Building out the infrastructure for Snapchat was an act of faith, according to co-founder and CTO Bobby Murphy. The company, which apparently was so easy to build that a Facebook engineer took two weeks to mock up a similar service, operates on Google’s App Engine. That’s a notable choice in a field of startups that have chosen the more popular cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services.

But Murphy likes App Engine, he said in a recent phone conversation, and he believes Google is scaling out and willing to invest in this platform. He prefers some of the features for Snapchat’s purposes and believes when it comes to scale, Google could offer more than AWS for his application. The details behind his consideration will be the focus of Murphy’s chat onstage at the Structure conference occurring June 19 and 20 in San Francisco.

So if you caught Murphy’s appearance on The Colbert Report and want to learn more about the infrastructure and the economics of scaling out an app with 150 million photos uploaded daily, then register for Structure.

Murphy’s is one of several developer-focused talks we’ll have this year as we try to draw more attention to the fact that building out applications on massive cloud infrastructures requires a change in thinking. It’s not just about learning how to build an application in the cloud, but also mandates a strategic approach regarding how to architect your applications in a way that takes into consideration to the economics of hosting them on someone else’s infrastructure.

We’ll have conversations with Cory von Wallenstein, the CTO of Dyn, focusing on how to build a process for evaluating and changing your architecture without disrupting your existing users. There will be another with Gleb Budman, the co-founder and CEO of Backblaze, and Adrian Cockcroft, cloud architect at Netflix, about building hugely scalable infrastructures in the face of serious logistical obstacles.

Structure 2012: Aditya Agarwal – VP Engineering, Dropbox, Adrian Cockcroft – Director, Architecture, Netflix, Alexei Rodriguez – VP of Operations, Evernote Corporation, Jonathan Heiliger – General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners

Six-and-a-half years ago when we started thinking about our first Structure event, it was a hard sell. People didn’t understand what cloud computing was, nor why a small technology blog would want to build a conference around web infrastructure. Our advertising team got questions like, “You want to hold a show on servers? Why?”

But we knew that just as the printing press changed the distribution of knowledge, the emergence of cloud computing, web-based services and even mobility would change how we disseminate information all over again. And in the process it would create new economic opportunities and change the way the world works.

However, that first Structure conference was about building that vision, not about the servers. If we were around back in the 1400s, we’d hold a gathering at a local tavern not about paper, but about the coming revolutions promised by that technology and and maybe even looking forward to the creation of the novel and widespread literacy.

So make sure you are in the audience at this event so you can predict how the future of the web is changing; not just how infrastructure has evolved, but how we’ll build businesses on top of it. Register here and we’ll see you in June.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

And just who has built storage systems using the Backblaze specifications? Netflix is probably the most-famous adopter — it uses storage pods as part of its content-delivery network infrastructure — but others include Vanderbilt University, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Popular online photography service Shutterfly stores petabytes worth of users’ old photos on BackBlaze’s storage pod architecture.

Gleb Budman

Their uses are as diverse as their organizations are. There’s Netflix’s CDN and Shutterstock’s consumer cloud storage, while many are using pods as giant NAS devices that everyone can access. “Its more data than they ever thought could be possible for their company,” Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman told me. ”They just RAID them and they go.”

Oh, and he added, “I know of at least one individual person who built one of these for himself for his house.” It stores his media collection and helped his marriage. It appears some wives don’t appreciate sprawling hard-drive farms sucking up energy and taking up all the garage space.

Disrupting the storage industry 1 terabyte at a time

That the Backblaze design has caught on so broadly shouldn’t be surprising, Budman said. For years, storage vendors have been protecting their margins by loading even customers’ “write once, read very rarely” systems with enterprise-class features that often weren’t necessary. If you wanted an enterprise-class storage system, “you bought a NetApp,” he joked, and if you wanted just to house some non-critical data, “you bought a NetApp.”

