Post Syndicated from Jeremy Milk original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/media-workflowing-in-the-big-apple-nab-show-new-york-preview/

You can send media in milliseconds to just about every corner of the earth with an origin store at your favorite cloud storage company and a snappy CDN. Sadly, delivering people across continents is a touch more complicated and time intensive. Nevertheless, the Backblaze team is saddling up planes, trains, and automobiles to bring the latest on media workflows to the attendees of NAB Show New York. Whether you’re there in person or virtually, we’ll be discussing and demo-ing all the newest Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage solutions that will ensure your data can travel with ease—no mass transit needed—everywhere you need it to be.

NAB Show New York Preview: What’s New for Backblaze B2 Media Workflow Solutions

Our booth will have all the goodness you’d expect of us: partners, friendly faces, spots to take a load off and talk about making your data work harder, and, of course, some next-level SWAG. Let’s get into what you can expect.

New Pricing Models and Migration Tools

Our team is on hand to talk you through two new offerings that have been generating a lot of excitement among teams across media organizations:

• Backblaze B2 Reserve: You can now purchase the Backblaze service many know and love in capacity-based bundles through resellers. If your team seeks 100% budget predictability with transaction fees and premium support included, you should check out this new offering. Check it out here.
• Universal Data Migration: Recently an International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) 2022 Best of Show nominee, the service makes it easy and FREE to move data into Backblaze from legacy cloud, on-premises, and LTO/tape origins. If your current data storage is holding your team or your budget back, we’ll pay to free your media and move it to B2 Cloud Storage. Learn more here.

Six Flavors of Media Workflow Deep Dives

We’ve gathered materials and expertise to discuss or demo our six most asked about workflow improvements. We’re happy to talk about many other tools and improvements, but here are the six areas we expect to talk about the most:

1. Moving more (or all) media production to the cloud. Ensuring everyone—clients, collaborators, employers, everyone—has easy real-time access to content is essential for the inevitable geographical distribution of modern media workflows.
2. Reducing costs. Cloud workflows don’t need to come with costly gotchas, minimum retention penalties, and/or high costs when you actually want to use your content. We’ll explain how the right partners will unlock your budget so you can save on cloud services and spend more on creative projects.
3. Streamlining delivery. Pairing cloud storage with the right CDN is essential to making sure your media is consumable and monetizable at the edge. From streaming services to ecommerce outlets to legacy media outlets, we’ve helped every type of media organization do more with their content.
4. Freeing storage. Empty your expensive on-prem storage and stop adding HDs and tapes to the pile by moving finished projects to always-hot cloud storage. This doesn’t just free up space and money: Instantly accessible archives means you can work with and monetize older content with little friction in your creative process.
5. Safeguarding content. All those tapes or HDs on a shelf, in the closet, or wherever you keep them are hard to manage and harder to access and use. Parking everything safely and securely in the cloud means all that data is centrally accessible, protected, and available for more use.
6. Backing up (better!). Yes, we’ve got roots in backup going back >15 years—so when it comes to making sure your precious media is protected with easy access for speedy recovery, we’ve got a few thoughts (and solutions).

Partners, Partners, and More Partners…

“The more we get together, the happier we’ll be,” might as well be the theme lyric of cloud workflows. Combining best of breed platforms unlocks better value and functionality, and offers you the ability to build your cloud stack exactly how you need it for your business. We’ve got a large ecosystem of Alliance Partners, and we’re happy to get deep into your needs and demo how you can combine Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with one or more partners including iconik, LucidLink, Synology (who will also be right next to us in the Javits Center!), and Fastly to best achieve your objectives.

Hoping We Can Help You Soon

Whether it’s in person at NAB Show New York or virtually when it works for you, we’d love to walk you through any of the solutions we can serve for hardworking media teams. If you will be in Manhattan, schedule a meeting to ensure you’ll get the right expert on our team, then stick around for the swag and good times. This invitation applies to you too, Channel Partners and Resellers—whether you have active projects or just want to learn more, let’s meet up and chat about ways to deliver more value together. If you’re not making the trip, not a problem. Just contact us here so we can arrange to help virtually.

The post Media Workflowing in The Big Apple: NAB Show New York Preview appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Amrit Singh original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/announcing-tech-day-22-live-tech-talks-demos-and-dialogues/

For those looking to build and grow blazing applications and do more with their data, we’d like to welcome you to this year’s Tech Day ‘22. We have a great community that works with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, including our internal team, IT professionals, developers, tech decision makers, cloud partners and more—and we felt it was high time to bring you all together again to share ideas, discuss upcoming changes, win some swag, and network.

Join our Technical Evangelists in live interactive sessions, demos, and tech talks that help you unlock your cloud potential and put B2 Cloud Storage to work for you. Whatever your role in the tech world—or if you’re simply curious about leveraging the Backblaze B2 platform—we invite you to join us!

Here’s What to Expect at Tech Day ’22

Tech Day ’22 is happening October 31, 10 a.m. PT. Can’t make it? Sign up anyway and we’ll share the event recording straight to your inbox.

IaaS Unboxed

A live chat about leveraging the independent cloud ecosystem for storage, compute, delivery, and backup, along with a customer showcase.

Sneak Peek

An early look at the Q3 2022 Drive Stats data with Andy Klein as he walks through the latest learnings to inform your thinking and purchase decisions.

