Estonia-based Storadera’s pitch is simple: low-cost, single-tier S3 storage in the cloud using optimized disk drive storage with higher-capacity shingled drives and AI-improved storage operations on its roadmap.
CEO, founder, and ex-software engineer Tommi Kannisto says he was inspired by US storage biz Backblaze and thought he could offer disk drive-based S3 object storage in Europe. Storadera was incorporated in 2019, went live in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2021 and opened a second datacenter in the Netherlands in 2023.
Storadera offers its single tier S3 storage for €6/TB/month – versus Backblaze’s base price of $6/TB/month – with no additional fees. When comparing starting prices in euros, Backblaze is the lowest-cost supplier as its $6/TB/month converts to €4.75. However, Storadera is based in Europe and its stored data is beyond the direct jurisdiction of non-EU countries.
Storadera costs marginally less than Wasabi and significantly less than AWS, which also charges data egress fees.
Kannisto told an IT Press Tour event in the UK that Storadera makes slightly less than €1 million a year in revenue: “We are profitable … we make a very good profit [and] we’re growing 5 percent/month in revenue.”
He said Storadera is “compatible with hundreds of S3-compatible applications. Implementing Storadera with backup tools like Veeam enables [customers] to send the secondary copy to the cloud and increase their backup retention. There is no need to buy new tools to manage cloud storage.”
It has around 100 customers, including the Estonian government and telco Telia. Reseller partners account for about half of its stored data and around 50 percent of its data is coming in from Veeam, so most data is backed up.
Data is stored in standard hard disk drives racked in JBODs, containing 102 drives. Each JBOD is attached to a server with 32 GB of RAM. Services, coming from 100,000 lines of GO code, run in the servers. Kannisto said it’s a hyperconverged setup: “All software runs in all servers and all servers write to all JBODs. There is no load balancer unit.”
The datacenters are autonomous and have bucket geo-replication.
Kannisto buys standard conventional Western Digital drives, with 26 TB ones in the Netherlands datacenter, and said shingled magnetic recording (SMR) media drives are on his roadmap due to their extra capacity with disk write optimizations possible as “most of our load is writing files.” Kannisto reckons “SMR will reduce our capex by 25 percent.”
Asked about using QLC SSDs, he said: “QLC 100-plus TB SSDs are still too expensive – and probably will be for the next ten years.””” He’s blogged on the SSD vs HDD issue, writing: “The price difference can be easily over 10x in favor of hard disks. If we can offer fast enough service on 10x less expensive hardware, then it sounds like magic.”
He also notes: “SSDs have a limited amount of terabytes written (TBW). After that, they just become read-only. Hard disks don’t have such strict limitations.”
Storadera uses variable block sizes in its writes. Small blocks are used at times of low load with bigger blocks used at high load times, made up from batches of small file writes. The system uses 4+2, 6+2, and upcoming 8+2 erasure coding schemes, with chunks striped across servers. All data is encrypted and object locking is used for immutability. Every 60 days, data integrity is checked for bit rot.
The system can handle “close to 300 MBps with 2 MB files,” and it’s easy, with steady streams of data, to write fast to HDD. SSDs are not needed in terms of write speed although metadata is stored on SSDs, accounting for about 0.05 percent of disk capacity.
Kannisto said Storadera is looking to expand its regional coverage, with a German datacenter coming on stream in the middle of this year, followed by further expansion to the UK, then the US or Canada, and APAC. There are no timelines for this.
Possible technology roadmap items include the use of AI to improve storage operations and the concept of smart caching to provide edge access.
