Today, we announced our new Powered by Backblaze program to give platform providers the ability to offer cloud storage without the burden of building scalable storage infrastructure (something we know a little bit about). 

If you’re an independent software vendor (ISV), technology partner, or any company that wants to incorporate easy, affordable data storage within your branded user experience, Powered by Backblaze will give you the tools to do so without complex code, capital outlay, or massive expense.

Read on to learn more about Powered by Backblaze and how it can help you enhance your platforms and services. Or, if you’d like to get started asap, contact our Sales Team for access.  

Benefits of Powered by Backblaze

• Business Growth: Adding cloud services to your product portfolios can generate new revenue streams and/or grow your existing margin.
• Improved Customer Experience: Take the complexity out of object storage and deliver the best solutions by incorporating a proven object cloud storage solution.
• Simplified Billing: Reduce complex billing by providing customers with a single bill from a single provider. 
• Build Your Brand:  Improve customer expectations by providing cloud storage with your company name for consistency and brand identity.

What Is Powered by Backblaze?

Powered by Backblaze offers companies the ability to incorporate B2 Cloud Storage into their products so they can sell more services or enhance their user experience with no capital investment. Today, this program offers two solutions that support the provisioning of B2 Cloud Storage: Custom Domains and the Backblaze Partner API.

How Can I Leverage Custom Domains?

Custom Domains, launched today, lets you serve content to your end users from the web domain or URL of your choosing, with no need for complex code or proxy servers. Backblaze manages the heavy lifting of cloud storage on the back end.

Custom Domains functionality combines CNAME and Backblaze B2 Object Storage, enabling the use of your preferred domain name in your files’ web domain or URLs instead of using the domain name that Backblaze automatically assigns.

We’ve chosen Backblaze so we can have a reliable partner behind our new Edge Storage solution. With their Custom Domain feature, we can implement the security needed to serve data from Backblaze to end users from Azion’s Edge Platform, improving user experience.

—Rafael Umann, CEO, Azion, a full stack platform for developers

How Can I Leverage the Backblaze Partner API?

The Backblaze Partner API automates the provisioning and management of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage storage accounts within a platform. It allows for managing accounts, running reports, and creating a bundled solution or managed service for a unified user experience.

We wrote more about the Backblaze Partner API here, but briefly: We created this solution by exposing existing API functionality in a manner that allows partners to automate tasks essential to provisioning users with seamless access to storage.

The Backblaze Partner API calls allow you to:

• Create accounts (add Group members)
• Organize accounts in Groups
• List Groups
• List Group members
• Eject Group members

If you’d like to get into the details, you can dig deeper in our technical documentation.

Our customers produce thousands of hours of content daily and, with the shift to leveraging cloud services like ours, they need a place to store both their original and transcoded files. The Backblaze Partner API allows us to expand our cloud services and eliminate complexity for our customers—giving them time to focus on their business needs, while we focus on innovations that drive more value.

—Murad Mordukhay, CEO, Qencode

How to Get Started With Powered by Backblaze

To get started with Powered by Backblaze, contact our Sales Team. They will work with you to understand your use case and how you can best utilize Powered by Backblaze. 

What’s Next?

We’re looking forward to adding more to the Powered by Backblaze program as we continue investing in the tools you need to bring performant cloud storage to your users in an easy, seamless fashion.

The post Object Storage Simplified: Introducing Powered by Backblaze appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

If you’re a reseller partner, we know it’s hard to cut through the noise and get potential clients interested in the services you sell. It helps when you’re able to share relevant, useful, truly valuable information with them to build your brand and engage potential clients in prospective services. 

The Backblaze Drive Stats reports can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. They not only provide insights into drive reliability but also empower you to better position and sell Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. So, let’s dig into what Drive Stats are and how you can use them to serve your clients.

What Are Drive Stats?

The Backblaze Drive Stats reports include a comprehensive set of data that Backblaze openly shares about the performance and reliability of the hard drives that we use in our data centers. The data we publish is excellent for building trust with customers—it’s unique in the industry, regularly covered in industry media, and used by everyone from IT admins to research institutions to inform their strategies. Use it to level up your understanding of hard drives in general—including how they affect cloud storage infrastructure—and to build trust with end users around Backblaze in particular.

How Can I Use Drive Stats as a Reseller?

Identifying and Addressing Customer Concerns

You probably encounter customer concerns regarding the potential risks associated with data storage—both on premises and in the cloud—all the time. With Drive Stats, you can speak to those concerns with hard data on drive failure rates. This data-driven approach empowers customers to make optimal operational decisions and positions you as a knowledgeable, trusted advisor in their cloud storage journey.

Tailoring Solutions to Customer Needs

Every business has unique data storage and backup requirements, often a combination of on premises and cloud based data storage. In crafting the proper storage solution for your clients, you are often confronted with cost versus reliability trade-offs. The Backblaze Drive Stats reports provide a dependable source of unbiased drive reliability statistics when local data storage is required. With the Drive Stats data at hand, you can apply your knowledge and experience to confidently propose and deliver a comprehensive, cost-effective data storage and backup solution at a fair price that meets your customers’ unique needs.