Hands-On Demos

Pat Patterson (Chief Technical Evangelist), and Greg Hamer (Senior Developer Evangelist) team up to facilitate an action-packed set of interactive sessions aimed at helping you do more in the cloud. If you don’t have an account already, you’ll definitely want to create a free Backblaze B2 account so you can follow along. All you need to do is sign up with your email and create a password—it’s really that easy.

• Scaling a Social App with Appwrite: Appwrite is a self-hosted backend-as-a-service platform that provides developers with all the core APIs required to build any application. Appwrite’s storage abstraction allows developers to store project files in a range of devices, including Backblaze B2. In this session, you’ll learn how to get started with Appwrite, and quickly build a social app that stores user-generated content in a Backblaze B2 Bucket.
• Go Serverless with Fastly Compute@Edge: Fastly has long been a Backblaze partner—mutual customers are able to serve assets stored in Backblaze B2 Buckets via Fastly’s global content delivery network with zero download charges from Backblaze B2. Compute@Edge leverages Fastly’s network to enable developers to create high-scale, globally-distributed applications, and execute code at the edge. Discover how to build a simple serverless application in JavaScript and deploy it globally with a single command.
• Provisioning Resources with the Backblaze B2 Terraform Provider: Hashicorp Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code software tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. Learn how our Terraform Provider unlocks Backblaze B2’s capabilities for DevOps engineers, allowing you to create, list, and delete Buckets and application keys, as well as upload and download objects.
• Storing and Querying Analytical Data with Trino: Trino is a SQL-compliant query engine that supports a wide range of business intelligence and analytical tools, allowing you to write queries against structured and semi-structured data in a variety of formats and storage locations. We’ll share how we optimized Backblaze’s Drive Stats data for queries and used Trino to gain new insights into nine years of real-world data.

And So Much More

Join the live Q&A and our user community of tech leaders, IT pros, and developers like you. Register for free to grab your spot (and swag) and we’ll see you on October 31.

The post Announcing Tech Day ‘22: Live Tech Talks, Demos, and Dialogues appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Jeremy Milk original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-lto-to-the-cloud/

Using Linear-Tape Open (LTO) backups has been a solid strategy used by companies with robust media libraries for a long time. The downside of LTO is, of course, the sheer volume of space dedicated to storing these vast piles of tapes, the laboriously slow process of accessing the data on them, and the fact that they can only be accessed where they’re stored—so if there’s a natural disaster or a break-in, your data is at risk. Anyone staring down a shelf sagging under the weight of years of data and picturing the extra editing bay you could put in its place is probably thinking about making a move to the cloud.

Once you have decided to migrate your data, you need a plan to move forward. The following article will give you the basic tools for migrating from LTO to the Cloud. Before we dive in, let’s talk about some of the vast benefits of migration (other than reclaiming your storage closet).

Benefits of Moving Your Data to the Cloud

Some pretty convincing benefits come with moving away from tape to cloud storage. First is the cost. Some people might think cloud storage is more expensive, but a closer crunching of the numbers proves that it actually saves you money. We’ve created a handy LTO to Cloud Storage calculator to figure out individual savings. If you’re concerned about migration/egress fees, utilizing a Universal Data Migration (UDM) service can help eliminate those costs. In addition, tape players and tapes need maintenance and eventually replacement, adding another budgetary benefit to migrating things to the cloud.

Another benefit is easy access to files. Rather than being hidden among the files on one particular tape in one particular area of one particular stack, files can be accessed, viewed and downloaded immediately from cloud storage. With many industries moving towards remote work, being able to access your files or archives from afar is increasingly important.

Cloud storage is also more secure than people think. Many cloud services providers offer products like Object Lock to keep files immutable (a huge concern for compliance-heavy industries like healthcare). In the case of a ransomware attack, off-site cloud storage data means that you’re safe from the threat and restore your data quickly and get back to normal.

With all those benefits, the only concern left is that anytime you make a change to your data infrastructure, you want it to be as easy as possible. Let’s walk through a typical LTO to cloud migration so you can explore how it aligns with your process.

Six Steps to Migrate from LTO to Cloud Storage (or a Hybrid Solution)

Migrating can feel like a daunting task, but breaking it down into bite-sized pieces will help a lot. Fears about data loss and team bandwidth will obviously play a factor in migration. Don’t worry: it’s much easier than you think, and the long-term benefits will outweigh the short-term migration considerations.

Follow the steps below for a seamless, successful migration.

Step One: Take Stock of Your Content

The first concern of migration: how do you ensure that all the data you need to move is there and will be there at the end of the process? Well, now is the time to take a complete content inventory. It may have been a long time since you reviewed what is stored on tape, where it is located, and if you even want to continue keeping it. You may have old, archived data that is safe to get rid of now.

In addition to an inventory, if there was ever a good time to clean out unused/unneeded files, now is the time. It’s also a good opportunity to eliminate any duplicates—that will ensure that you’re not wasting money on storage costs or time and confusion ensuring that you’re looking at the correct file.

Instead of looking at it as a pain point or chore you dread, consider a content inventory as an opportunity to clean out old files, eliminate waste, and streamline your data to only what you need and want to keep. It’s like inviting Marie Kondo over to ask whether your files spark joy. It’s also a great time to reorganize your files. Consider renaming files and folders to make it easy to retrieve items once they are stored in the cloud. Bonus: this walk down memory lane might spark ideas for refreshing or repurposing old content.

