Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage offers single-tier performance-oriented cloud object storage
Object storage services are ubiquitous in the public cloud, but not all services are created equal. Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage aims to break the mold when it comes to the perception of object being nothing more than slow, cheap and deep storage – as well as challenge the model where customers need to choose between performance, availability and cost.
Introduction
While cloud-based object storage is ubiquitous, pricing for object storage among most vendors is a complex maze of multiple service tiers, units of API requests and egress charges. Wasabi Technologies aims to evade these with its single-price, single-tier object storage service, although this comes with conditions on what constitutes a ‘good fit’ for the service.
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Wasabi is executing on a multi-year pivot-to-channel strategy, in which it is finding success as the company has grown to 17,000 customers. Positioning object storage as an endpoint for other products – Veeam Backup with Wasabi, for example, is a popular use case – is fueling growth in the company.
Wasabi presents a compelling combination of price, performance, availability and features, and while customer counts serve as validation of strategy, the object storage model (which is currently Wasabi’s sole service) is encumbered by the perception of being a ‘cheap and deep’ option for storing data, potentially relegating it to archival use cases. Wasabi aims to counteract this with a tier-free access model, with no egress charges as well as ingest and data access roughly five times faster than competing cloud object storage services.
Launched in 2017, Boston-based Wasabi styles itself as a ‘hot cloud storage company,’ offering object storage compatible with Amazon S3 APIs. The company, founded by ex-Carbonite executives David Friend and Jeff Flowers, envisions a purposefully multi-cloud future, with Wasabi acting as a utility provider of storage (akin to the utilities of networking and electricity). To that end, Wasabi has redoubled focus on channel sales, now comprising 45% of sales compared with 30% at the start of 2020.
Wasabi’s pricing structure is at the core of its value proposition: pay-as-you-go pricing is set at $6.99 per TB per month, with no additional charges for data egress or API requests, in contrast to AWS, GCP and Azure. No alternative tiers are offered for greater or lesser performance characteristics. Wasabi assesses a 90-day minimum for storage costs, and pricing is not prorated for capacities under 1TB. The company characterizes the price difference as 80% less than Amazon S3, and additionally highlights the physical proximity of its datacenters relative to Amazon, for customers aiming to use AWS for compute (given that Amazon does not charge ingress) and Wasabi for storage.
At present, the company has roughly 100 employees.