- Backblaze B2 Overdrive delivers up to 1 Tbps for AI without sky-high pricing headaches
- Backblaze includes egress, read, and write in one price
- Designed for AI and HPC, B2 Overdrive redefines performance at petabyte scale
American cloud storage company Backblaze has launched a new B2 Overdrive tier designed to support AI, HPC, and other high-bandwidth workloads.
With prices starting at $15 per terabyte and sustained network throughput of up to 1Tbps, the service positions itself as an affordable option for businesses handling massive data volumes.
B2 Overdrive includes storage, read (Get), write (Put), and egress at a single price point. This contrasts with the tiered and often unpredictable pricing models used by competitors.
Takes aim at AWS with a bold alternative
The service is available immediately to customers with multi-petabyte workloads. It complements Backblaze’s existing B2 cloud storage tier, priced at $6 per terabyte per month.
That basic tier includes features like object lock immutability and a 99.9% uptime SLA and is often listed among the best cloud backup services for small businesses or individual users.
B2 Overdrive, by contrast, is aimed at organizations working at scale. According to Backblaze, it delivers 100% performance at roughly one-fifth the cost of AWS S3 and includes free egress up to three times the average monthly storage amount, with additional egress priced at $0.01 per GB.
The tier is built on disk-based infrastructure and connects directly to customer environments via secure private networking. It enables data to move freely to GPU clouds or high-performance compute clusters without incurring egress charges.
Backblaze says B2 Overdrive is intended for use cases such as AI and machine learning training, inference, large-scale analytics, media processing, and research computing.
Unlike most public cloud storage providers that emphasize latency, Backblaze focuses on sustained throughput.
Among major US providers – AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Oracle – Backblaze is the only one to publish throughput numbers directly.
Though not a general-purpose solution, B2 Overdrive may appeal to businesses seeking performance and pricing transparency.
While not commonly used for photo management, its affordability and expandable storage could make it a contender for archival photo storage as well.
“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 among legacy providers,” said Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman.
Via Blocksandfiles
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