Step Two: Update Your Tracking System

LTO backups involve rotating many tapes on different days and sorting them by type of data (what is stored on them) and on varying schedules. You will need to update your tracking system for your tape strategy to how you will use tape going forward. You can also formulate a plan for tracking your cloud-based backup data as well. It may be as simple as cataloging where files are located, what type of data needs to be on tape, how often they will be backed up, when files move from hot storage to archive, and so on.

Step Three: Plan for Your Migration

To ensure a successful migration, spend some time planning exactly how to execute the move. Here are a few common questions that come up:

• Are you moving the data in phases or all at once? If you’re moving data in phases, what needs to move first and why?
• How many personnel are you dedicating to work on the project? And what kind of support will they need from other stakeholders?
• Are you planning on keeping any information on tape long-term (a hybrid solution)? Some companies like healthcare, government contractors, education, and accounting firms are subject to data retention and storage laws, so that might come into play here.

Document how you want to proceed so that everyone involved has their needs met. Planning ahead will help you feel like you have a good handle on things before jumping into the deep water.

Also, it’s important to evaluate your internet bandwidth and speed to ensure you don’t experience any bottlenecks. If you have to upgrade your internet package, do so before you begin migrating. Migrate using an Ethernet-connected device with a stable connection. Wi-Fi is much slower and less reliable. If you’re moving a significant amount of data at once, you may even want to consider something like Backblaze’s Fireball service.

Another thing to consider is that the cloud will let you categorize and interact with your data in different ways. For example, with Backblaze B2 storage, you can create up to 1,000 buckets per account to categorize your data your way and keep files separate—how is that different from how you’re currently interacting with your data? Who will have access to your cloud storage backups? Do you need to employ Extended Version History or Object Lock to make sure that your backups aren’t unintentionally changed?

Step Four: Back Up Both Ways

For a short while, you might want to back up to both LTO and the cloud, keeping them in tandem while you ensure a smooth and successful data migration. Once all your critical files have been moved over, you can stop backing up to tape. (Unless your organization has decided that a hybrid model works for you.)

Again, keep in mind that you may want to keep some files archived on tape and stored away. It depends on your industry, compliance issues, and data infrastructure preferences.

Step Five: Execute the Migration

Now it’s time to take the plunge. You can use the Universal Data Migration (UDM) service to move your data over and absorb any egress fees. You can move your data in days, not weeks, streamlining this chore.

Step Six: Review and Compare Cloud and LTO Backups

Before you stop running your backup systems concurrently (LTO and cloud), be sure to test your backups thoroughly. When you run those tests, you don’t want to just look at the files; you actually want to restore several files, just as if you’d had them deleted from your system. Run tests restoring individual files and whole folders to ensure data integrity and master the restore process. Make sure to run those tests for your servers and with files in both Mac and PC environments.

Depending on which backup solution you use, restore procedures may differ. Sometimes, working with a company that provides end-to-end backup and restore services may work well for your organization. For example, many people prefer to back up with Veeam and integrate it with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

At the end of the day, cloud storage offers many benefits like secure storage, easy access, and cost-efficient backups. Once you get past the hurdle of migration, you’ll be glad you made the switch.

The post How to Migrate From LTO to the Cloud appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Pat Patterson original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/lights-camera-custom-action-part-two-inside-integrating-frame-io-backblaze-b2/

In Lights, Camera, Custom Action: Integrating Frame.io with Backblaze B2, we described a custom action for the Frame.io cloud-based media asset management (MAM) platform. The custom action allows users to export assets and projects from Frame.io to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and import them back from Backblaze B2 to Frame.io.

The custom action is implemented as a Node.js web service using the Express framework, and its complete source code is open-sourced under the MIT license in the backblaze-frameio GitHub repository. In this blog entry we’ll focus on how we secured the solution, how we made it deployable anywhere (including to options with free bandwidth), and how you can customize it to your needs.

What is a Custom Action?

Custom Actions are a way for you to build integrations directly into Frame.io as programmable UI components. This enables event-based workflows that can be triggered by users within the app, but controlled by an external system. You create custom actions in the Frame.io Developer Site, specifying a name (shown as a menu item in the Frame.io UI), URL, and Frame.io team, among other properties. The user sees the custom action in the contextual/right-click dropdown menu available on each asset:

When the user selects the custom action menu item, Frame.io sends an HTTP POST request to the custom action URL, containing the asset’s id. For example:

{
  "action_id": "2444cccc-7777-4a11-8ddd-05aa45bb956b",
  "interaction_id": "aafa3qq2-c1f6-4111-92b2-4aa64277c33f",
  "resource": {
    "type": "asset",
    "id": "9q2e5555-3a22-44dd-888a-abbb72c3333b"
  },
  "type": "my.action"
}

The custom action can optionally respond with a JSON description of a form to gather more information from the user. For example, our custom action needs to know whether the user wishes to export or import data, so its response is:

{
  "title": "Import or Export?",
  "description": "Import from Backblaze B2, or export to Backblaze B2?",
  "fields": [
    {
      "type": "select",
      "label": "Import or Export",
      "name": "copytype",
      "options": [
        {
          "name": "Export to Backblaze B2",
          "value": "export"
        },
        {
          "name": "Import from Backblaze B2",
          "value": "import"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

When the user submits the form, Frame.io sends another HTTP POST request to the custom action URL, containing the data entered by the user. The custom action can respond with a form as many times as necessary to gather the data it needs, at which point it responds with a suitable message. For example, when it has all the information it needs to export data, our custom action indicates that an asynchronous job has been initiated:

{
  "title": "Job submitted!",
  "description": "Export job submitted for asset."
}

Securing the Custom Action

When you create a custom action in the Frame.io Developer Tools, a signing key is generated for it. The custom action code uses this key to verify that the request originates from Frame.io.

