Cloud storage provider Backblaze is now selling B2 Overdrive cloud storage with accelerated data access speed for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.
Backblaze offers its existing S3-compliant B2 service costing $6/TB/month on a pay-as-you-go basis. Now it has added a high-performance variant with up to 1 Tbps sustained throughput and starting at $15/TB/month.
CEO Gleb Budman stated: “With B2 Overdrive, we’re challenging the industry’s assumption that organizations must pay colossal prices for colossal performance. We’ve engineered a solution that delivers the sustained high-throughput organizations need, without the egress fees and complex pricing tiers that are pervasive of legacy providers.”
The basic B2 cloud storage service has an object lock immutability feature and a 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement. Backblaze says it provides 100 percent performance at a fifth of the AWS S3 cost and free egress for up to three times the user’s average monthly storage amount. Egress exceeding this amount is priced at $0.01/GB. Volume and term discounts are available with the B2 Reserve service.
B2 Overdrive is more expensive, starting at $15/TB, but is claimed to be “a fraction of competitors’ costs,” and Backblaze is right about this point:
It is based on disk drive storage, and connects through secure private networking to a customer’s infrastructure. Data at exabyte scale can be moved freely to any GPU cloud or HPC cluster with unlimited free egress. The service is designed for throughput-intensive use cases such as AI/ML training and inference, HPC, large-scale data analytics, media processing pipelines, research compute, and content delivery.
A comparison with the four main US public cloud high-performance object storage services – see the table above – shows that only Backblaze provides network throughput speed. AWS, Azure, GCP (Google), and OCI (Oracle) provide indicative latency numbers instead. No direct performance comparison is possible.
Their pricing includes storage, read (Get), write (Put), and egress fees, which don’t apply to B2 Overdrive. A chart showing these prices demonstrates Backblaze’s low cost:
Backblaze B2 Overdrive is generally available today for customers with multi-petabyte workloads.
