Heard Around Backblaze — June 2019

Like any tech company, all of us at Backblaze pay attention to the news and what’s happening in Silicon Valley and other tech communities. We comment on items posted to Slack, debate the latest items sent around via email, or discuss topics around lunchroom tables and in the snack rooms.

If you’re interested in what interests us, then take a look at some of the latest items that have been heard around Backblaze.

New Mac Pros Announced and Ready This Fall — But Will it Fit in Your Carry On?

We were excited to read the specs on the new Apple Mac Pro and some of us daydreamed about how fast it will compile or render, and what our favorite flight simulator will look like with 28 cores and two GPUs.

How would you use all that horsepower? And what’s with that $999 monitor stand?

Legendary Ramen House to Land in Silicon Valley (next door to us!

Backblaze HQ is located in the heart of downtown San Mateo and in the middle of a vibrant restaurant scene, especially for world-class ramen. We were floored to hear that Taishoken Ramen will open its first US location just a few steps from our office.

Ramen dipping noodles anyone?

Let’s Be Careful Out There

Backblaze famously launched in 2007 because friends of the company couldn’t find a backup solution that worked for them. Well after 12 years, and more than 750PB of customer data stored, we still love and work our tails off to keep it the best service for you.

Still, we’re floored when people take the time to let us know what the service means to them. Jeff Meyer, @soundman1024, was in the path of a tornado in the Midwest recently and what did he do?

Grabbed the important papers and a change of clothes…and didn’t bother with hard drives because Backblaze has my back(ups)!

Glad you’re safe @soundman1024!

Grabbed the important papers and a change of clothes and evacuated from the path of a mile wide tornado earlier this evening. Didn’t bother with hard drives because Backblaze has my back(ups). Thanks for the peace of mind, @backblaze.

(Completely safe btw.)

— Jeff Meyer (@soundman1024) May 29, 2019

Tableau Purchased by Salesforce

We use Salesforce at Backblaze for CRM and Tableau for business intelligence and analytics and wondered how the acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce will affect how we use the software. Will Tableau continue to work with other CRM software vendors and how will Salesforce’s “No Software” cloud-only approach affect on-site installations of Tableau?

We’ll be watching closely.

Japan’s Office Chair Grand Prix

Backblaze employees saw this story on Japan’s grand prix with office chairs and someone suggested that Backblaze should host a similar competition in San Francisco.

Are they kidding? With SF’s hills?

Giant 4MB Disk Platter on Reddit

A recent Reddit post got a lot of interest here and elsewhere, What a 4 megabyte harddrive looked like in 1965 (iPhone X for scale).

We wondered how many of these platters it would take to store all the data Backblaze has stored for its customers in our data centers.

The answer? Roughly 274,877,906,944 disks.