When Frame.io sends a POST request, it includes the following HTTP headers:

The timestamp can be used to prevent replay attacks; Frame.io recommends that custom actions verify that this time is within five minutes of local time. The signature is an HMAC SHA-256 hash secured with the custom action’s signing key—a secret shared exclusively between Frame.io and the custom action. If the custom action is able to correctly verify the HMAC, then we know that the request came from Frame.io (message authentication) and it has not been changed in transit (message integrity).

The process for verifying the signature is:

• • Combine the signature version (currently “v0”), timestamp, and request body, separated by colons, into a string to be signed.
  • Compute the HMAC SHA256 signature using the signing key.
  • If the computed signature and signature header are not identical, then reject the request.

The custom action’s verify TimestampAndSignature() function implements the above logic, throwing an error if the timestamp is missing, outside the accepted range, or the signature is invalid. In all cases, 403 Forbidden is returned to the caller.

Custom Action Deployment Options

The root directory of the backblaze-frameio GitHub repository contains three directories, comprising two different deployment options and a directory containing common code:

• node-docker—generic: Node.js deployment
• node-risingcloud: Rising Cloud deployment
• backblaze-frameio-common: common code

The node-docker directory contains a generic Node.js implementation suitable for deployment on any Internet-addressable machine–for example, an Optimized Cloud Compute VM on Vultr. The app comprises an Express web service that handles requests from Frame.io, providing form responses to gather information from the user, and a worker task that the web service executes as a separate process to actually copy files between Frame.io and Backblaze B2.

You might be wondering why the web service doesn’t just do the work itself, rather than spinning up a separate process to do so. Well, media projects can contain dozens or even hundreds of files, containing a terabyte or more of data. If the web service were to perform the import or export, it would tie up resources and ultimately be unable to respond to Frame.io. Spinning up a dedicated worker process frees the web service to respond to new requests while the work is being done.

The downside of this approach is that you have to deploy the custom action on a machine capable of handling the peak expected load. The node-risingcloud implementation works identically to the generic Node.js app, but takes advantage of Rising Cloud’s serverless platform to scale elastically. A web service handles the form responses, then starts a task to perform the work. The difference here is that the task isn’t a process on the same machine, but a separate job running in Rising Cloud’s infrastructure. Jobs can be queued and new task instances can be started dynamically in response to rising workloads.

Note that since both Vultr and Rising Cloud are Backblaze Compute Partners, apps deployed on those platforms enjoy zero-cost downloads from Backblaze B2.

Customizing the Custom Action

We published the source code for the custom action to GitHub under the permissive MIT license. You are free to “use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software” as long as you include the copyright notice and MIT permission notice when you do so.

At present, the user must supply the name of a file when importing an asset from Backblaze B2, but it would be straightforward to add code to browse the bucket and allow the user to navigate the file tree. Similarly, it would be straightforward to extend the custom action to allow the user to import a whole tree of files based on a prefix such as raw_footage/2022-09-07. Feel free to adapt the custom action to your needs; we welcome pull requests for fixes and new features!

The post Lights, Camera, Custom Action (Part Two): Inside Integrating Frame.io + Backblaze B2 appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Jennifer Newman original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/quest-integrates-backblaze-into-rapid-recovery-version-6-7/

It’s the classic “tree falls in the woods” scenario: if your company experiences data loss, but your users never feel it, did it even happen? That’s the value proposition our friends over at Quest—an IT platform that solves complex problems with simple software solutions—present with their popular Rapid Recovery tool:

Quest Rapid Recovery Version 6.7 Adds Backblaze B2 in Cloud Tier

As of today—whether you’re a Quest customer or a Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage user—you can combine all this value with the astonishingly easy cloud storage we’re known for here at Backblaze. In Quest’s 6.7 release of Rapid Recovery, navigate to Cloud Accounts in the menu (see screenshot below for menu location), click Add New Account.

Enter a display name, select B2 Cloud Storage, and choose Amazon S3 as the cloud type. Then you just need to enter your Access key (keyID), Secret Key (applicationKey), and your service endpoint URL.

Your data will be safe, useful, and affordable at a quarter of the price of legacy cloud providers. Try it out today or contact our sales team to learn more.

More About Quest’s Rapid Recovery Tool

If you’re a Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage user who is in the market for a recovery solution for your business, you can dig into the details about Rapid Recovery here. Here’s a brief primer of the solutions capabilities:

• Simplify backup and restore: One cloud-based management console allows you to restore lost or damaged systems and data with near-zero recovery time and no impact to users—an advanced, admin-friendly solution.
• Address demanding recovery point objectives (RPO): Leverage image-based snapshots for RPOs and reduce risk of data loss and downtime with tracked change blocks to accelerate backups and reduce storage.
• Wide application support: Lightning-fast recovery for file servers and applications on both Microsoft Windows and Linux systems gets business-critical applications online to keep your business rolling.
• Cloud-based backup, archive, and disaster recovery: (This is where we come in…) Point-and-click cloud connectivity makes for easy replication of application backups for no-stress cloud backup.
• Virtual environment protection: Agentless backup and recovery for Microsoft Exchange and SQL databases residing on your virtual machines and low-cost VM-only tiered licensing for on-premises and cloud virtual environments.
• Data deduplication and replication: With B2 Cloud storage, you’ll already save upwards of 75% versus other cloud storage solutions, but you can reduce costs further by leveraging built-in compression and deduplication. Nice.