So, in the world of high-volume storage, we’ve come to a place similar to the PC market decades ago when it was cheaper to just buy the parts and build your own than it was to buy a pre-assembled computer. “Dell basically killed the homegrown computer market because they really, really focused on optimizing costs,” Budman explained. “No one did that for storage equipment. [Storage vendors] said, ‘Hey, we’re selling a million-dollar design, why would we change that?’”

Backblaze’s data center full of storage pods.

Thanks in part to Backblaze, though, this system is changing. Ceaseless demands for parts led Protocase, the Canadian sheet-metal fabricator that makes Backblaze’s pod enclosures, to create a whole business — the aptly named 45 Drives — around selling pod parts or even wholly pre-assembled pods (second-generation ones start at $5,395 without the 45 hard drives they hold). Where it used to struggle to get business outside of Canada, Budman said, Protocase has sold Backblaze units to places as far away as China, Russia and Brazil.

Global electronics fabricator and supply-chain specialist Sanmina sells a modified version of the Backblaze pod design, as do a handful of value-added resellers and components companies around the world.

Interestingly, one place you won’t see Backblaze designs is in the other famous open source hardware effort — the Facebook-led Open Compute Project. Budman said he’s had conversations with the organization and some of its leaders and there has been interest in getting Backblaze involved, but that “for the most part what they want is help making their Open Compute system work.” He said he’d love to do it in theory, but there’s only so much time for a small company like Backblaze to spend on missions aside from improving its business.

Version 3.0: Now with 180TB and a lower cost

As for those third-generation storage pod designs, Open Compute Project, 45 Drives, guys with huge digital media collections and anyone else interested in building their own gear should have a lot to be excited about. Total capacity has been boosted to 180TB thanks to the prevalence of 4TB hard drives, and Backblaze has certified a few more types of hard drives because of the harsh lessons it learned about reliance on a single model during the hard drive shortage in 2010. The company has also replaced a bunch of the components it uses, everything from motherboards to memory to SATA cables.

Budman explains all the changes and the rationale behind them in a blog post published Wednesday morning, but the general theme is improved reliability and ease of management at a lower cost. All told, the new designs cost $1,942.59 — $37.41 less than the second-generation ones. Because of that recent shortage, though, hard drives still cost a little more than they did a few years ago.

Whatever comes of its efforts to be transparent about storage system design, Budman hopes it at least has a lasting effect on the availability of affordable storage. Organizations, he said, should “no longer have to make the decision between an expensive piece of equipment and not storing data.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Strategies for the Future of Digital Content Storage
• The role of converged infrastructure in the data center

Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year.

Gleb Budman

“Literally overnight,” Budman told me, “… all the places we would go to get drives said, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any drives.’”

People assumed it was just a blip, and while Backblaze watched cautiously in the beginning, it figured it had enough hard drives stockpiled to make it through. However, when months passed and the situation only got worse — some suppliers were offering 3TB drives that used to cost $129 for around $600 — Backblaze knew it had to act. If the company didn’t want to change its pricing model or throttle users’ capacity, something had to give.

“That’s an absolute, just last, last, last resort,” Budman said.

It’s good to be a startup

Sometimes, it’s nice to have the flexibility of a startup. Rather than jack up prices or lower its revenue guidance, Backblaze just kept going about its business. Well, publicly, at least — behind the scenes, the company was working like crazy farming hard drives from the only places it could still get them at a reasonable price.

Its solution was to eschew the internal hard drives generally put inside servers and buy up the external hard drives sold for consumer backup at stores such as Best Buy, Fry’s and Costco. They fit nicely into Backblaze’s storage pods once removed from their protective enclosures, and the best part was that the 3TB drives Backblaze requires only cost around $169 apiece even during the height of the shortage. The company that builds Backblaze’s pods was even willing to “shuck” the drives for a couple bucks apiece, saving Backblaze a lot of manual labor in order to make its newfound source of capacity production-ready.