Educating Customers on Data Management Best Practices

Beyond selling a product, you play a vital role in educating your customers on best practices for data management. Backblaze Drive Stats provide you with valuable insights that can be shared with your clients to help them make informed decisions about their storage strategy. By educating customers on the factors that contribute to reliable and efficient data storage, you position yourselves as trusted advisors in the rapidly evolving world of cloud technology.

Drive Stats as Your Competitive Advantage

In the competitive landscape of cloud storage solutions, reseller partners can gain a strategic advantage by harnessing the power of Backblaze Drive Stats as an effective, valuable, and powerful piece of content. The stats not only enhance transparency and build trust with customers but also empower resellers to effectively address concerns, tailor solutions, and educate clients on data management best practices. By leveraging this valuable resource, resellers can position themselves as leaders in the market and drive the success of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

The post Leveraging Backblaze Drive Stats to Boost Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Sales: A Guide for Reseller Partners appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Backblaze compute partner CoreWeave is a specialized GPU cloud provider designed to power use cases such as AI/ML, graphics, and rendering up to 35x faster and for 80% less than generalized public clouds. Brandon Jacobs, an infrastructure architect at CoreWeave, joined us earlier this year for Backblaze Tech Day ‘23. Brandon and I co-presented a session explaining both how to backup CoreWeave Cloud storage volumes to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and how to load a model from Backblaze B2 into the CoreWeave Cloud inference stack.

Since we recently published an article covering the backup process, in this blog post I’ll focus on loading a large language model (LLM) directly from Backblaze B2 into CoreWeave Cloud.

Below is the session recording from Tech Day; feel free to watch it instead of, or in addition to, reading this article.

More About CoreWeave

In the Tech Day session, Brandon covered the two sides of CoreWeave Cloud: 

1. Model training and fine tuning. 
2. The inference service. 

To maximize performance, CoreWeave provides a fully-managed Kubernetes environment running on bare metal, with no hypervisors between your containers and the hardware.

CoreWeave provides a range of storage options: storage volumes that can be directly mounted into Kubernetes pods as block storage or a shared file system, running on solid state drives (SSDs) or hard disk drives (HDDs), as well as their own native S3 compatible object storage. Knowing that, you’re probably wondering, “Why bother with Backblaze B2, when CoreWeave has their own object storage?”

The answer echoes the first few words of this blog post—CoreWeave’s object storage is a specialized implementation, co-located with their GPU compute infrastructure, with high-bandwidth networking and caching. Backblaze B2, in contrast, is general purpose cloud object storage, and includes features such as Object Lock and lifecycle rules, that are not as relevant to CoreWeave’s object storage. There is also a price differential. Currently, at $6/TB/month, Backblaze B2 is one-fifth of the cost of CoreWeave’s object storage.

So, as Brandon and I explained in the session, CoreWeave’s native storage is a great choice for both the training and inference use cases, where you need the fastest possible access to data, while Backblaze B2 shines as longer term storage for training, model, and inference data as well as the destination for data output from the inference process. In addition, since Backblaze and CoreWeave are bandwidth partners, you can transfer data between our two clouds with no egress fees, freeing you from unpredictable data transfer costs.

Loading an LLM From Backblaze B2

To demonstrate how to load an archived model from Backblaze B2, I used CoreWeave’s GPT-2 sample. GPT-2 is an earlier version of the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 LLMs used in ChatGPT. As such, it’s an accessible way to get started with LLMs, but, as you’ll see, it certainly doesn’t pass the Turing test!

This sample comprises two applications: a transformer and a predictor. The transformer implements a REST API, handling incoming prompt requests from client apps, encoding each prompt into a tensor, which the transformer passes to the predictor. The predictor applies the GPT-2 model to the input tensor, returning an output tensor to the transformer for decoding into text that is returned to the client app. The two applications have different hardware requirements—the predictor needs a GPU, while the transformer is satisfied with just a CPU, so they are configured as separate Kubernetes pods, and can be scaled up and down independently.

Since the GPT-2 sample includes instructions for loading data from Amazon S3, and Backblaze B2 features an S3 compatible API, it was a snap to modify the sample to load data from a Backblaze B2 Bucket. In fact, there was just a single line to change, in the s3-secret.yaml configuration file. The file is only 10 lines long, so here it is in its entirety:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: s3-secret
  annotations:
     serving.kubeflow.org/s3-endpoint: s3.us-west-004.backblazeb2.com
type: Opaque
data:
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: <my-backblaze-b2-application-key-id>
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: <my-backblaze-b2-application-key>

As you can see, all I had to do was set the serving.kubeflow.org/s3-endpoint metadata annotation to my Backblaze B2 Bucket’s endpoint and paste in an application key and its ID.

While that was the only Backblaze B2-specific edit, I did have to configure the bucket and path where my model was stored. Here’s an excerpt from gpt-s3-inferenceservice.yaml, which configures the inference service itself:

apiVersion: serving.kubeflow.org/v1alpha2
kind: InferenceService
metadata:
  name: gpt-s3
  annotations:
    # Target concurrency of 4 active requests to each container
    autoscaling.knative.dev/target: "4"
    serving.kubeflow.org/gke-accelerator: Tesla_V100
spec:
  default:
    predictor:
      minReplicas: 0 # Allow scale to zero
      maxReplicas: 2 
      serviceAccountName: s3-sa # The B2 credentials are retrieved from the service account
      tensorflow:
        # B2 bucket and path where the model is stored
        storageUri: s3://<my-bucket>/model-storage/124M/
        runtimeVersion: "1.14.0-gpu"
        ...

