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Comment by atYevP | Hacker News Reader

Yev from Backblaze here -> Thanks! We try to keep the droll posts to a minimum :)

Hey, this is totally off-topic, but I have a humorous question for you guys: whenever I try to say the name of your company, about 75% of the time I flub it and say "Blackbaze" or "Blackblaze". Does this happen to you too? Do you have a swear jar for when people get it wrong? :)

http://www.blackblaze.com/

Yea, as a result of -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-s...

That's hilarious. Especially it ending up in your own marketing material. Lmao. Appreciate the link. I'm aware of this kind of issue having done plenty of customer service with disaster caused by misheard or misspelled things. So, I occasionally suggest a title change to some OSS projects that get posted here that might go big. Better to help them avoid the inevitable early on. :)

> Especially it ending up in your own marketing material

EVERYTHING can be marketing materials if you try hard enough :D

Analemma_ -> It happens to everyone (except me, because I have a lot of practice). But I wrote a little something about it -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-s...

Out of curiosity, is there any reason why you haven't tried to tackle the EMC demographic? Components are so cheap right now, you can offer hospitals, banks, telecom, avionics terabytes of data in something like a 8u form factor with in a master-master multi-pathing configuration (no consensus problem or anything because both arrays have to message to the filer that the persist was successful on writes), then offload using cheap "commodity" PCI-e Intel DC PC3700s? (Alternatively, you could go cheaper and target the 'all flash' VNX-F market and still easily offer five-nines (i.e. fault-tolerant "Big Iron" style, rather than just HA.)

You guys have the chassis manufacturing experience (your article on one of the pod designs had FEA simulations IIRC, so I'm thinking you have at least one engineer with graduate level expertise in fluid dynamics), presumably enough direct contact with vendors to source whatever you need to get upstream distribution (who do you guys use for your white label racks?), at least a few customers who have the budget and need for a solution like that, and I'd imagine you have at least one EE on your team with design experience to cobble together what you need.

Either way, you guys have a great blog. Always a great read, keep it up!

> Out of curiosity, is there any reason why you haven't tried to tackle the EMC demographic?

We didn't want to be in the hardware market. We outsource all of our "builds" to companies that are willing to bend the metal and assemble most of the pods for us. You can buy the pods directly from them as well (like from backuppods.com or 45drives.com). Backblaze was started by software people who were forced to look at hardware to solve a price-to-density problem.

Which is a really long way of saying - we don't want to sell hardware, if folks want to back up or store their data with us, that's awesome - but if they want hardware and support for that hardware - there's folks out there that are more in to that sort of thing :)

Hi Yev, offtopic but I have a b2 question/request:

When we switched from Amazon S3 to b2, we lost the ability to do signed requests: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/RESTAuthentic...

Our iOS app uploads photos, and we (used to) sign each one and then upload directly from the phone to S3. With b2, we currently have to proxy between the phone and b2 because it doesn't support signatures. It's not a huge deal (we're using $5/month Digital Ocean instances), but it'd be nice to have support in b2 for the same thing.

Best, Erich (happy b2 customer)

Hey Erich! Definitely ping the B2 folks about that -> https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new - they are collecting lists from folks and they'd want to hear your use-case and why the addition is important!

droll: curious or unusual in a way that provokes dry amusement

[synonyms: funny, humorous, amusing, comic, comical, mirthful, chucklesome, hilarious, rollicking]

Thanks.

I wonder where this other "droll" usage comes from, drone + dull?

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