organizations had built many of which then they shared in open source and so we wanted to give
back some of that today one of the things that we look at is open cloud in a in a in a way of the cloud has shifted um and it used to be that for many many years Amazon was the cloud yep and everybody and it started off being just okay they have storage maybe they have compute um and then the Amazon started having this service this service this service service now they have 200 services that they offer you and for a while that was just everybody considered that the default path and uh and in fact Amazon at some point even said you're
not allowed to use the term multi-cloud because we are a Douglas that's it it still happens today yeah right and and and so they're trying to make you believe that there is no other choice but certainly there's in addition to Amazon there's obviously Google and there's Azure and there's Oracle but then increasingly companies also want these specialized clouds they want these best of breed service Services you see that with stripe for billing or twilio for communications you have fastly and
cloudflare and others for for networking you have these different companies that are focusing on a particular part of the tech stack and trying to provide a lot of value in that part of it and and so for back plays we are doing that with storage and we believe that storage is this foundational part of the tech stack and if you do it really well it's a really important part of the tech stack but that doesn't mean we're gonna just lock you in you can only use us the whole point is you use us for storage
maybe use vulture digestion or somebody for compute maybe you use cloudflare faster or ackameyer bunny or somebody for for networking um you know you use these other different providers for building up the best of breed Cloud infrastructure that you want for your company and that's what what we talk about when we talk about the open Cloud it's it's not being locked into aws's um Walled Garden and which you know they very much try to keep you in through expensive egress fees and complexity to get out and all that yeah I think the
egress fee is obviously something that I talk about often with certain I've had a lot of um on-premises object storage companies on the show certainly the egress is a big part of why people choose to look at them and then while they look at you and if you can offer a similar service at 150 costs like you guys do it's very very compelling um for for a business for a technologist but I think the concept of that open Cloud and where we are today what I've started seeing is is definitely a pullback from this notion of you know
the public Cloud hyperscalers other all in the Panacea of of of the cloud um and you know we've seen um instances lately where there's been specialized clouds I've had a few on the show like sushi Cloud bare metal there's lots of Phoenix snap doing bare metal you you guys actually work with um one of our uh From fame's perspective the company I work for work with a partner of ours to basically offer the storage component of an open Dr service of which you are the storage you've got Phoenix snap and then continuity centers
provide the actual software to do the business so the best bit of the cloud today I think are being used for the best outcome for the customer and that's because there's so much great technology so much great Innovation but also choice out there and people understanding that you just don't go to AWS as a default anymore in fact you might actually not do that by default you might see what options are out there and then maybe look at AWS afterwards you know not that I don't want to demonize them too much
because they obviously do us a great service and they're they're an amazing organization and I love the technology and what they've pushed but I think what they've done is they've been able guys like you to accelerate your businesses as well right yeah and I think maybe taking you know the one step back so you know we talked about how we started you know doing computer backup and building our own infrastructure because AWS was so expensive and so we had to do it um where that evolved and how what we're
primarily doing today um so we we then had businesses that came to us and said I use you for my computer backup uh for for my home I'm trying to figure out why I have a better backup product with you at home than I have at the office for 10 times the price so let me use your Cloud backup service in in my business and so we expanded to that and then those companies came to us and said I use you for all my laptop desktop backup but I have all these other storage needs I need to Archive my data I need to back
up my server I need to sync my Nas I have this application that I've built I have all these other storage needs you've built this amazing storage Cloud give me access to the actual Cloud so that then was our when we launched backblaze B2 2 and backplace B2 became this this open API storage Cloud it's it's compatible with Amazon's S3 so it's an easy drop-in solution for anybody that's using anything um S3 um it's one-fifth the price of S3 it has no egress fees to Partners and and um
and if you want to get your data out you can get three times the amount of data out for free um it's it's fast it's durable it's just easy to use and that's that's that's the focus for bad boys now it's it's really leaning into helping customers with that storage need um and like you said we partnered with Phoenix and we partner with um with veeam um and and others to solve specific customer needs and I think you know those are some there's some of the great kind of ways that that happens right so
um you know with veeam um you know veeam provides a great service for customers to do backups and ransomware protection and that data needs to go somewhere and it's as easy as copy your backloads B2 credentials throw them into the veeam console and all that data is in our Cloud safe and protected using the veeam software same with a lot of our other partners so Synology and qnap are common Partners they do we do a lot of business where we help customers that have Synology and qnap systems on premises and they need