And then it happened: The shopping carts Backblaze was initially filling up gave way to two-hard-drives-per-person limits, which meant the company had to scramble. Keep in mind, adding 50TB a day means getting your hands on at least 14 new drives per day. In the end, Budman tells me, its ingenuity meant Backblaze was able to procure about 1,800 3TB hard drives — or about 5.5 petabytes worth of capacity — in the three months it was actively farming them.

Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army.

A chart of local stores and employee purchases

What doesn’t kill you …

Budman said the shortage should have taught everyone a valuable lesson that hard drives aren’t commodities that will always be available at commodity prices, so you need to take advantage of low prices when you can. In fact, Budman said, one of the reasons he resisted venture capital initially was to help stave off the mindset that money from VCs is easy and companies don’t need to spend wisely.

It appears the strategy worked. Backblaze closed a $5 million funding round in July 2012, but it hasn’t abandoned its hard-drive-farming ways. Internal hard drive prices have stabilized, but even today if prices on external drives drop to less than those of internal drives (after factoring in the voided warranty and the cost to shuck them), Backblaze will snatch them up.

But it’s nothing like the glory days in late 2011 and early 2012. Here’s a video of Backblaze employee friend and NextPunch founder Vladik Rikhter telling his story of playing cat-and-mouse with Costco’s e-commerce system and ending up with “a Kia’s worth of drives” in his entryway.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• Strategies for the Future of Digital Content Storage
• The role of converged infrastructure in the data center

Not so for Backblaze. The San Mateo, CA., company, which offers a cloud-based data backup service, is in the market for a new data center and isn’t shy about discussing it. In fact, it’s posting a link to its RFP on its blog.

“Many companies have this knee-jerk reaction about disclosure. They worry that things they say will somehow be used against them,” Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman told me in a recent interview. Backblaze has been open about some other things, too. It shared information about how it builds the storage pods that run the company’s cloud-based data backup service.  It also talked about why it didn’t initially seek venture funding and also about why it changed its mind.

“There may be some things that should be proprietary for a very specific reason, but if we don’t see a reason not to share, we share,” Budman said

The RFP lays out exactly what the company is looking for in terms of initial physical, power, and network requirements and information on what it thinks it will need for expansion over the course of the next 3 to 5 years. For example, it expects to add 1 to 1.5 cabinets per month over a 36 month period. That’s because Backblaze is nothing if not growing.The company manages 40 petabytes of data now and adds about 2 petabytes per month.

Interestingly, while Apple, Google, Amazon remain incredibly tight-lipped about their data center build outs — our own Katie Fehrenbacher can attest to that after her data center road trip  – there’s also a countervailing trend pushing for more openness about data center gear. The biggest example is the Facebook initiated Open Compute Project, which pushes for standards-based, energy-efficient data center hardware. These companies may not want you in their data center, but they’re now willing to share some best practices about the hardware you should run in yours.

Backblaze’s 8-page RFP asks prospective data center providers what they offer in terms of physical security, and SAS 70 compliance and other regulatory certifications.

It’s an interesting document that could act as a template for other companies that are now in the market for a new data center.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman

Backblaze, the 5-year-old company that backs up everything on your PC for $5 per month, has snagged $5 million in funding from TMT Investments, an investment house out of the U.K.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Backblaze will use the money to staff up and expand its marketing efforts — and attack the masses of people who still do not back up their computers, CEO Gleb Budman said in a recent interview. Backblaze competes most directly with Mozy, now owned by VMware (via EMC) and Carbonite.

Taking outside money was not done lightly. The company was bootstrapped for its first year and a half and then it took in $390,000 in seed money. The company has been profitable since the early days, Budman said.

“When we started we explicitly didn’t want venture funding for a few reasons — we worried that going through the process would get distracting and we worried about handing off too much control and equity and mostly we worried about the impact on our culture,” Budman said

Now, with five years under its belt and 16 employees, he feels the culture is set and the time is right to fund more growth. The company will remain stingy — it will take half of the funding now and the other half in a year.