Aside from storageUri configuration, you can see how the predictor application’s pod is configured to scale from between zero and two instances (“replicas” in Kubernetes terminology). The remainder of the file contains the transformer pod configuration, allowing it to scale from zero to a single instance.

Running an LLM on CoreWeave Cloud

Spinning up the inference service involved a kubectl apply command for each configuration file and a short wait for the CoreWeave GPU cloud to bring up the compute and networking infrastructure. Once the predictor and transformer services were ready, I used curl to submit my first prompt to the transformer endpoint:

% curl -d '{"instances": ["That was easy"]}' http://gpt-s3-transformer-default.tenant-dead0a.knative.chi.coreweave.com/v1/models/gpt-s3:predict
{"predictions": ["That was easy for some people, it's just impossible for me,\" Davis said. \"I'm still trying to" ]}

In the video, I repeated the exercise, feeding GPT-2’s response back into it as a prompt a few times to generate a few paragraphs of text. Here’s what it came up with:

“That was easy: If I had a friend who could take care of my dad for the rest of his life, I would’ve known. If I had a friend who could take care of my kid. He would’ve been better for him than if I had to rely on him for everything.

The problem is, no one is perfect. There are always more people to be around than we think. No one cares what anyone in those parts of Britain believes,

The other problem is that every decision the people we’re trying to help aren’t really theirs. If you have to choose what to do”

If you’ve used ChatGPT, you’ll recognize how far LLMs have come since GPT-2’s release in 2019!

Run Your Own Large Language Model

While CoreWeave’s GPT-2 sample is an excellent introduction to the world of LLMs, it’s a bit limited. If you’re looking to get deeper into generative AI, another sample, Fine-tune Large Language Models with CoreWeave Cloud, shows how to fine-tune a model from the more recent EleutherAI Pythia suite.

Since CoreWeave is a specialized GPU cloud designed to deliver best-in-class performance up to 35x faster and 80% less expensive than generalized public clouds, it’s a great choice for workloads such as AI, ML, rendering, and more, and, as you’ve seen in this blog post, easy to integrate with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, with no data transfer costs. For more information, contact the CoreWeave team.

The post How to Run AI/ML Workloads on CoreWeave + Backblaze appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

You can imagine data egress fees like tolls on a highway—your data is cruising along trying to get to its destination, but it has to pay a fee for the privilege of continuing its journey. If you have a lot of data to move, or a lot of toll booths (different cloud services) to move it through, those fees can add up quickly. 

Data egress fees are charges you incur for moving data out of a cloud service. They can be a big part of your cloud bill depending on how you use the cloud. And, they’re frequently a reason behind surprise AWS bills. So, let’s take a closer look at egress, egress fees, and ways you can reduce or eliminate them, so that your data can travel the cloud superhighways at will. 

What Is Data Egress?

In computing generally, data egress refers to the transfer or movement of data out of a given location, typically from within a network or system to an external destination. When it comes to cloud computing, egress generally means whenever data leaves the boundaries of a cloud provider’s network. 

In the simplest terms, data egress is the outbound flow of data.

Egress vs. Ingress?

While egress pertains to data exiting a system, ingress refers to data entering a system. When you download something, you’re egressing data from a service. When you upload something, you’re ingressing data to that service. 

Unsurprisingly, most cloud storage providers do not charge you to ingress data—they want you to store your data on their platform, so why would they? 

Egress vs. Download

You might hear egress referred to as download, and that’s not wrong, but there are some nuances. Egress applies not only to downloads, but also when you migrate data between cloud services, for example. So, egress includes downloads, but it’s not limited to them. 

In the context of cloud service providers, the distinction between egress and download may not always be explicitly stated, and the terminology used can vary between providers. It’s essential to refer to the specific terms and pricing details provided by the service or platform you are using to understand how they classify and charge for data transfers.

How Do Egress Fees Work?

Data egress fees are charges incurred when data is transferred out of a cloud provider’s environment. These fees are often associated with cloud computing services, where users pay not only for the resources they consume within the cloud (such as storage and compute) but also for the data that is transferred from the cloud to external destinations.

There are a number of scenarios where a cloud provider typically charges egress: 

• When you’re migrating data from one cloud to another.
• When you’re downloading data from a cloud to a local repository.
• When you move data between regions or zones with certain cloud providers. 
• When an application, end user, or content delivery network (CDN) requests data from your cloud storage bucket. 

The fees can vary depending on the amount of data transferred and the destination of the data. For example, transferring data between regions within the same cloud provider’s network might incur lower fees than transferring data to the internet or to a different cloud provider.

Data egress fees are an important consideration for organizations using cloud services, and they can impact the overall cost of hosting and managing data in the cloud. It’s important to be aware of the pricing details related to data egress in the cloud provider’s pricing documentation, as these fees can contribute significantly to the total cost of using cloud services.

Why Do Cloud Providers Charge Egress Fees?

Both ingressing and egressing data costs cloud providers money. They have to build the physical infrastructure to allow users to do that, including switches, routers, fiber cables, etc. They also have to have enough of that infrastructure on hand to meet customer demand, not to mention staff to deploy and maintain it. 

