Technologists focusing on Africa have long been reporting efforts to open source hardware, including several demos at MakerFaireAfrica. These projects were built with the idea that anyone can take a given gadget and do what they want with it, leading to reduced development costs and lots of innovation.
While Backblaze isn’t offering a physical device, they are offering detailed plans and specifications for their storage clusters. They’ve released the information to the public, encouraging anyone and everyone to modify and improve their ideas.
GigaOM reports:
The company, whose primary business is selling online storage to consumers for a small monthly fee today, announced that it’s giving away the design of its storage cluster for anyone to use, modify and build upon. The design allows anyone to build large storage clusters -– from a few terabytes to over a petabyte. What’s so disruptive about this? What if I told you that you could build a petabyte-sized cluster for around $120,000?
The future of long term storage is much more about smart software that leverages cheap hardware than exclusive hardware design. Backblaze knows this, and considers itself a software company, not a hardware company. They only built their own infrastructure because they had no other choice.
Although at first blush, it may look like Backblaze is encouraging their competitors, what they’re really doing is crowd sourcing hardware design. Not only will they benefit from community contributions, but their competitors, who currently charge hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for long term storage, will be forced to review their price structures as well.
Open source software has lead to great innovation, reducing the price of research and development, and putting a lot of great products on the market. As more and more online companies are forced into designing better hardware to support their massive networks (Facebook, Google, eventually Twitter), open source hardware as the power to do the same.
About the author: Theresa Carpenter Sondjo is an entrepreneur and web developer. She lives in Cotonou, where she and her partner run
People Online. Their mission is simple:
la mise en ligne du Bénin. Follow her on Twitter at
@theresac.
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OpenSource Hardware Goes Mainstream
While Backblaze isn’t offering a physical device, they are offering detailed plans and specifications for their storage clusters. They’ve released the information to the public, encouraging anyone and everyone to modify and improve their ideas.
GigaOM reports:
The future of long term storage is much more about smart software that leverages cheap hardware than exclusive hardware design. Backblaze knows this, and considers itself a software company, not a hardware company. They only built their own infrastructure because they had no other choice.
Although at first blush, it may look like Backblaze is encouraging their competitors, what they’re really doing is crowd sourcing hardware design. Not only will they benefit from community contributions, but their competitors, who currently charge hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for long term storage, will be forced to review their price structures as well.
Open source software has lead to great innovation, reducing the price of research and development, and putting a lot of great products on the market. As more and more online companies are forced into designing better hardware to support their massive networks (Facebook, Google, eventually Twitter), open source hardware as the power to do the same.