More about Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is purpose-built for ease, instant access to files and data, and infinite scalability. Backblaze B2 is priced so users don’t have to choose between what matters and what doesn’t when it comes to backup, archive, data organization, workflow streamlining, and more. Signing up couldn’t be more simple: a few clicks and you’re storing data. The first 10GB is free, and if you need more capacity to run a proof of concept you can talk to our sales team. Otherwise, when you’re ready to store data, you can pay one of two ways:

• Our per-byte consumption pricing: Only pay for what you store. It’s $5 TB/month, no hidden delete fees or gotchas. What you see is what you get.
• Our B2 Reserve capacity pricing: If you’d like to by predictable blocks of storage, you can work with any of our reseller partners to unlock the following benefits:
  • Free egress up to the amount of storage purchased per month.
  • Free transaction calls.
  • Enhanced migration services.
  • No delete penalties.
  • Tera support.

The Answer to the Question

You all can debate the philosophical implications of trees falling in woods and the sound they make. But when it comes to Rapid Recovery, it seems like we can guarantee one thing: your users might not hear the data loss when it happens, but you can bet the sight of relief your IT team breathes when they rapidly recover will be audible.

The post Quest Integrates Backblaze into Rapid Recovery Version 6.7 appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Pat Patterson original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/lights-camera-custom-action-integrating-frame-io-with-backblaze-b2/

At Backblaze, we love hearing from our customers about their unique and varied storage needs. Our media and entertainment customers have some of the most interesting use cases and often tell us about their workflow needs moving assets at every stage of the process, from camera to post-production and everywhere in between.

The desire to have more flexibility controlling data movement in their media management systems is a consistent theme. In the interest of helping customers with not just storing their data, but using their data, today we are publishing a new open-source custom integration we have created for Frame.io. Read on to learn more about how to use Frame.io to streamline your media workflows.

What is Frame.io?

Frame.io, an Adobe company, has built a cloud-based media asset management (MAM) platform allowing creative professionals to collaborate at every step of the video production process. For example, videographers can upload footage from the set after each take; editors can work with proxy files transcoded by Frame.io to speed the editing process; and production staff can share sound reports, camera logs, and files like Color Decision Lists.

The Backblaze B2 Custom Action for Frame.io

Creative professionals who use Frame.io know that it can be a powerful tool for content collaboration. Many of those customers also leverage Backblaze B2 for long-term archive, and often already have large asset inventories in Backblaze B2 as well.

What our Backblaze B2 Custom Action for Frame.io does is quite simple: it allows you to quickly move data between Backblaze B2 and Frame.io. Media professionals can use the action to export selected assets or whole projects from Frame.io to B2 Cloud Storage, and then later import exported assets and projects from B2 Cloud Storage back to Frame.io.

How to Use the Backblaze B2 Custom Action for Frame.io

Let’s take a quick look at how to use the custom action:

As you can see, after enabling the Custom Action, a new option appears in the asset context dropdown. Once you select the action, you are presented with a dialog to select Import or Export of data:

After selecting Export, you can choose whether you want just the single selected asset, or the entire project sent to Backblaze B2.

Once you make a selection, that’s it! The custom action handles the movement for you behind the scenes. The export is a point-in-time snapshot of the data from Frame.io—which remains as it was—to Backblaze B2.

The Custom Action creates a new exports folder in your B2 bucket, and then uploads the asset(s) to the folder. If you opt to upload the entire Project, it will be structured the same way it is organized in Frame.io.

How to Get Started With Backblaze B2 and Frame.io

To get started using the Custom Action described above, you will need:

• A Frame.io account.
• Access to a compute resource to run the custom action code.
• A Backblaze B2 account.

If you don’t have a Backblaze B2 account yet, you can sign up here and get 10GB free, or contact us here to run a proof of concept with more than 10GB.

What’s Next?

We’ve written previously about similar open-sourced custom integrations for other tools, and by releasing this one we are continuing in that same spirit. If you are interested in learning more about this integration, you can jump straight to the source code on GitHub.

Watch this space for a follow-up post diving into more of the technical details. We’ll discuss how we secured the solution, made it deployable anywhere (including to options with free bandwidth), and how you can customize it to your needs.

We would love to hear your feedback on this integration, and also any other integrations you would like to see from Backblaze. Feel free to reach out to us in the comments below or through our social channels. We’re particularly active on Twitter and Reddit—let’s chat!

The post Lights, Camera, Custom Action: Integrating Frame.io with Backblaze B2 appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Jeremy Milk original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/five-misconceptions-about-moving-from-tape-to-cloud/

There are a lot of pros and cons that go along with using the old, reliable LTO system for your backups. And while the medium still has many adherents, there is a growing movement of folks looking to move beyond magnetic tape, a form of storage technology that has been around since 1928. Technically, it’s the same age as sliced bread.