However, it’s telling that most cloud providers don’t charge ingress fees, only egress fees. It would be hard to entice people to use your service if you charged them extra for uploading their data. But, once cloud providers have your data, they want you to keep it there. Charging you to remove it is one way cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure do that. 

What Are AWS’s Egress Fees?

AWS S3 gives customers 100GB of data transfer out to the internet free each month, with some caveats—that 100GB excludes data stored in China and GovCloud. After that, the published rates for U.S. regions for data transferred over the public internet are as follows as of the date of publication:

• The first 10TB per month is $0.09 per GB.
• The next 40TB per month is $0.085 per GB.
• The next 100TB per month is $0.07 per GB.
• Anything greater than 150TB per month is $0.05 per GB. 

But AWS also charges customers egress between certain services and regions, and it can get complicated quickly as the following diagram shows…

How Can I Reduce Egress Fees?

If you’re using cloud services, minimizing your egress fees is probably a high priority. Companies like the Duckbill Group (the creators of the diagram above) exist to help businesses manage their AWS bills. In fact, there’s a whole industry of consultants that focuses solely on reducing your AWS bills. 

Aside from hiring a consultant to help you spend less, there are a few simple ways to lower your egress fees:

1. Use a content delivery network (CDN): If you’re hosting an application, using a CDN can lower your egress fees since a CDN will cache data on edge servers. That way, when a user sends a request for your data, it can pull it from the CDN server rather than your cloud storage provider where you would be charged egress. 
2. Optimize data transfer protocols: Choose efficient data transfer protocols that minimize the amount of data transmitted. For example, consider using compression or delta encoding techniques to reduce the size of transferred files. Compressing data before transfer can reduce the volume of data sent over the network, leading to lower egress costs. However, the effectiveness of compression depends on the nature of the data.
3. Utilize integrated cloud providers: Some cloud providers offer free data transfer with a range of other cloud partners. (Hint: that’s what we do here at Backblaze!)
4. Be aware of tiering: It may sound enticing to opt for a cold(er) storage tier to save on storage, but some of those tiers come with much higher egress fees. 

How Does Backblaze Reduce Egress Fees?

There’s one more way you can drastically reduce egress, and we’ll just come right out and say it: Backblaze gives you free egress up to 3x the average monthly storage and unlimited free egress through a number of CDN and compute partners, including Fastly, Cloudflare, Bunny.net, and Vultr. 

Why do we offer free egress? Supporting an open cloud environment is central to our mission, so we expanded free egress to all customers so they can move data when and where they prefer. Cloud providers like AWS and others charge high egress fees that make it expensive for customers to use multi-cloud infrastructures and therefore lock in customers to their services. These walled gardens hamper innovation and long-term growth.

Free Egress = A Better, Multi-Cloud World

The bottom line: the high egress fees charged by hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft are a direct impediment to a multi-cloud future driven by customer choice and industry need. And, a multi-cloud future is something we believe in. So go forth and build the multi-cloud future of your dreams, and leave worries about high egress fees in the past. 

The post Cloud 101: Data Egress Fees Explained appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Backblaze and HYCU, the fastest-growing leader in multi-cloud data protection as a service (DPaaS), are teaming up to provide businesses a complete backup solution for modern workloads with low-cost scalable infrastructure—a must-have for modern cyber resilience needs.

Read on to learn more about the partnership, how you can benefit from affordable, agile data protection, and a little bit about a relevant ancient poetic art form.

HYCU + Backblaze: The Power of Collaboration

Within HYCU’s DPaaS platform, shared customers can now select Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage—an S3 compatible object storage platform that provides highly durable, instantly available hot storage—as a destination for their HYCU backups. 

With more applications in use across the modern data center, visibility and the ability to protect that mission-critical data has never been at more of a premium. Our collaboration with Backblaze now offers joint customers a cost-effective and scalable data protection solution combining the best in backup and recovery with Backblaze’s streamlined and secure cloud storage.

—Subbiah Sundaram, SVP Product, HYCU, Inc.

The Data Sprawl Problem

On average, businesses and organizations have upwards of 200 different sets of data or “data silos” spread across a growing number of applications, databases, and physical locations. This data sprawl isn’t just hard to manage, it opens up more opportunities for cybercriminals to inject ransomware and gain access to systems. 

HYCU gives customers the power to protect every byte while also managing all their business critical data in one place. Powered by the world’s first development platform for data protection, HYCU is the only DPaaS platform that can scale to protect all of your data—wherever it resides. Most importantly, it gives customers the ability to recover from disaster almost instantly, keeping them online and in business, with an average recovery time of 10 minutes. 

By combining HYCU data protection with Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud, customers can see up to 80% lower costs in comparison to using providers like AWS for their storage, which means that combining the two can be a force multiplier for a businesses’ ability to fully protect their data and scale efficiently and reliably.

The partnership offers the following benefits:

• Performance: With a 99.9% uptime service level agreement (SLA) and no cold delays or speed premiums, storing data in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage means joint customers have instant access to their data whenever and wherever they need it. 
• Affordability: Existing customers can reduce their total cost of ownership by switching backup tiers with interoperable S3 compatible storage, and institutions and businesses who may not have been able to afford hyperscaler-based solutions can now protect their data.
• Compliance and Security: With Backblaze B2’s Object Lock feature, the partnership also offers an additional layer of security through data immutability, which protects backups from ransomware and satisfies evolving cyber insurance requirements.

