Brian Beach Principal Engineer, Backblaze

Backblaze, Inc., an online backup provider, has added TiVo veteran Brian Beach to its team as distinguished engineer.

At TiVo, he was hired in the prestigious role of principal engineer, a title given to fewer than 5% of engineers at the company, and later served as VP of R&D. He spent nearly 15 years at TiVo, architecting the product when the company had just 15 employees and was not yet commercially available and leading teams in innovation.

At Backblaze, which recently celebrated the five-year anniversary of its 1.0 offering, he will work directly with the company’s five founding executives and engineering team.

“Brian has been a technical innovator and product leader throughout his career,” says Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze. “I’m excited to have this powerhouse talent join our team to further advance the Backblaze cloud platform as we scale to hundreds of petabytes and exabytes.”

“I’ve known the founding team of Backblaze for many years and have always admired their approach to the business. They bootstrapped a very resource-intensive business from nothing, carefully growing it into a viable business, ensuring that they were not required to answer to short-term profitability at the cost of long-term planning,” says Beach. “Backblaze has gone to great lengths to maintain the integrity of their service as they’ve scaled, and I have tremendous respect for the technology they developed, so much so that I was their first paying customer and remain one today. I look forward to being part of the team that will shape the strategy around this invaluable service.”

In the role of distinguished engineer, Beach will be part of the team leading innovation on the Storage Pods, which were developed and open sourced by Backblaze, and on the company’s cloud storage system that has been a critical component in delivering unlimited online backup for a $5/month. Storage Pod design is cost-efficient, inspiring creative lower-cost storage at such companies as Netflix, speculated to be in use by the NSA and currently storing over 70PB of Backblaze customer data.

Having been a critical part of the team that scaled the TiVo set-top box and service from non-existence to a public company with millions of customers and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, Beach will be an asset as Backblaze scales to support its growing customer base. He and the engineering team will work to increase automation while decreasing storage costs so Backblaze can continue to uphold its promise to provide unlimited backup for just $5/ month to all its customers.

Below are five attributes of Backblaze:

1. Backblaze is an all-inclusive online backup service. Unlike traditional online backup services, it does not require users to select which files and folders will be included in the backup. This ‘opt out,’ rather than ‘opt in,’ approach means that Backblaze excludes OSs files, applications and temporary files and sends all other data to the cloud. This ensures that photos, videos, music, and more-stored inside or outside of a standard data directory or folder-are backed up automatically and safely.
2. It is an online backup service where the cost is not variable to the amount of data. The cost for everyone to backup an unlimited amount of data is just $5/ month. The company is able to do this because they have designed and built a cost-efficient cloud storage system, resulting in a cost of storage of just $0.003/GB/month-18 times lower cost than Amazon S3 and 14 times lower cost than Google Cloud Storage.
3. Backblaze has a big cloud storage systems. Storing over 70PB of customer data, It is one-quarter the size of Facebook.
4. Backblaze bootstrapped to millions in revenue. Embodying the true Silicon Valley entrepreneurial spirit, the serial entrepreneur team bootstrapped Backblaze, a massively capital-intensive company, to profitability and millions in revenue before taking $5 million in VC funding on their own terms.
5. It has restored over 4 billion files. From family photos to critical business contracts, it has recovered 4 billion files for its customers and expects to cross 5 billion restored files early next year. In December 2012, Backblaze restored 5.7 million files per day on average with one individual user restore of 4.9TB.