Backblaze (BLZE) Highlights “Elephant Flows” and New Geo Network Insights in Network Stats Webinar

Key Points

• Backblaze flagged the rising importance of “elephant flows”—very large, line-rate transfers from neoclouds and hyperscalers—that create bursty, time‑variable network demand and change how the network performs day-to-day.
• The company added geographic enrichment and new metrics like “magnitude” (bits per IP) and unique‑IP counts with heat maps and Sankey visuals to guide capacity and site decisions across regions.
• To handle aggregated large flows Backblaze is expanding port capacity (from 100G to 400G and planning multi‑400G/up to 1Tb via B2 Overdrive), but its visibility is based on sFlow sampling so it cannot see content or definitively identify application‑level migrations.

Backblaze NASDAQ: BLZE detailed changes in its network traffic patterns and new ways it is analyzing data flows during its latest “Network Stats” webinar, led by Technical Narrative Content Manager Stephanie Doyle and Network Engineering Manager Brent Nowak.

The session focused on quarter-over-quarter traffic metrics, including new geographic enrichment of the company’s network dataset. Nowak said the team historically measured “who we’re talking to” (networks) plus “what and when,” based on TCP conversations, transfer length, and bits transferred. “What we added this quarter was the where,” he said, describing the addition of geo information that enabled the company to map where certain traffic types are going.

Traffic trends and network classifications

Nowak walked through a month-over-month view of total traffic sent and received, using “bits 95th,” a 95th percentile metric commonly used by ISPs to reduce the influence of outliers versus averages. He said the company has traffic history in this view going back to May 2025, with “a large amount of traffic that we were sending into the winter season,” followed by “a little decrease December, January, and an uptick again in February and March.”

Traffic was categorized into multiple network classifications, including CDN, hosting, hyperscalers, neoclouds, and ISP connections such as Tier 1 and regional ISPs.

Elephant flows and “bursty” neocloud demand

Doyle and Nowak repeatedly highlighted what they described as the growing importance of “elephant flows”—large, single transfers between two parties—compared with “mice flows,” which are many small transfers common in web browsing.

“What’s moving and driving a lot of innovation at Backblaze is what we are defining as elephant flows,” Nowak said, adding that these transfers can run “at line rates of a gigabit, 10 gigabit, or even higher,” and at scale can aggregate to “100 gigabit, 400 gigabit” between partners.

In later charts, Nowak said neocloud and hyperscaler workflows are materially changing network operations because the flows can occur at any time and at very large sizes. He described the resulting variability: “It means that our network on a Tuesday is performing very differently on a Thursday.” He attributed this to customers moving data quickly to GPU infrastructures, noting that “time is money when you are renting time on a GPU cluster.”

New visualizations: regions, magnitude, and unique IPs

In addition to Sankey-style visualizations showing how traffic is transferred via different connectivity types, Nowak discussed regional heat maps of total traffic. He said the company’s U.S. West infrastructure was its first deployment and has the most historical content, which shows up as heavier traffic concentration in U.S. West across CDN and ISP regional traffic.

He also pointed to growing concentration in EU Central and EU West across neocloud activity, ISP regional traffic, hyperscaler, and CDN traffic. CDN traffic, he said, appears “pretty well spread” across U.S. East, U.S. Central, and EU Central locations.

One new metric introduced in the webinar was “magnitude,” which Nowak described as a Backblaze-coined measure of “the amount of bits transferred per IP address.” He said the metric provides insight beyond total traffic volume by showing transfer intensity per “speaker.” In that view, Nowak said the company sees “a very deep green color concentration in U.S. East for NeoCloud,” which he attributed to the geographic location of hyperscalers and GPU providers.

Another view looked at unique IP addresses. Nowak said the U.S. West cluster shows high counts of unique IP addresses, primarily over ISP regional networks, including “Comcast, Verizon, Google Fiber.” He said this helps guide network decisions—suggesting higher-capacity ports in U.S. East locations, while in U.S. West the company may prefer “more internet exchanges to get more local to consumers.”

Geographic enrichment and capacity planning

With the addition of geo data, Backblaze created heat maps of neocloud, hyperscaler, and CDN activity by country. Nowak said the U.S. was “very deeply shaded” in initial views. Doyle noted this was “somewhat unsurprising” and referenced a common industry statistic that “40%-60% of data centers are located in the U.S.”

When excluding U.S. data, Nowak said the map showed concentrations of hosting, CDN, and neocloud activity in countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Finland, and the U.K. A separate U.S.-only view showed neocloud activity concentrated toward California, hyperscaler activity in Virginia, and new areas of concentration appearing in Illinois, Georgia, and New Jersey, which Nowak said the company had not yet fully analyzed.

Discussing infrastructure decisions, Nowak said Backblaze is increasing capacity on internet connections—“where we were deploying 100 gigabit links, we’re now increasing that to 400 gigabit or multiples of 400 gigabit.” He also cited “B2 Overdrive,” describing it as an offering that provides “S3-compatible object storage” that can scale “from 100 gigabit up to 1 terabit,” influencing port capacity choices and network expansion.

What Backblaze can—and can’t—see in the data

In the Q&A, a participant asked about Finland neocloud demand, latency and throughput, and how Backblaze uses these trends to plan expansions. Doyle said latency and throughput tracking is covered in a separate series called “Performance Stats.” Nowak emphasized the “very dynamic” nature of the neocloud landscape, with facilities coming online and shifting assumptions month to month.

Responding to questions about whether large flows indicate data moving off Backblaze to other storage, Doyle and Nowak said the network view does not provide that level of visibility. Nowak explained that Backblaze samples traffic using sFlow—“every 64,000th packet”—to reconstruct a picture of TCP conversations (participants, transfer length, bits transferred, and protocol), then enriches the dataset to classify networks. However, he stressed the sampling does not reveal content: “We can’t see the content of the stream that’s encrypted.”

On whether Backblaze can identify application-level migrations, Nowak added: “We can merely tell what network that we’re talking to and in what Magnitude. I don’t think we can answer that question today.”

About Backblaze NASDAQ: BLZE

Backblaze, Inc, a storage cloud platform, provides businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect data in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud services through a web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. It also provides Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which enables customers to store data, developers to build applications, and partners to expand their use cases. This service is offered as a consumption-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and serves use cases, such as public, hybrid, and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive, and tape replacement; repository for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning; and Internet of Things.

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