Speaker: Dan Willoughby, Developer Advocate
Overall, what did the use case comparison analysis reveal?
Dan Willoughby: Overall, I think if you're looking for an alternative to Amazon S3 to cut down on some costs, Backblaze and Storj are good choices for that. If you have gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, whatever bytes, you're gonna find a good home here. There's great data privacy in both choices. Neither have a minimum storage retention period and their S3 compatibility can really be a drop in replacement for you.
What stands out for Storj for scoring higher?
Dan Willoughby: So I think Storj really excels over Backblaze by having multi region included by default. Not that Backblaze doesn't duplicate your data and keep it durable in a single data center. But if you're looking for something that is not reliant on a single physical location, Storj is going to give that to you for a much lesser price than Backblaze will.
What are the reasons that put Storj at advantage in those use cases?
Dan Willoughby: I think Storj has an advantage in the multi region space because of the technology behind it. I've worked in distributed storage for over eight years and I've worked very closely with the chief architect at Storj. Quite frankly, I've seen the technology work for the use cases it was designed for. The thing I recall most, is we had a time when there's thousands of devices spread out across the United States. And in 2021, Texas had a blackout. The whole state lost its power and we had about 10% of our devices concentrated in that state. If your data was in a single data center in Texas, at that time, there was no way to retrieve your data. But Storj utilizes not just a single data center, but tens of thousands of devices spread out across the world. But in this case, the United States, there was no outage during that time. In fact, the (Storj) customers didn't even notice. And so really fundamentally, the technology is resilient and it is multi regional. I've seen it work.
What stands out for Backblaze in use cases where they scored higher?
Dan Willoughby: I think Backblaze excels greatly at having a predictable cost for pretty much any use case. They have three x free egress which will work great for backups. They have partnerships with Cloudflare and CDNs which will work great for, you know, multimedia use cases. They don't have any hidden costs, no minimum file sizes, no minimum storage fees. Every everything about, about that storage going to be predictable.
What are the reasons for Backblaze scoring higher in those use cases?
Dan Willoughby: I think Backblaze excels at predictable cost just because they really know their data, they regularly publish the lifetime and cost per hard drive on their blog. And they've really been able to optimize their cost to where they can offer something that is gonna be sustainable.
Which use cases benefit the most from using Storj over Backblaze?
Dan Willoughby: When I think of use cases, I would use Storj over Backblaze if I had a network of servers that had to pull down a snapshot to set up that server multiple times quite frequently and I needed it in multiple locations across the globe. Storj is absolutely gonna be the best a bang for my buck in that case.