Those working in IT already know the benefits of migrating from LTO to cloud storage, which include everything from nearly universal ease of access to reduced maintenance, but those who hold the company’s pursestrings might still need convincing. Some organizations delay making a move because of misconceptions about the cost, inconvenience, risk, and security, but they may not have all the details. Let’s explore five top misconceptions about migrating from tape so you can help your team make an informed decision.

Misconception #1 – Total Cost of Ownership is Higher in the Cloud

The first misconception is that moving from a tape-based backup solution to cloud storage is expensive. Using our LTO vs. B2 Cloud Storage calculator, you can enter the amount of existing data you have, the amount of data you add yearly, and your daily incremental data to determine the actual cost savings.

For example, say you have 50TB of existing data, you add 5TB more every year, and your daily incremental backup data is 500GB. If that were the case, you could expect to pay almost 75% less backing up with cloud storage versus tape. The calculator also includes details about the assumptions we used in the computations so you can adjust accordingly. These assumptions include the LTO Backup Model, Data Compression Ratio and Data Retention Policy, as well as a handful of others you can dig into on your own if you’d like to fine tune the math.

Misconception #2 – Migration Costs are Impossible to Manage

We have shown how much more affordable it is to store on the cloud vs. on tape, but what about the costs of moving all of your data? Everyone with a frequently accessed data archive and especially those serving data to end users live in fear of large egress fees. Understandably the idea of paying egress fees for ALL of their data at once can be paralyzing. There is one service available today that pays for your data migration—egress fees, transfer costs, administration, all of it.

The new Universal Data Migration (UDM) service covers data migration fees for customers in US, Canada, Europe storing more than 10TB—including any legacy provider egress fees. The service offers a suite of tools and resources to make moving your data over to cloud storage a breeze, including high speed processes for reading tape media (reel cassettes and cartridges) and transferring directly to Backblaze B2 via a high-speed data connection. This all comes with full solution engineer support throughout the process and beyond. Data is transferred quickly and securely within days, not weeks.

Short story: Even if it might feel like it some days, your data does not have to be held hostage by egress expenses. Migration can be the opposite of a “killer”–it can open your budget for other investments and free your teams to access the data they need whenever they need it.

Misconception #3 – Cloud Storage Is a Security Risk

A topic on everyone’s minds these days is security. It’s reasonable to worry about risks when transitioning from tapes stored on-premises or off-site to the cloud. You can see the tapes on site; they’re disconnected from the internet and locked in a storage space on your property. When it comes to cybercriminals accessing data, you’re breathing easy. Statistics on data breaches and ransomware show that businesses of every size are at risk when it comes to cyberattacks, so this is an understandable stance. But when you look at the big picture, the cloud can offer greater peace of mind across a wide range of risks:

• Cut Risk by Tiering Data Off Site: Cybercrime is certainly a huge threat, so it’s wise to keep it front of mind in your planning. There are a number of other risk factors that deserve equal consideration, however. Whether you live in an area prone to natural disasters, are headquartered in an older building, or just have bad luck, getting a copy of your data offsite is essential to ensuring you can recover from most disasters.
• Apply Object Lock for Virtual Air Gapping: Air gaps used to be the big divider between cloud and tape on the security front. But setting immutability through Object Lock means you can set a virtual air gap on all of your cloud data. This functionality is available through Veeam, MSP 360, and a number of other leading backup management software providers. You don’t have to rely on tape to attain object lock.
• Boost Security without Burdening IT: Cloud storage providers’ full time job is maintaining the durability of the data they hold—they focus 24/7 on maintenance and upkeep so you don’t have to worry about whether your hardware and software are up to date and properly maintained. No need to sweat security updates, patches, or dealing with alerts. That’s your provider’s problem.

Misconception #4 – It’s All or Nothing with Data Migration

For certain industries, regulations require that certain data sets stay on-site. In the past, managing some data on-site and some in the cloud was just too much of a hassle. But hybrid services have come a long way toward making the process smoother and more efficient.

For all of your data that doesn’t have to stay on-site, you could start using cloud storage for daily incremental backups today, while keeping your tape system in place for older archived data. Not only would this save you time not worrying about as many tapes, but you can also restore the cloud-based files instantly if you need to.

Using software from StarWind VTL or Archiware P5, you can start backing up to the cloud instantly and make the job of migrating more manageable.

Misconception #5 – The Costs Outweigh the Benefits

If you’re going to go through the process of migrating your data from LTO to the cloud—even though we’ve shown it to be fairly painless—you want to make sure there’s an upside, right?

Let’s start with the simple ease of access. With tape storage, the nature of physical media means that access is limited by its nature. You have to be on premises to locate the data you need (no small feat if you have a catalog of tapes to sort through).

By putting all that data in the cloud, you enable instant access to anyone in your organization with the right provisions. This shifts hours of burden from your IT department, helping the organization get more out of the resources and infrastructure they already have.

Bonus Pro-Tip: Use a “Cheat Sheet” or Checklist to Convince Your CFO or COO

When you pitch the idea of migrating from tape to cloud storage to your CFO or COO, you can allay their fears by presenting them with a cheat sheet or checklist that proactively addresses any concerns they might have.

Some things to include in your cheat sheet are basically what we’ve outlined above: First, that cloud storage is not more expensive than tape; it actually saves you money. Second, using a hybrid model, you can move your data over conveniently on your own time. There is no cost to you to migrate your data using our UDM service, and your data is fully protected against loss and secured by Object Lock to keep it safe and sound in the cloud.

Migration Success Stories

Check out these tape migration success stories to help you decide if this solution is right for you.

Kings County, CA

Kings County, California, experienced a natural disaster destroying their tapes and tape drive, prompting an $80,000 price tag to continue backing up critical county data like HIPAA records and legal information. John Devlin, CIO of Kings County, decided it was time for a change. His plan was to move away from capital expenditures (tapes and tape drives) to operating expenses like cloud storage and backup software. After much debate, Kings County decided on Veeam Software paired with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage for its backup solution, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since!

Austin City Limits

Austin City Limits is a public TV program that has stored more than 4,000 hours of priceless live music performances on tape. As those tapes were rapidly beginning to deteriorate, the company opted to transfer recordings to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage for immediate and ongoing archiving with real-time, hot access. Utilizing a Backblaze Fireball rapid data ingest tool, they were able to securely back up hours of footage without tying up bandwidth. Thanks to their quick actions, irreplaceable performances from Johnny Cash, Stevie Ray Vaughan and The Foo Fighters are now preserved for posterity.

In Summary

So, we’ve covered that moving your backups to a storage cloud can save your organization time and money, is a fairly painless process to undertake, doesn’t present a higher security risk, and creates important geo-redundancies that represent best practices. Hopefully, we’ve helped clear up those misconceptions and we’ve helped you decide whether migrating from tape to cloud storage makes sense for your business.

The post Five Misconceptions About Moving From Tape to Cloud appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Jeremy Milk original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/media-workflowing-to-europe-ibc-2022-in-amsterdam-preview/

You can send media in milliseconds to just about every corner of the earth with an origin store at your favorite cloud storage company and a snappy content delivery network (CDN). Sadly, delivering people to Europe is a touch more complicated and time intensive. Nevertheless, the Backblaze team is saddling up planes, trains, and automobiles to bring the latest on media workflows to the attendees of IBC 2022. Whether you’re there in person or virtually, we’ll be discussing and demo-ing all the newest Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage solutions that will ensure your data can travel with ease—no mass transit needed—everywhere you need it to be.

IBC 2022 Preview: What’s New for Backblaze B2 Media Workflow Solutions

Our stand will have all the usual goodness: partners, friendly faces, spots to take a load off and talk about making your data work harder, and, of course, some next-level SWAG. Let’s get into what you can expect.

New Pricing Models and Migration Tools

Our team is on hand to talk you through two new offerings that have been generating a lot of excitement among teams across media organizations:

• Backblaze B2 Reserve: You can now purchase the Backblaze service many know and love in capacity-based bundles through resellers. If your team needs 100% budget predictability and would like waived transaction fees and premium support included as well, you should check out this new pricing model. Check it out here.
• Universal Data Migration: This IBC 2022 Best of Show nominee makes it easy and FREE to move data into Backblaze from legacy cloud, on-premises, and LTO/tape origins. If your current data storage is holding your team or your budget back, we’ll pay to free your media and move it to B2 Cloud Storage. Learn more here.

Six Flavors of Media Workflow Deep Dives

We’ve gathered materials and expertise to discuss or demo our six most asked about workflow improvements. We’re happy to talk about many other tools and improvements, but here are the six areas we expect to talk about the most:

1. Moving more (or all) media production to the cloud. Ensuring everyone—clients, collaborators, employers, everyone—has easy real-time access to content is essential for the inevitable geographical distribution of modern media workflows.
2. Reducing costs. Cloud workflows don’t need to come with costly gotchas, minimum retention penalties, and/or high costs when you actually want to use your content. We’ll explain how the right partners will unlock your budget so you can save on cloud services and spend more on creative projects.
3. Streamlining delivery. Pairing cloud storage with the right CDN is essential to make sure your media is consumable and monetizable at the edge. From streaming services to ecommerce outlets to legacy media outlets, we’ve helped every type of media organization do more with their content.
4. Freeing storage. Empty your expensive on-prem storage and stop adding HDs and tapes to the pile by moving finished projects to always-hot cloud storage. This doesn’t just free up space and money: Instantly accessible archives means you can work with and monetize older content with little friction in your creative process.
5. Safeguarding content. All those tapes or HDs on a shelf, in the closet, or wherever you keep them are hard to manage and harder to access and use. Parking everything safely and securely in the cloud means all that data is centrally accessible, protected, and available for more use.
6. Backing up (better!). Yes, we’ve got roots in backup going back >15 years—so when it comes to making sure your precious media is protected with easy access for speedy recovery, we’ve got a few thoughts (and solutions).

Partners, Partners, and More Partners…

“The more we get together, the happier we’ll be,” might as well be the theme lyric of cloud workflows. Combining best of breed platforms unlocks better value and functionality, and offers you the ability to build your cloud stack exactly how you need it for your business. We’ve got a massive ecosystem of integration partners to bring to bear on your challenges, and we’re happy to share our IBC 2022 stand with two incredible members of that group: media management and collaboration company iconik and the cloud NAS platform LucidLink.

Hoping We Can Help You Soon

Whether it’s in person at IBC 2022 or virtually when it works for you, we’d love to walk you through any of the solutions we can serve for hardworking media teams. If you will be in Amsterdam, schedule a meeting to ensure you’ll get the right expert on our team, then stick around for the swag and good times. If you’re not making the trip, please reach out to to us here where we can share all of the same information.