that data synced or backed up to the cloud again copy paste into those things you know Madison's works yeah and then it's okay right it was it was such a hard thing to actually do in the early days um you know I think so B2 cloud storage I think was introduced in about 2015. before that it was actually pretty difficult to the concept of just getting your data up somewhere as crazy as it sounds today it wasn't simple because you needed certain things in place you said it needed protocols needed networking it wasn't just what we have
today so I think you know you hit The Sweet Spot in terms of timing to be able to get that service up and running so I guess from that point of view I mean when you had the cloud backup you got backblades now running in 2015. so at that stage I know at the moment you run about five data centers globally you've got some in the US Amsterdam um high amount of durability as well so your nines uh they're quite huge right and I want to I'll just say talk about the openness as well and the fact that you guys do give back to the industry as
a whole with regards to your your data on the disks and the drives that you actually use and you give durability data as is it an annual thing that you do based on that so quarterly oh well importantly okay even better yeah so so years ago one of the things that happened was people started saying hey backlays you have a lot of hard drives tell me which ones I should buy and um and so we obviously keep a lot of statistics and do a lot of analysis on all the drives and we have hundreds of thousands of hard drives now yeah and so
what we started doing and we've been doing this for years and years now is publishing a quarterly analysis of all the drives in our environment and by make model size age and slicing and dicing that data and sharing it out and and so if you go to backboys.com and and go to the blog we we um we have a section or go to the about us page there's a section there um for the drive stats we we have all the data all the resources you can even download information and um we've been doing that consistently
and that is it's something that's very powerful for lots of customers interestingly when we did it we've thought um one we may have the drive manufacturers Cup come to us and try to convince us to stop doing that yeah um but they've actually really leaned in with us and been great partners and and a lot of what they want is they actually want us using their hard drives because one of the things that we hear is that um their customers are wait for our reports to decide which drives to buy because they want to see what the what
the data shows and so the the and so we have we've been trying to be open with that and sharing a lot of data and you know now we have over three exabytes of data that we store for I was gonna ask that was my next question how much are you storing that yeah we have about three exabytes um so it's a it's one of the largest clouds on the planet um we store over 500 billion files for customers um so it's it's large scale and and it's a lot of data and so we do we share that information out
um so yeah so we you know we try to be open we try to be transparent and you know we do that about a variety of things one of the other things that we've started talking more about is um we actually mostly bootstrapped backblaze um we started you mentioned you know going for a year without sorry the five of us that started the company we quit our jobs and committed to each other for one year without salary and that was the initial quote-unquote funding round and the two prior companies were that we did were both traditional Venture funded we
raised rounds we they were required this one we decided to differently and we said let's try and make this work by just focusing on product customers culture not going out and raising funding on day one so we we bootstrapped the company we went for about a year and a half with zero salary we went for almost another year at minimum wage and then almost another more year at two times minimum wage so it's a very long slog and burning through all of our savings but it was because we said like we really believe leave this this makes
sense like there's this huge opportunity both to build something exciting and to help so we did that for a long long time for for 15 years we raised less than three million dollars which is crazy crazy which is crazy for any any starter but especially for one that says Capital intensive as a storage Cloud company right yeah and and then we took it public on the NASDAQ in a traditional IPO not not a SPAC um we took it public in 2021 raised about 100 million dollars um got to fly out to New York and um push the button and do the whole thing
you know it was it was a lot of fun it was very exciting and um and so one of the things that we started talking about is what does that Journey look like and if you're building a company that is 10 20 50 million dollars in revenue and you're thinking maybe at some point I want to take this company public we're trying to also lay out that uh trajectory for uh for companies as well yeah that's real that's really good so yeah just help if he's continuing to fade back and help that's awesome open honesty hey we've
only got about five minutes say left I really wanted to touch just quickly on you know where where the state of data is today because obviously if you pump a lot in you know in terms into your cloud and obviously ransomware the thread of cyber has has really raised their the understand that you need to back up your data if you need to put it into some place that's really safe you know you guys just released an immutability feature that's great with a lot of the backup vendors as well because immutability ensures that you know the
