Cloud storage provider Backblaze has set up a Universal Data Migration service where it will cover data transfer and egress charges from other suppliers – with the caveat that you have to commit to move at least 10TB of data to its B2 Cloud Storage service and keep it there.
It’s a turnkey service and covers migration from other public clouds, storage attached to servers, NAS, SAN, tape libraries (LTO) and cloud drives, such as Apple’s iCloud. Backblaze says its service covers practically any source data location.
Backblaze’s Nilay Patel, VP of Sales and Partnerships, said: “Vendor lock-in is the number one challenge organizations face with existing storage solutions – Universal Data Migration is here to answer that challenge.” The vendor claims it does this “without unnecessary costs or complexities.”
Previous inward migration services offered by Backblaze, such as a Cloud to Cloud offering and its Fireball physical disk transfer, have been rolled up into the Universal Data Migration service. Fireball is akin to Amazon’s Snowball and is a storage array chassis with 96TB of capacity that is rented for $550 for 30 days. It’s shipped to a customer’s site where data is transferred across a 10GbitE link and then the device is shipped back to Backblaze for data upload to the customer’s B2 cloud account.
The Universal Data Migration service is now available with the 10TB minimum data transfer proviso along with a term commitment.
B2 storage costs $0.005/GB/month, compared to Amazon S3’s $0.021GB/month. The egress charge is $0.01/GB/month in contrast to Amazon’s $0.05/GB/month.
Backblaze itself is being challenged by IDrive Backup and its IDrive e2 S3 compatible cloud object storage, with the first 10GB free and pricing starting at $0.005/GB/month, the same as Backblaze B2. But there are no ingress/egress fees, and no charge for downloading data. IDrive e2 is US-based, where it has 8 edge locations.
Backblaze, Idrive and other tier 2 cloud storage providers exist under an Amazon S3 pricing umbrella. With a history of reducing prices, Amazon may well drop S3 prices again and so lower the appeal of these tier 2 CSP price-cutters.
A Backblaze blog is scheduled to talk about the universal Data Migration service.