“We run our own cloud, we do our own support. For the first few years we killed ourselves. We were lean and crazy and there was definitely a risk of burn out. Now we’re at good place. We all work hard, but at a marathon pace, not a sprint,” he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream
• Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?
• A near-term outlook for big data

You’d think at this stage of the game, most computer users would be savvy enough to have a data backup plan in place. But you’d be wrong.

That’s why every storage, disaster recovery and backup vendor on the planet has glommed onto World Backup Day, which is Saturday, March 31.

The day itself was born out of a casual thought posted to Reddit last year by Adam Jeffreson. Cynics assumed Jeffreson worked for a storage or backup company, but that is not the case, he said via email.

“Basically I knew someone who broke their laptop, and they lost loads of important documents because they had never backed it up. When I asked them about why they didn’t, they said they had never thought to. After thinking about this I realized it was actually pretty common, and that most people needed to be reminded to do it. Hence, backup day.”

Reddit commenters jumped on the topic. One group set the actual date — March 31 seemed a good idea.  Another group started the website, which implores users: “Don’t be an April Fool. Back up your files. Check your restores.”

Last year was the first World Backup Day but it seems a lot of people still don’t get it. Sixty percent of 640 small and medium businesses surveyed recently don’t even budget for backup. And just 15 percent have any kind of automated online backup plan in place, according to the research which was conducted by Compass Partners for Mozy, an online backup vendor.

Many companies leave whatever backing up is done to the discretion of individual employees. That means a lot of files are stuck on USB drives or emailed to personal Hotmail and Gmail accounts. Sound familiar?

Jeffreson sounds happy that people took his idea and ran with it: “Posting an idea on the Internet is giving it away. I’m happy it went somewhere.”

It sure did: Vendors from Backblaze to Trend Micro to Spideroak were all aboard with their World Backup Day pitches this week. As self-serving as all that is for them, just ask yourself: When was the last time you backed up your files?  There’s no time like the present — or  maybe March 31.

Some rights reserved by Phil Aaronson

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• The role of converged infrastructure in the data center
• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market

Cheap-and-easy cloud storage has become a heated battleground both in the consumer and business computing realm, with companies like Carbonite, Dropbox and Box.net duking it out for both business and home users.

With Backblaze 2.0, users can now blow by the previous 9GB file size limit and store files of unlimited size. In fact, they can now store whole VMware images or other VMs for the same cost, said Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze.

For most consumers, the old 9GB file size limit was probably not a big deal since most files don’t hit that limit — although people wanting to save Blu-rays would have had an issue. The new version also eliminates restrictions on file types. The older version was coded not to accept .iso or some other system files.

Another new perk is automatic throttling that checks the user’s available bandwidth. “We never want to use 100 percent of the bandwidth available since we want to leave something for other applications, but we check the bandwidth and adjust based on what’s available,” Budman said.

As Derrick Harris reported in July, Backblaze can offer such cheap services because it built its own infrastructure – its own white box servers, its own storage software layer — because it found alternative infrastructure, including Amazon’s S3 storage service, was too expensive.

Image courtesy of Backblaze.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Ubuntu’s Move to OpenStack Means for Eucalyptus
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

[OpenStack] looks not only like an open-source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space.

As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a long way in just a year. But it’s only one of a growing number of open-source projects challenging expensive and proprietary incumbents across the IT industry. From storage to networking, open-source projects are emerging that offer viable alternatives. Take, for example, Backblaze, which just this week freely shared detailed specifications for a storage device capable of holding 135 terabytes of data. Though the majority of customers continue to prefer products backed by the expertise and support of commercial organizations, existing suppliers from Citrix and Cisco to Dell and IBM are proving quick to incorporate open-source advances into their commercial products, lowering their own costs in the process.

For more on the ways in which commercial IT providers are adapting to open source, see my latest weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Despite growth in open source, commercial solutions still dominate
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum