[brianwski]

Sorry about skipping your network capacity question. I just got over-excited about throttling. :-)

We currently have about 100 Gbps symmetric capacity into our datacenter on a couple of redundant providers, but the key is we have open overhead and we'll purchase more as our customers need it.

But here is the best part (if you want OUTBOUND capacity) - our current product fills the INBOUND internet connection, but currently we only use a tiny, tiny fraction of the OUTBOUND connection. So if you want to serve files out of our datacenter we have a metric ton of unused bandwidth we would LOVE you to use. And if you fill it up, we promise to purchase more.

But also keep in mind, Backblaze is very experienced with STORAGE and I have a lot of confidence we won't lose any of your files. What we don't have a huge amount of experience with yet is serving up viral videos and such. So just bear with us during this beta period while we figure it all out. Personally I'm looking forward to that part (all the CDN/caching layers).

[samstave]

>But here is the best part (if you want OUTBOUND capacity) - our current product fills the INBOUND internet connection, but currently we only use a tiny, tiny fraction of the OUTBOUND connection. So if you want to serve files out of our datacenter we have a metric ton of unused bandwidth we would LOVE you to use. And if you fill it up, we promise to purchase more.

:) well, yeah -- but thats also what B2 charges for.... so The business model requires that BW to start getting consumed :-)

[vidarh]

That's the first thing I noticed: This is awesome if most of your data is never touched. The moment you want to serve it up a lot, of course they promise to purchase more: Their bandwidth prices are as outrageously high as Amazon's.

If you serve up viral videos etc. and start eating a ton of bandwidth, even a "do it yourself" CDN out of VPS's could quickly save you a fortune...

[chinathrow]

But if your inbound capacity is pretty full these days, how can you manage to onboard _large_ new clients at this point? Can you scale your inbound bandwith as fast (and at the same cost) as adding a new vault a month?

[brianwski]

Our inbound is not completely full, and we always try to have extra capacity/headroom for new customers. But if you plan to upload more than 5 petabytes at a rate of faster than 15 Gbps sustained, you probably want to contact us ahead of time to let us know it's coming and we'll increase our capacity for you. We can absorb anything less and it won't cause us any issues.

As somebody else mentioned, since we're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it.

[samstave]

>we're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it.

Whats the lead time in your case?

In my historic experience doing this regardless of if I was even in MAE-West... cross connects and provisioning were eons in internet time...

[brianwski]

I'd estimate a week? That's probably what you meant by "eons". :-)

It could go faster, but if we need to buy a new (expensive) network switch that can take a few days to arrive. And as you mention, the datacenter guys are happiest if you give them 3 - 4 days and a work order to do the cross connect.

Building out more vaults (the blocks of 20 storage pods we store data in) is usually about the same if we rush it, but we have a big (multi-petabyte) buffer spinning ready to accept data at anytime. We have a regularly scheduled delivery of pods once per month based on projections, but we have been known to tell our provider to go ahead and build three months worth of pod chassis (everything except for the drives) immediately and ship them to us. We supply the hard drives, so that either comes from our own stashes or we quickly order some more from various sources.

[mentat]

It's a pretty different world now, both price and speed-wise.

[toomuchtodo]

Not to speak for brian, but as someone who used to do physical datacenter operations, most facilities have a bunch of fiber already provisioned (in the ground). Its just a matter of getting the networking gear and provider provisioned. Turnup can be done as quickly as 24-72 hours, depending on the provider and the dollar amount involved.

[ComputerGuru]

Thanks for your reply :)