data is not only there but it's secure when it's there when it rests um what where do you see the industry today versus where it was you know maybe pre-pandemic you know 2019-ish and then where you're seeing it going with regards to not only I guess ransomware but just in general yeah so you know certainly I mean one of the things that was happening before and happened during and is happening after is this massive move to the cloud um and so you know there's there's just an explosion of data and a lot of that
data is just heading toward the cloud so that's that's um that was happening before and it's still happening now covet in many ways the pandemic um accelerated some of that because it opened the Pandora's Box so many people started working from home working remotely a lot of what we help customers with is actually we help customers certainly with it use cases like backup and archive and ransomware protection and a lot of them had servers that were on premises and then they said but my you know RIT people don't necessarily
want to be going into the office they're not supposed to be there um and so they started looking at how can we move some of that data off-site um and into the cloud a lot of the people that were there had backups that were local to those systems but the employee these weren't in the office anymore so the backups have to be remote as well so then they're like why are we trying to get the backups into the office when the employees aren't there so a lot of that um happened that way clearly ransomware
and everything else is still a big issue we we help with object lock the immutability feature like we talked about um there's there's some increasing focus on Disaster Recovery type of of scenarios so it's not only about backup it's how do you get up and running and so we work with Partners like veeam and Phoenix NAP and others uh continuity centers where we've helped um work together where we are the storage cloud and and they provide parts of either the software or the compute infrastructure
we've done a an offering where you can spin up a veeam restore in the cloud um so you don't have to have the infrastructure on premises if uh if you don't have it if you have a disaster we've done that with with Phoenix snap beam and us um and I think it's you know it's a great solution for customers the the other thing is just application developers yeah and I think application Developers you know early early on um some of the application developers got onto AWS because they tend to be the
ones that are forward leaning forward thinking they're they're a little bit on The Cutting Edge and they're dangerous yeah they're a bit dangerous but they're trying to figure it out and trying to get the best possible choices and they started on AWS but increasingly AWS has gotten very complicated focused on the largest Enterprises on the federal government and they're leaving behind this large base of application developers that are still innovating and moving fast and trying to get best of
breed services and so we have been increasingly leaning in to help them and part of that is by providing them you know amazingly good storage at one-fifth of price that's really fast and durable but some of that is also about supporting this open Cloud ecosystem and so that's one of the trends that we see is that um application developers are kind of looking up and going you know what what's what I was using before is now feels like this kind of older stodgy locked in situation and I want to break
out I want to break free and I want to go use the best of breed offerings and whether that's for AI use cases so I need to use those gpus that only that company has over there whether that's other compute whether it's networking all the different things and so we want to be that foundational storage platform where customer can can store their data and send it to the the company that has the latest gpus for for their AI analysis send it to the network that has the best delivery use it in the way that
they see free and so we we actually enable the customers to get their data out of Amazon for free we will pay for them to get their data out um if uh if they keep the data with us for a year so we've helped okay so that's that that's a special that's an offering that you guys have awesome so I will definitely link to that and Assurance in fact I'll link to a lot of what you guys are doing in the show notes I think it's so good I really like I love I feel the passion that you have for this space and why backblaze exists
it's not there just to just to it's not just a soulless company in my in my mind I can see it this conversation hopefully has shown that to the people listening as well and it's a great alternative that you've got to think about because again the options the openness of it mean that you can use it in different ways and you can be more efficient so hey that's that's really amazing like I said at the start in our pre-chat we could talk a long time and you know maybe if you maybe in some other time
will extend the conversation out in some different way but it's been really good I think backblaze is a great company really understanding its place in the market and knowing its strengths and what it can do and I think that's why you've been so successful that's why you've built this amazing cloud you've got these great products and it's cool it's pretty simple in terms of you know what you guys do but it's become an amazing name in the industry so really thank you for being on and giving their
listeners an insight into you know where you guys came from and where you're going so thanks gleb for that all right just to wrap it up as a reminder if you like great things with great Tech we like to feature in future episodes please click on the link on the show notes go to gtwgt.
com and catch up on all episodes this has been episode 72 of great things with great Tech thanks gleb thanks backblaze and we'll see you next time on great things foreign
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