These benefits can prove particularly useful for higher education institutions, schools, state and local governments, nonprofits, and others where maximizing tight budgets is always a priority.

Making Data Protection Easier

This partnership adds a powerful new data protection option for joint customers looking to affordably back up their data and establish a disaster recovery strategy. And, this is just the beginning. Stay tuned for more from this partnership, including integrations with HYCU’s other data protection offerings in the future. 

Interested in getting started? Learn more in our docs.

The post HYCU + Backblaze: Protecting Against Data Loss appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

If you do any kind of video streaming, encoding and storing your data is one of your main challenges. Encoding videos in various formats and resolutions for different devices and platforms can be a resource-intensive task, and setting up and maintaining on-premises encoding infrastructure can be expensive.

Today, we’re excited to announce an expanded partnership with Qencode, a media services platform that enables users to build powerful video solutions, including solutions to the challenges of transcoding, live streaming, and media storage. The expanded partnership embeds the Backblaze Partner API within the Qencode platform, making it frictionless for users to add cloud storage to their media production workflows. 

What Is Qencode?

Qencode is a media services platform founded in 2017 that assists with digital video transformation. The Qencode API provides developers within the over-the-top (OTT), broadcasting, and media & entertainment sectors with scalable and robust APIs for:

• Video transcoding
• Live streaming
• Content delivery
• Media storage
• Artificial intelligence

Qencode + Backblaze

Recognizing the growing demand for integrated and efficient cloud storage within media production, Qencode and Backblaze built an alliance which creates a new paradigm for cutting-edge video APIs fortified by a reliable and efficient cloud storage solution. This integration empowers flexible workflows consisting of uploading, transcoding, storing, and delivering video content for media and OTT companies of all sizes. By integrating the platforms, this partnership provides top-tier features while simplifying the complexities and reducing the risks often associated with innovation.

We want to set new standards for value in an industry that is fragmented and complex. By merging Qencode’s advanced video processing capabilities with Backblaze’s reliable cloud storage, we’re addressing a critical industry need for seamless integration and efficiency. Integrating Backblaze’s Partner API takes our platform to the next level, providing users with a single, streamlined interface for all their video and media needs.

Murad Mordukhay, CEO of Qencode

Qencode + Backblaze Use Cases

The easy-to-use interface and affordability make Qencode an ideal choice for businesses who need video processing at scale without compromising spend or flexibility. Qencode enables businesses of all sizes to customize and control a complete end-to-end solution, from sign-on to billing, which includes seamless access to Backblaze storage through the Qencode software as a service (SaaS) platform. 

Simplifying the User Experience

Expanding this partnership with Qencode takes our API technology a step further in making cloud storage more accessible to businesses whose mission is to simplify user experience. We are excited to work with a specialist like Qencode to bring a simple and low cost storage solution to businesses who need it the most.

The post Backblaze + Qencode: Video Transcoding Made Simple appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Business disruptions can be devastating, as any business owner who has been through one will tell you. This stat isn’t meant to stoke fear, but the Atlas VPN research team found that 31% of businesses in the U.S. are forced to close for a period of time as a consequence of falling victim to ransomware attacks.

It’s likely some, if not most, of those businesses had backups in place. But, having backups alone won’t necessarily save your business if it takes you days or weeks to restore operations from those backups. And true disaster recovery means more than simply having backups and a plan to restore: It means testing that plan regularly to make sure you can bring your business back online.

Today, we’re sharing news of a new disaster recovery service built on Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage that’s aimed to help businesses restore faster and more affordably: Continuity Centers’ Cloud Instant Backup Recovery (Cloud IBR) which instantly recovers Veeam backups from the Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud.

Helping Businesses Recover After a Disaster

We launched the first generation version of this solution—Instant Recovery in Any Cloud—in May of 2022 to help businesses complete their disaster recovery playbook. And now, we’re building on that original infrastructure as code (IaC) package, to bring you Cloud IBR.

Cloud IBR is a second generation solution that further simplifies disaster recovery plans. The easy-to-use interface and affordability make Cloud IBR an ideal disaster recovery solution designed for small and medium size businesses (SMBs) who are typically priced out of enterprise-scale disaster recovery solutions.

How Does Cloud IBR Work?

Continuity Centers combines the automation-driven Veeam REST API calls with phoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud platform into a unified system, and completely streamlines the user experience.

The fully-automated service deploys a recovery process through a simple web UI, and, in the background, uses phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud servers to import Veeam backups stored in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, and fully restores the customer’s server infrastructure. The solution hides the complexity of dealing with automation scripts and APIs and offers a simple interface to stand up an entire cloud infrastructure when you need it. Best of all, you pay for the service only for the period of time that you need.

Cloud IBR gives small and mid-market companies the highest level of business continuity available, against disasters of all types. It’s a simple and accessible solution for SMBs to embrace. We developed this solution with affordability and availability in mind, so that businesses of all sizes can benefit from our decades of disaster recovery experience, which is often financially out of reach for the SMB.

—Gregory Tellone, CEO of Continuity Centers.