The post Media Workflowing to Europe: IBC 2022 in Amsterdam Preview appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Jennifer Newman original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/elements-media-platform-adds-backblaze-b2-as-native-cloud-option/

Cloud workflows are rapidly becoming a driver of every modern media team’s day-to-day creative output. Whether it’s enabling remote shoots, distributed teams, or leveraging budgets more effectively, the cloud can deliver a ton of value to any team. But workflows, by their nature, are complex—and plenty of legacy cloud solutions only add to that complexity with tangled pricing models and limits to egress and collaboration.

ELEMENTS has been simplifying media workflows for more than a decade. Cloud storage has always been part of the ELEMENTS DNA, but they’ll be presenting revolutionary platform updates for cloud workflows in 2023 and beyond at IBC 2022. Part of this new focus on cloud solutions is their addition of an easy, transparent cloud storage option to their platform in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. Nimble post-production teams are always on the lookout for more straightforward and easy-to-understand cloud plans with transparent costs—this is a market that Backblaze serves more effectively than the other legacy providers accessible through the platform.

The Backblaze + ELEMENTS Integration

The ELEMENTS platform makes it simple to upload and download files straight from on-premises storage while also offering smart and fully customisable archiving workflows, cloud-based media asset management (MAM), and a number of other tools and features that remove the borders between cloud and on-premises storage. Once connected, ELEMENTS enables users to search, edit, or automate changes to media assets. This extends to team collaboration and setting rights to folders and data across the connected networks. ELEMENTS has provided an intuitive interface making this an easy-to-use solution that is designed for the M&E industry.

Connecting your Backblaze account with ELEMENTS is easy. Simply navigate to the System > Integrations menu and enter your Backblaze login credentials. After this, Backblaze B2 Buckets of the connected account can be mounted as a volume on ELEMENTS.

If you’d like to run a proof of concept with Backblaze, the first 10 GB is free and setting up a Backblaze account only takes a few clicks. Or you can contact sales for more information.

If you’re already a Backblaze B2 customer and would like to check out the ELEMENTS platform, contact ELEMENTS directly here.

Simplifying Your Workflow AND Your Budget

Backblaze focuses on end-to-end ease, including how it works in your budget. Businesses can select a pay-as-you go option or work with a reseller to access capacity plans.

B2 Cloud Storage – This is a general cloud plan for applications, backups and almost all of your business needs. The pricing is simple: $5 per TB per month + $0.01 per GB download fee. As with all plans, the files are located on one storage tier and can always be easily accessed.

B2 Reserve – This is the sweet spot for most media use cases. B2 Reserve is a cloud package starting from 20TB per month. This plan comes at a slightly higher cost than the standard B2 Cloud Storage plan but is free from egress fees up to the amount of storage purchased per month. B2 Reserve will quickly work in your favor if you plan on accessing your files regularly. NOTE: B2 Reserve is only available through resellers.

Top Benefits for Teams Using Backblaze and ELEMENTS Together

The ELEMENTS platform offers a set of robust tools that unlock time and budgets for creative teams to do more. We’ll underline how these different features can work with Backblaze B2.

Automation Engine

The ELEMENTS Automation Engine allows users to create workflows with any number of steps. This tool has a growing list of templates, two of which are Archive and Restore automations. These can be used to archive footage to Backblaze and delete it from the on-premises storage while keeping a lightweight preview proxy. If you need the original footage after previewing the proxy, triggering the Restore automation is all you need to do. The hi-res footage will automatically be downloaded from the Backblaze B2 bucket and placed onto the original location.

A huge benefit of using cloud storage through the ELEMENTS platform is that the individual users do not need to have cloud accounts or direct cloud access. Users will only be able to use the cloud features through the preset automation jobs and according to their permissions.

Media Library

Cloud technologies open up a number of new possibilities within the Media Library, our powerful, browser-based media asset management (MAM) platform.

For example, if your post-production facility has a locally-deployed media library which is running on your ELEMENTS storage and is connected to your Backblaze account, users can playback all of your footage at any time, no matter where it is stored—on-premises, in the cloud, or even in your LTO archive.

The Media Library adds a layer of functionality to the cloud and allows you to easily build a true cloud archive—one that can be accessed from anywhere, in which footage can easily be previewed and just as easily restored with a click of a button.

File Manager

The File Manager is a functionality of the ELEMENTS Web UI that allows you to browse and manage content on your storage on-premises and, very soon, in the cloud. It provides you with a clear overview of all your files, no matter how many file systems and cloud buckets you have. File Managers’ support for cloud storage means users will be able to manage all of their files in one place, without having to navigate through a host of different cloud providers’ interfaces.

ELEMENTS Client

The ELEMENTS Client is an intuitive connection manager that allows admins to decide who gets to mount what—providing a secure gatekeeper to your footage.
The latest function, coming soon to the ELEMENTS Client, will allow users to mount cloud workspaces. This means that users will be able to access the contents of the Backblaze B2 Bucket as if it were a local drive. With optional access logging, users will have the ability to access the cloud-stored content while admins can maintain a high level of security.

Bringing Independent Cloud Storage to the ELEMENTS Platform

Offering B2 Cloud Storage as a native option within the ELEMENTS platform brings a whole new type of cloud offering to Elements’ users. We’re eager to see how creatives use an easier, more affordable, independent option in their workflows.

The post ELEMENTS Media Platform Adds Backblaze B2 as Native Cloud Option appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.