SpiderOak says its new Nimbus.io cloud storage service, will offer consumers and businesses a cheaper way to archive their data. Yes, cheaper than Amazon.
When it comes to storing cold data — the stuff that companies offloaded to tape — the need for speed is not paramount. Businesses just have to make sure their stuff is safe for when they need it. It is SpiderOak’s view that Amazon charges too much for that kind of storage.
The Nimbus.io service will cost $ 0.06 per GB — including both data transport and storage costs. That is roughly half as much as Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service which starts at $ 0.125 for 1TB/month, with the price falling as volume rises. But there is also an associated data transfer cost after 1GB of data transferred of $ 0.120 per GB/month up to total 1 TB/month. (Amazon does offer a free storage tier for new customers for a year.)
While Amazon is undoubtedly the behemoth here, it is not necessarily the price leader even though it did lower S3 pricing a few weeks ago. Backblaze, another lean-and-mean competitor, also prices its storage below Amazon s3.
SpiderOak which has offered a storage and backup services since 2007, decided there was a need to attack archival storage specifically. ”We define [archival] as data where the latency requirements for reads are not severe. A lot of people use S3 just for back-up purposes or for very large file storage,” said SpiderOak CTO Alan Fairless. “With most backup jobs you don’t care if it takes 15 minutes versus milliseconds,” he said. He did take exception to the tape analogy, however. “We’re a lot faster than that,” he said.
“We see the world as not necessarily leaving S3 completely, but we feel people are overpaying for their archival class data. It’s not accessed that often so there’s no reason to pay S3 the additional money for that data,” said SpiderOak CEO Ethan Oberman.
Oberman also stressed the company’s strict privacy stance. “Under no circumstances can we view our customer data in any way and that invisibility has been important in the enterprise market. Our competitors can’t make those claims,” he said.
The company hosts two data centers in Chicago and Kansas City for its services.
Nimbus.io will be available as both a commercial product and an open source project under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPL). The client libraries, benchmark, and testing code are covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user mcfarlandmo
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market
- NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
- What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
