Storj Labs Announces Pricing for Tardigrade Cloud Storage Service, Beta 2 Release,  Delivering Resiliency and Affordability for Users in the Cloud
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Storj Labs today announced pricing for the Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service. At half the price of legacy cloud storage providers average list prices, this is the first major drop in cloud storage prices in over five years. The company also issued the Beta 2 release for Tardigrade in conjunction with the pricing announcement, indicating the product is feature and code complete. Tardigrade has consistently met all production service level milestones for delivering enterprise-grade storage. With thousands of users and operators already on the service, formal production launch is scheduled for January 2020.

Pricing for the Tardigrade Cloud Storage Service is broken down into two categories—static storage and download bandwidth:

  • Static storage is calculated in “terabyte months,” which is a prorated calculation of how much storage is used throughout the month, broken down by hour. One terabyte month costs $10. Storing one terabyte for 30 days, two terabytes of data for 15 days, or three terabytes for 10 days, would be the equivalent of one terabyte month.
  • Download bandwidth measures the transfer of data from a Storage Node Operator (AKA Host) to an Uplink and is charged at $45 per terabyte of bandwidth consumed. Upload bandwidth, or the transfer of data from an Uplink to Hosts, is free.

Legacy providers often charge very high bandwidth prices, which can create “vendor lock-in” that makes it expensive for customers to migrate off of a service. Storj Labs is also offering discounted egress if users decide to migrate off of Tardigrade, giving customers the peace of mind that they are not locked in if the service doesn’t fit their needs.

Tardigrade list prices are less than half of legacy cloud storage providers listed starting prices. (For example, Amazon S3 list prices are currently $23 per terabyte for static storage plus $90 per terabyte of egress. Across the three main providers, those prices average $22 per terabyte for static storage and $99 per terabyte for bandwidth). Furthermore, the prices quoted by legacy providers often don’t include features like encryption and multi-zone redundancy, which come standard with Tardigrade at no additional cost. While legacy cloud providers do provide volume price discounts for larger customers, Tardigrade starts with everyday low prices for all customers, and then offers additional volume discounts.

“The last major change in cloud storage prices came when Google entered the market, over five years ago. Since then, cloud storage prices have declined on average by less than 10 percent total, despite the retail price of storage devices dropping by 3x over the same period,” says Ben Golub, Executive Chairman, and Interim CEO at Storj Labs. “With the amount of data we create doubling every two years, there’s a huge need for affordable cloud storage that’s also secure and protects against many of the attacks that have become commonplace this past decade. By leveraging the power of decentralization, Storj Labs is able to offer enterprise grade performance and durability, enhanced security, and do so economically at half the price of the legacy cloud providers.”

The company’s Beta 2 release delivers enhanced performance, availability, and durability, giving developers the confidence they need to migrate their applications to the Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service. Storj Labs has now achieved performance on par with or superior to legacy cloud storage providers. Over the past seven months of operating the network, Tardigrade has never lost a file. Given Tardigrade’s current performance, Storj Labs is confident it can provide 6 9s of durability, and will deliver 11 9s of durability in the near future. The company is also providing a money back guarantee on lost data. Tardigrade was designed with client side encryption and multi-zone storage as part of its innate infrastructure, unlike legacy providers.

“Since we founded Storj Labs in 2014, we’ve strived to create a decentralized cloud storage network that delivers enterprise-grade features, performance, and durability, but also harnesses the power of decentralization to enhance privacy, security, and performance for people storing data in the cloud,” says Shawn Wilkinson, Chief Strategy Officer at Storj Labs. “It’s been a long road filled with many challenges that have never been solved before, but we’re now ready for more people to start using the network in their cloud environments. We look forward to seeing what people can build with decentralized cloud storage.”

Along with its Beta 2 release, the company will also accelerate its customer onboarding efforts, welcoming the rest of its 14,000 waitlist members to join the network and start storing data on Tardigrade.

The Beta 2 release marks the final milestone before reaching the production launch of Tardigrade, when Storj Labs will begin enforcing its service level agreements and enabling users to store their production data on the platform. During the Beta period, users are able to upload test data to the network to begin their integration processes. To ensure the platform lives up to the expectations and needs of users, Storj Labs uses a series of launch gates to ascertain the highest availability, durability, and performance.

  • Availability: Tardigrade has now achieved 99.97 percent availability, which measures the system’s ability to download a file and the first attempts to do so.
  • Durability: Since launching the platform into Alpha (v0.1.0) in April 2019, Tardigrade has never lost any of the approximately 2 million files stored on the network. While the service has been operating at 100 percent durability, the company can currently make a statistically significant claim of 99.9999 percent durability, meaning that the chance of losing a single file (one in a million), is far less than your chances of being struck by lightning this year. The company’s stated goal is to offer a service level agreement of 11 9s of durability. To make a statistically significant claim to that effect, the service will need to maintain the current level of 100 percent durability for several million more files for at least one year.
  • Performance: Tardigrade upload and download performance is on par with or superior to major centralized cloud storage providers like Amazon S3. At production launch, Tardigrade will deliver performance that is faster than legacy providers and much more consistent. If downloading 100 files, a user would experience less than a half-second difference between the fastest and slowest download, versus several seconds compared to centralized cloud storage providers. This is due to the platform’s decentralized architecture.
  • S3 compatibility and ease-of-use: Using the S3 gateway, 90 percent of existing applications utilizing object storage can be shifted to Tardigrade with little to no effort required on the part of customers. During the Beta 1 period, Storj Labs received extremely positive feedback from developers on the ease-of-use of the native tools and libraries as well.
  • Code maturity: With Beta 2, Tardigrade is code complete for the production launch with no known severity one or two issues. Between Beta 2 and production, the only changes that the company intends to make are some final polishes and bug fixes, along with completing external security code audits and review.
  • Sustainable pricing: The network is designed to create sustainable economics for all participants, even when priced at a fraction of the price of legacy cloud operators.

Users can sign up to try out Tardigrade decentralized cloud storage by visiting Tardigrade.io and joining the waitlist. The service is ideal for workloads that are written once and read many times, including database backups and snapshots, VM snapshots, research, general data archives, media storage and retrieval, videos, and images.

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About Storj Labs

Storj Labs provides secure, affordable distributed cloud storage that gives data ownership back to the user, instead of major corporations. The company’s open-source cloud storage platform utilizes spare disk drive space shared by its community members to create a secure network for developers, operations teams, companies, and others in need of secure cloud storage. The distributed architecture of the Storj network protects against attacks, improves reliability, increases download/upload speeds, and enhances performance when compared to many traditional cloud storage approaches.

Storj Labs also created the Tardigrade decentralized cloud service, the world’s first decentralized cloud object storage service. Tardigrade offers decentralized cloud storage that’s automatically encrypted, easily implemented, highly performant, exceptionally economical, and ridiculously resilient.

Currently in Beta, the Tardigrade service delivers durability, performance, and security that is better than major cloud providers, at a fraction of the cost. Through the Tardigrade Open Source Partner Program, any open source projects that enable users to store data on Tardigrade via connectors will receive a portion of the revenue generated by those users.