Right-Sized Disaster Recovery

Previously, mid-market businesses were underserved by disaster recovery and business continuity planning because the requirements and efforts to create a disaster recovery (DR) plan are often foregone in favor of more immediate business demands. Additionally, many disaster recovery solutions are designed for larger size companies and do not meet the specific needs for SMBs. Cloud IBR allows businesses of all sizes to instantly stand up their entire server infrastructure in the cloud, at a moment’s notice and with a single click, making it easy to plan for and easy to execute.

Learn more about Cloud IBR at the Cloud IBR website.

The post Announcing Instant Backup Recovery, a Joint Solution by Continuity Centers appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

If you already use Veeam, you’re probably familiar with using object storage, typically in the cloud, as your secondary repository using Veeam’s Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR). But Veeam v12, released on February 14, 2023, introduced a new direct-to-object storage feature that expands the way enterprises can use cloud storage and on-premises object storage for data protection.

Today, I’m talking through some specific use cases as well as the benefits of the direct-to-object storage feature, including fortifying your 3-2-1 backup strategy, ensuring your business is optimizing your cloud storage, and improving cyber resilience.

The Basics of Veeam’s Direct-to-Object Storage

Veeam’s v12 release added the direct-to-object storage feature that allows you to add object storage as a primary backup repository. This object storage can be an on-premises object storage system like Pure Storage or Cloudian or a cloud object storage provider like Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage’s S3 compatible storage. You can configure the job to run as often as you would like, set your retention policy, and configure all the other settings that Veeam Backup & Replication provides.

Prior to v12, you had to use Veeam’s SOBR to save data to cloud object storage. Setting up the SOBR requires you to first add a local storage component, called your Performance Tier, as a primary backup repository. You can then add a Capacity Tier where you can copy backups to cloud object storage via the SOBR. Your Capacity Tier can be used for redundancy and disaster recovery (DR) purposes, or older backups can be completely off-loaded to cloud storage to free up space on your local storage component.

The diagram below shows how both the SOBR and direct-to-object storage methods work. As you can see, with the direct-to-object feature, you no longer have to first land your backups in the Performance Tier before sending them to cloud storage.

Why Use Cloud Object Storage With Veeam?

On-premises object storage systems can be a great resource for storing data locally and achieving the fastest recoveries, but they’re expensive especially if you’re maintaining capacity to store multiple copies of your data, and they’re still vulnerable to on-site disasters like fire, flood, or tornado. Cloud storage allows you to keep a backup copy in an off-site, geographically distanced location for DR purposes.

Additionally, while local storage will provide the fastest recovery time objective (RTO), cloud object storage can be effective in the case of an on-premises disaster as it serves the dual purpose of protecting your data and being off-site.

To be clear, the addition of direct-to-object storage doesn’t mean you should immediately abandon your SOBR jobs or your on-premises devices. The direct-to-object storage feature gives you more options and flexibility, and there are a few specific use cases where it works particularly well, which I’ll get into later.

How to Use Veeam’s Direct-to-Object Storage Feature

With v12, you can now use Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature in the Performance Tier, the Capacity Tier, or both. To understand how to use the direct-to-object storage feature to its full potential, you need to understand the implications of using object storage in your different tiers. I’ll walk through what that means.

Using Object Storage in Veeam’s Performance Tier

In earlier versions of Veeam’s backup software, the SOBR required the Performance Tier to be an on-premises storage device like a network attached storage (NAS) device. V12 changed that. You can now use an on-premises system or object storage, including cloud storage, as your Performance Tier.

So, why would you want to use cloud object storage, specifically Backblaze B2, as your Performance Tier?

• Scalability: With cloud object storage as your Performance Tier, you no longer have to worry about running out of storage space on your local device.
• Immutability: By enabling immutability on your Veeam console and in your Backblaze B2 account (using Object Lock), you can prevent your backups from being corrupted by a ransomware network attack like they might be if your Performance Tier was a local NAS.
• Security: By setting cloud storage as your Performance Tier in the SOBR, you remove the threat of your backups being affected by a local disaster. With your backups safely protected off-site and geographically distanced from your primary business location, you can rest assured they are safe even if your business is affected by a natural disaster.

Understandably, some IT professionals prefer to keep on-premises copies of their backups because they offer the shortest RTO, but for many organizations, the pros of using cloud storage in the Performance Tier can outweigh the slightly longer RTO.

Using Object Storage in the Performance AND Capacity Tiers

If you’re concerned about overreliance on cloud storage but also feeling eager to eliminate often unwieldy, expensive, space-consuming physical local storage appliances, consider that Veeam v12 allows you to set cloud object storage as both your Performance and Capacity tier, which could add redundancy to ease your worries.

For instance, you could follow this approach:

1. Create a Backblaze B2 Bucket in one region and set that as your primary repository using the SOBR.
2. Send your Backup Jobs to that bucket (and make it immutable) as often as you would like.
3. Create a second Backblaze B2 account with a bucket in a different region, and set it as your secondary repository.
4. Create Backup Copy Jobs to replicate your data to that second region for added redundancy.

This may ease your concerns about using the cloud as the sole location for your backup data, as having two copies of your data—in geographically disparate regions—satisfies the 3-2-1 rule (since, even though you’re using one cloud storage service, the two backup copies of your data are kept in different locations.

