Blockchain-based storage service takes on Amazon aws, unveils pricing

Blockchain-based storage service takes on Amazon AWS, unveils pricing

A cloud storage service first announced in 2015 that uses the decentralized, peer-to-peer architecture of blockchain to store encrypted data on the computers of users around the globe has unveiled its pricing model and production launch date.

Storj Labs, which operates a beta storage service for developers, businesses and consumers, initially launched the Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service in August. Today, it announced its Beta 2 release and pricing, taking aim at Amazon's AWS S3 cloud service with what it says is a more cost-effective and resilient approach.

The Tardigrade storage service claims 99.97% availability, and said its prices are less than half the starting prices of legacy cloud storage providers. For example, Amazon S3 list prices are currently $23 per terabyte for static storage per month. Amazon S3 also claims uptimes that range from 95% to 99%.

"Across the three main providers, those prices average at $22 per terabyte for static storage and $99 per terabyte for bandwidth," Storj Labs said in a blog post. "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."

Storj's Tardigrade storage service beta currently has 400 active users.

Users who rent out space on their hard drives earn STORJ, a form of currency that can be used to purchase capacity on Storj's Tardigrade service. (The users earn STORJ by selling excess hard drive space and can use it to purchase space on the Storj Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service via the company's file sharing app.)

Storj is by no means alone. P2P compute storage services have grown over the past several years to include a dozen options, but none have seen "reasonable" enterprise adoption, according to Raj Bala, a Gartner research director.

"These services may be half the price of Amazon S3, but they’re 100 times greater risk given the decentralized nature of the storage and the nascent companies behind them," Bala said via email. "Comparatively, AWS is a trusted provider with 10s of exabytes under management. I am also very skeptical of the performance claims being made relative to S3, particularly when objects need to be rebuilt in case a peer in the storage network disappears."

Cloud storage provider Backblaze offers capacity through its B2 service at a quarter the price of Amazon AWS, but without the risk a P2P architecture poses, Bala said.

"B2 is built and operated by sophisticated people from a technical perspective with a successful track record. So one need not use a P2P storage service just to save money," Bala said.

Bala also criticized P2P-based storage services for claiming to use blockchain's innate cryptography and resilliency when, in fact, the distributed ledger technology is only used for the purposes of payment.

Storj Labs' CEO Ben Golub, however, pointed out that in 2017 Amazon AWS storage service experienced a massive outage in the US-EAST-1 region, and while due to human error, it was because of the more centralized nature of the vendor.

Storj's Tardigarde service is fault tolerant because the hard drives are located throughout the world and data is stored in a way similar to a RAID configuration in a traditional storage server – redundancy is built into the scheme.

"The data is encrypted first, so we never see it, and then we tyipcally break it up into 80 pieces of which 29 are necessary to put it back together," Golub said. "But, we can change that math depending on the use case."

The Tardigrade service charges $10 per terabyte per month, or 1 cent per gigabyte, for static storage. (Storing 1 terabyte for 30 days, two terabytes of data for 15 days or three terabytes for 10 days would each be the equivalent of 1 terabyte month). The service charges $45 per terabyte, or 45 cents per gigabyte, of download bandwidth consumed. (Storj does not charge for upload bandwidth.)