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Comment by budmang | Hacker News Reader

We're thrilled about this. In short, we've directly connected our storage and their compute to ensure fast connections, and made the data transfers free. We've heard some ways people want to use this (disaster recovery, transcoding, rendering) - but would love to hear ways that you might. Thank you!

Gleb from Backblaze

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Hey Gleb! This is awesome!

Are there plans to accelerate this as an offering for other providers? I think there's huge benefit in partnering with other providers where you're enabling an agnostic storage layer (any provider that needs a durable object storage system without the complexity of operationalizing one themselves). Congrats, huge Backblaze fan!

Thanks for the kudos. We're open to supporting other providers as well, including other types of services beyond compute (e.g. databases and specific verticals.)

Do you have some specific providers you were interested in having connected?

When your European region exists: I'd love to see Hetzner(.com) connected.

Looks like they're in Germany/Finland. We'll try.

Be still my beating heart. Seriously? I would drop my Hetzner storage boxes in a heartbeat if I could connect to you instead on a fast link. I have, through the years, have used their auctions to snatch quite a few SSD only boxes and so I need external mass storage their network storage offer is ... ahem ... not the fastest! I would welcome something better :)

I'll second what the others have said. Especially their new Hetzner Cloud would be a perfect fit. It's one of the cheapest (if not the cheapest) cloud option I could find. Combining that with your B2 storage would be a perfect match.

And the best thing: They don't only focus on price but the quality is great as well.

And for us being a german/european provider is a bonus (GDPR).

Yeah Hetzner would be awesome. We already run some stuff over there so I could foresee spinning up some transcoders if you have connectivity there.

Just to second that. Hetzner has a great product in Europe for compute but they lack simple storage options. Connecting both would be great.

I've been using b2 and linode and I would benefit from having those two services connected :)

Great - we'll try to connect with them.

I can second this. We run significant bandwidth from you guys to Linode, and this would help immensely in a few of our applications.

We also use Digital Ocean, so they'd be our second choice; however, I doubt they'll be willing to integrate with a direct competitor to their Spaces product.

I guess we can explore with DO, but certainly will with Linode.

> Do you have some specific providers you were interested in having connected?

Not off hand, but lots of colleagues in hosting, exchange fabrics, SaaS products, etc and I want to be able to recommend a partnership to them whenever a good fit appears.

Excellent. We just created this Google Form to add/recommend partners: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdObw8HKH4uDexOg-fl...

Vultr would be great!

Doesn't Backblaze just have a single datacenter? If so, I think they're pretty limited in who they can partner up with like this. That is, they could only partner with companies who are in the same datacenter as them (or very close, network wise, due to latency) that they can connect directly to.

Backblaze has two facilities, one in California and one in Arizona. They're limited to anyone who can reach their network edge through a network port in their datacenters, but theoretically, you could ride fiber to their network ports from other facilities.

I would expect that as this grows (and it will, cheap, reliable storage and all), their network footprint would extend into more facilities (scale is required for this to be cost effective though).

Latency is not an issue until you're pushing GB/sec and crossing an ocean, and even that is feasible (lots of resources at https://es.net/ for that use case).

Are there any plans to expand this to a European location?

The CEO mentioned in an another comment that a .eu location by the end of 2018 is a goal.

This is awesome. I personally only use B2 for personal backups but I know my company is looking for storage of 4k media footage.

This makes it more compelling for them :)

Also this opens up the possibility for someone to make a SaaS on video storage and transcoding for great value

Would love to help your company with their storage needs. Feel free to email me: gleb.budman at backblaze

BTW, this person is figuring out how to do transcoding of files their files in B2 as well: https://twitter.com/orlandoferrer/status/981205299532124163

IBM's GPFS+LTFS (tape-based) is also a very low cost way to go on this and a commonly used solution in M&E as well as Geospatial Imagery space (I work in the latter). Assuming you have the facility and staff to run it, of course.

Ray

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