Backblaze, a data storage provider, has amassed so much customer data over the years that it now has over 1 exabyte (EB) of storage.
With a byte being a single unit of digital storage, 1EB is the equivalent of 1 billlion gigabytes (GB) or 1 million of your lofty 1TB hard drives. As BackBlaze puts it, if 1GB is like the size of Earth, 1EB is like the size of the sun. If you were to start a video call, it would have to last 237,823 years to fill up 1EB.
Today, Backblaze is one of the very few companies that has a storage capacity of 1EB. According to ZDNet, the first 1EB storage system came via Oracle in 2011. It's more complicated than you may think. Backblaze invested a lot of time and money to get to 1EB. For starters, you need to have the appropriate infrastructure to accommodate all the hard drives. Furthermore, hard drives often fail, and the company has to replace them.
Backblaze started as a five-person crew back in 2007 in one of the co-founder's apartments. The company has now grown to 145 employees with customers in over 160 different countries.
Backblaze's 1EB arsenal is spread across 125,000 hard drives with capacities spanning from 4TB to 14TB. The firm utilizes models from all the big-name brands, such as Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST).
1EB is cool and all, but Backblaze has already set its eyes on reaching 1 zettabyte (ZB) or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, depending on how you want to look at it.