Setting Up Veeam’s Direct-to-Object Storage Feature with Backblaze

For a comprehensive walk-through of setting up Veeam’s Direct-to-Object Storage feature with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, follow the steps in this tutorial video:

Use Cases for Veeam’s Direct-to-Object Storage Feature

Now that you know how to use Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature, you might be wondering what it’s best suited to do. There are a few use cases where Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature really shines, including:

• In remote offices
• For NAS backup
• For end-to-end immutability
• For Veeam Cloud and Service Providers (VCSP)

Using Direct-to-Object Storage in Remote Offices

The new functionality works well to support distributed and remote work environments.

Veeam had the ability to back up remote offices in v11, but it was unwieldy. When you wanted to back up the remote office, you had to back up the remote office to the main office, where the primary on-premises instance of Veeam Backup & Replication is installed, then use the SOBR to copy the remote office’s data to the cloud. This two-step process puts a strain on the main office network. With direct-to-object storage, you can still use a SOBR for the main office, and remote offices with smaller IT footprints (i.e. no on-premises device on which to create a Performance Tier) can send backups directly to the cloud.

If the remote office ever closes or suffers a local disaster, you can bring up its virtual machines (VMs) at the main office and get back in business quickly.

Using Direct-to-Object Storage for NAS Backup

NAS devices are often used as the Performance Tier for backups in the SOBR, and a business using a NAS may be just as likely to be storing its production data on the same NAS. For instance, a video production company might store its data on a NAS because it likes how easily a NAS incorporates into its workflows. Or a remote office branch may be using a NAS to store its data and make it easily accessible to the employees at that location.

With v11 and earlier versions, your production NAS had to be backed up to a Performance Tier and then to the cloud. And, with many Veeam users utilizing a NAS as their Performance Tier, this meant you had a NAS backing up to …another NAS, which made no sense.

For media and entertainment professionals in the field or IT administrators at remote offices, having to back up the production NAS to the main office (wherever that is located) before sending it to the cloud was inconvenient and unwieldy.

With v12, your production NAS can be backed up directly to the cloud using Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature.

Direct-to-Object Storage for End-to-End Immutability

As I mentioned, previous versions of Veeam required you to use local storage like a NAS as the Performance Tier in your SOBR, but that left your data vulnerable to security attacks. Now, with direct-to-object storage functionality, you can achieve an end-to-end immutability. Here’s how:

• In the SOBR, designate an on-premises appliance that supports immutability as your primary repository (Performance Tier). Cloudian and Pure Storage are popular names to consider here.
• Set cloud storage like Backblaze B2 as your secondary repository (Capacity Tier).
• Enable Object Lock for immutability in your Backblaze B2 account and set the date of your lock.

With this setup, you check a lot of boxes:

• You fulfill a 3-2-1 backup strategy.
• Both your local data and your off-site data are protected from deletion, encryption, or modification.
• Your infrastructure is provisioned for the fastest RTO with your local storage.
• You’ve also fully protected your data—including your local copy—from a ransomware attack.

Direct-to-Object Storage for VCSPs

The direct-to-object storage feature also works well for VCSPs. It changes how VCSPs use Cloud Connect, Veeam’s offering for service partners. A VCSP can send customer backups straight to the cloud instead of first sending them to the VCSP’s own systems.

Veeam V12 and Cyber Resiliency

When it comes to protecting your data, ultimately, you want to make the decision that best meets your business continuity and cyber resilience requirements. That means ensuring you not only have a sound backup strategy, but that you also consider what your data restoration process will look like during an active security incident (because a security incident is more likely to happen than not).

Veeam’s direct-to-object storage feature gives you more options for establishing a backup strategy that meets your RTO and DR requirements while also staying within your budget and allowing you to use the most optimal and preferred kind of storage for your use case.

The post How to Use Veeam’s V12 Direct-to-Object Storage Feature appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

You know that sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you receive a hefty bill you weren’t expecting? That is what some content delivery network (CDN) customers experience when they get slammed with bandwidth fees without warning. To avoid that sinking feeling, it’s important to understand how bandwidth fees work. It’s critical to know precisely what you are paying for and how you use the cloud service before you get hit with an eye-popping bill you can’t pay.

A content delivery network is an excellent way to speed up your website and improve performance and SEO, but not all vendors are created equal. Some charge more for data transfer than others. As the leading specialized cloud storage provider, we have developed partnerships with many top CDN providers, giving us the advantage of fully understanding how their services work and what they charge.

So, let’s talk about bandwidth fees and how they work to help you decide which CDN provider is right for you.

What Are CDN Bandwidth Fees?

Most CDN cloud services work like this: You can configure the CDN to pull data from one or more origins (such as a Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Bucket) for free or for a flat fee, and then you’re charged fees for usage, namely when data is transferred when a user requests it. These are known as bandwidth, download, or data transfer fees. (We’ll use these terms somewhat interchangeably.) Typically, storage providers also charge egress fees when data is called up by a CDN.

The fees aren’t a problem in and of themselves, but if you don’t have a good understanding of them, successes you should be celebrating can be counterbalanced by overhead. For example, let’s say you’re a small game-sharing platform, and one of your games goes viral. Bandwidth and egress fees can add up quickly in a case like this. CDN providers charge in arrears, meaning they wait to see how much of the data was accessed each month, and then they apply their fees.

Thus, monitoring and managing data transfer fees can be incredibly challenging. Although some services offer a calculation tool, you could still receive a shock bill at the end of the month. It’s important to know exactly how these fees work so you can plan your workflows better and strategically position your content where it will be the most efficient.

