Wasabi, a cloud storage startup, has devised a pricing model whereby customers buy capacity up-front in return for lower charges.
Wasabi’s Reserved Capacity Storage (RCS) provides enterprises with price predictability and one-time billing. The deal sees storage costs cut by up to 27 per cent compared with pay-as-you-go when customers commit to fixed price terms of up to five years. Customers pay only for storage that is reserved; there are no fees for data egress, API requests or data retrieval.
David Friend, CEO of Wasabi, gave out a quote: “With most of the world’s data still stored in on-premises hardware, we want to make it easy for people to migrate their data to the cloud and start saving enormous amounts of money in the process.”
Cloud storage customers like predictability
Wasabi said a 100TB/five year RCS plan costs under $40,000 and includes technical support. By contrast, a five-year, on-premises 100TB hardware appliance deal from an unnamed vendor lists at $130,000. This rises to more than $240,000 with maintenance over five years and does not include data centre or people costs.
Wasabi said its research shows many customers prefer the predictability of a fixed price purchase order. The company thinks RCS will be useful for backups, second copies of data, and archives. Also there is a make-margin bonus for channel partners, who can resell the service as a ‘boxed cloud’ SKU.
Wasabi claims its service is faster and 80 per cent cheaper than Amazon S3. The company was founded in 2017 and it said it has 10,000 customers worldwide and has deployed more than 100 petabytes to date.
