When most people think about year-end work, they think in terms of deadlines, retrospectives, and a well-earned break. Data centers have other ideas because, well, the internet still needs to work on holidays in order to power those digital fireplaces and Spotify playlists.

Backblaze runs year-round, around the clock, which means that even the holidays are business as usual in a data center. And many customers who use Backblaze to store their AI models, applications, media, and critical business data need that data storage to be more reliable than ever, especially around the holidays. Every drive swap, rack adjustment, alert investigation, and routine fix leaves a trace in our work tickets, and we’ve discussed in our Drive Stats reports how we use those work tickets to do things like define a failure. They’re also evidence of what it takes to keep an always-on service humming, even when the rest of the company is offline.

So, as the year comes to a close, we wanted to shout out to our awesome data center, cloud ops, and on-call team members—we couldn’t do it without you. And here’s a little retrospective on what this past year looked like.

Total time spent working in each data center

Backblaze has four data regions and six data centers. Here’s the breakdown of where we spent our time this year, inclusive of everything from entropy-fighting maintenance tasks to all the normal network and performance upgrades that keep us ahead of changing data patterns to good ol’ scaling and expansion of our data center footprint::

In total across data centers, we spent 3,112.43 hours replacing hard drives. (If those hours don’t square up with the charts above, it’s because the total view includes other types of work, like upgrading our systems.) On average, it took about 0.74 hours per hard drive.

Here’s a breakdown of the drives replaced by capacity:

If you’re a Drive Stats fan, you may notice there are some funky drive sizes on there based on our other reporting data. (A 2TB drive? Where does that one even come from?) The drives above are inclusive of our whole fleet, including boot drives and non-production drives, and some of those are sized differently than based for whatever reason—history, job in the data center, etc.

Vault deployments

We also deploy new Vaults fairly regularly. This year, we added the following Vaults (per data center):

And, here’s a breakdown of the number of Vaults broken down by drive size:

In total, we spent 1043.23 hours on Vault deployment which is about 31.61 hours on average per Vault.

Numbers, as always, tell the story

Taken together, the data shows every hour logged, every drive replaced, every Vault added, and every ticket closed. It adds up to a year’s worth of hands-on infrastructure care; in short, it’s the steady investment required to operate storage at scale.

Whether you’re on call monitoring your own systems, planning for growth in the year ahead, or fully offline over the holidays, your data is here for you. Cheers to another great year!

About Stephanie Doyle

Stephanie is the Associate Editor & Writer at Backblaze. She specializes in taking complex topics and writing relatable, engaging, and user-friendly content. You can most often find her reading in public places, and can connect with her on LinkedIn.