Profile: Amazon S3 and other S3 cloud storage services have a new competitor: Estonia-based Storadera has come to market armed with a one-line price sheet for its single tier, business user offering.
Storadera was registered in August 2019 by CEO Tommi Kanisto. It developed and tested its Storage Space service and launched it to the buying public in 2021 – a move that helped it attract €270,000 ($262,000) in funding in October that year.
Kanisto claimed to B&F: “Storadera cloud storage is built from the ground up to be frugal and lean technically and operationally. By doing this we can offer way better and simpler pricing than the big three competitors: AWS, Google and Microsoft.”
The instant data access service costs €6 ($5.83) per TB per month with the terabyte amount calculated as the monthly average. That’s it. There are no other items on its price sheet – no egress fees, or fast retrieval fees, or lower fees for slower-to-retrieve deep archives.
Keep it simple
Storadera emphasizes this simplicity as a selling point against the public cloud providers. By way of example, there are seven Amazon S3 storage classes – including Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and Glacier Deep Archive.
Amazon S3 standard itself has three pricing tiers:
- First 50TB per month – $0.023/GB, $23/TB/month
- Next 450TB per month – $0.022/GB, $22/TB/month
- Over 500TB per month – $0.021/GB, $21/TB/month
Another comparison is with Backblaze, which offers S3-compatible cloud storage at $0.005 per GB per month, or $5/TB/month. However, Backblaze has a $0.01GB ($10/TB) download or egress charge.
Wasabi hot cloud storage costs a flat $.0059/GB/month ($5.90/TB/month), with no charges for egress or for API requests. Storadera makes no charge for API calls and has no delete fees. It is convinced its users will not experience sticker shock – unlike AWS S3 users who do not get, Storadera claims, predictable pricing.
At this stage in its life Storadera runs in just one datacenter: a Greenergy building on the outskirts of Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn. It is expanding, partly to counter uncertainty from the Russia-Ukraine war. It has plans for a datacenter in the Netherlands and the UK by April 2023, followed by one in the APAC region by mid-2023 and the US by the end of 2023.
In the box
The main IT components in its datacenter are Western Digital 4RU Data102 JOBDs, Dell 1RU PowerEdge servers and Nvidia Mellanox 25GbitE switches. Storadera developed its own storage and service layer software. It uses erasure coding for data integrity and encrypts data at rest, with HTTPS protecting it in transit. Data integrity is re-checked at 30-day intervals looking for bit rot or other silent failures. Users have data access via secret keys.
Storadera sells its services directly to larger customers and through partners to others, with whom it has a revenue share model. It sees potential applications for its storage in the backup, archive, MSP extension, replication, media, data lake, logs, CCTV and general persistent storage areas. The company is also building partnerships – such as one with Veeam to become a certified Veeam Ready Object and Ready Object with Immutability supplier.
It says it’s suitable for many S3 use cases, although not high download ones. The roadmap incudes adding more security, a storage gateway, file syncing, an enterprise package for high downloads, a service package for prepaid or committed reserved storage, and partnering with other service providers.