How Do CDN Bandwidth Fees Work?

Data transfer occurs when data leaves the network. An example might be when your application server serves an HTML page to the browser or your cloud object store serves an image, in each case via the CDN. Another example is when your data is moved to a different regional server within the CDN to be more efficiently accessed by users close to it.

There are dozens of instances where your data may be accessed or moved, and every bit adds up. Typically, CDN vendors charge a fee per GB or TB up to a specific limit. Once you hit these thresholds, you may advance up another pricing tier. A busy month could cost you a mint, and traffic spikes for different reasons in different industries—like a Black Friday rush for an e-commerce site or around events like the Super Bowl for a sports betting site, for example.

To give you some perspective, Apple spent more than $50 million in data transfer fees in a single year, Netflix $15 million, and Adobe and Salesforce spent more than $7 million according to The Information. You can see how quickly things add up before breaking the bank.

Price Comparison of Bandwidth Fees Across CDN Services

To get a better sense of how each CDN service charges for bandwidth, let’s explore the top providers and what they offer and charge.

As part of the Bandwidth Alliance, some of these vendors have agreed to discount customer data transfer fees when transferring one or both ways between member companies. What’s more, Backblaze offers free egress or discounts above and beyond what folks get with the Bandwidth Alliance for customers.

Note: Prices are as published by vendors as of 3/16/2023.

Fastly

Fastly offers edge caches to deliver content instantly around the globe. The company also offers SSL services for $20/per domain per month. They have various additional add-ons for things like web application firewalls (WAFs), managed rules, DDoS protection, and their Gold support.

Fastly bases its pricing structure on usage. They have three tiered plans:

1. Essential: up to 3TB of global delivery per month.
2. Professional: up to 10TB of global delivery per month.
3. Enterprise: unlimited global delivery.

They bill customers a minimum of $50/month for bandwidth and request usage.

bunny.net

bunny.net labels itself as the world’s lightning-fast CDN service. They price their CDN services based on region. For North America and Europe, prices begin at $0.01/GB per month. For companies with more than 100TB per month, you must call for pricing. If you have high bandwidth needs, bunny.net offers fewer PoPs (Points of Presence) for $0.005/GB per month.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare offers a limited free plan for hobbyists and individuals. They also have tiered pricing plans for businesses called Pro, Business, and Enterprise. Instead of charging bandwidth fees, Cloudflare opts for the monthly subscription model, which includes everything.

The Pro plan costs $20/month (for 100MB of upload). The Business plan is $200/month (for 200MB of upload). You must call to get pricing for the enterprise plan (for 500MB of upload).

Cloudflare also offers dozens of add-ons for load balancing, smart routing, security, serverless functions, etc. Each one costs extra per month.

AWS Cloudfront

AWS Cloudfront is Amazon’s CDN and is tightly integrated with its AWS services. The company offers tiered pricing based on bandwidth usage. The specifics are as follows for North America:

• $0.085/GB up to the first 10TB per month.
• $0.080/GB for the next 40TB per month.
• $0.060/GB for the next 100TB per month.
• $0.040/GB for the next 350TB per month.
• $0.030/GB for the next 524TB per month.

Their pricing extends up to 5PB per month, and there are different pricing breakdowns for different regions.

Amazon offers special discounts for high-data users and those customers who use AWS as their application storage container. You can also purchase add-on products that work with the CDN for media streaming and security.

Google Cloud CDN

Google Cloud CDN offers fast and reliable content delivery services. However, Google charges bandwidth, cache egress fees, and for cache misses. Their pricing structure is as follows:

• Cache Egress: $0.02–$0.20 per GB.
• Cache Fill: $0.01–$0.04 per GB.
• Cache Lookup Requests: $0.0075 per 10,000 requests.

Cache egress fees are priced per region, and in the U.S., they start at $0.08 for the first 10TB. Between 10–150TB costs $0.055, and beyond 500TB, you have to call for pricing.
Google charges $0.01 per GB for cache fill services.

Microsoft Azure

The Azure content delivery network is Microsoft’s offering that promises speed, reliability, and a high level of security.

Azure offers a limited free account for individuals to play around with. For business customers, they offer the following price structure:

Depending on the zone, the price will vary for data transfer. For Zone One, which includes North America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, pricing is as follows:

• First 10TB: $0.158/GB per month.
• Next 40TB: $0.14/GB per month.
• Next 100TB: $0.121/GB per month.
• Next 350TB: $0.102/GB per month.
• Next 500TB: $0.093/GB per month.
• Next 4,000TB: $0.084/GB per month.

Azure charges $.60 per 1,000,000,000 requests per month and $1 for rules per month. You can also purchase WAF services and other products for an additional monthly fee.

How to Save on Bandwidth Fees

A CDN can significantly enhance the performance of your website or web application and is well worth the investment. However, finding ways to save is helpful. Many of the CDN providers listed above are members of the Bandwidth Alliance and have agreed to offer discounted rates for bandwidth and egress fees. Another way to save money each month is to find affordable origin storage that works seamlessly with your chosen CDN provider. Here at Backblaze, we think the world needs lower egress fees, and we offer free egress between Backblaze B2 and many CDN partners like Fastly, bunny.net, and Cloudflare.

The post CDN Bandwidth Fees: What You Need to Know appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.