
Tim Nufire
"I am currently a Founder and Chief Cloud Officer at Backblaze"
Offering both an unlimited online backup service and the world's least expensive cloud storage service takes a lot of data storage. When Backblaze started out we needed a way to store our customer's data inexpensively and safely. We developed the Backblaze Storage Pod as the key building block of our cloud storage. Later we grouped 20 Storage Pods into a Backblaze Vault to optimize the reliability and durability of the entire system. A Storage Pod consists of 45, and now 60, hard drives in a 4U sized server made from commercially available parts. Over the years we've introduced new and improved designs and each new version we open source the hardware design. That's right, anyone can build their own high capacity storage server for as little as a nickel ($0.05) per Gigabyte, and many people have done exactly that.