“Wasabi Technologies is a next-generation cloud storage company disrupting the market. We have a high-performance offering at a disruptively low price.” Said CEO David Friend (pictured). If his name sounds familiar it’s because David founded Carbonite with Jeff Flowers.
“We had an idea for a new storage architecture faster and cheaper than anything on the planet,” he exclaimed in an exclusive, live, in-person interview.
The company developed their solution for two years – using their knowledge from Carbonite to actually control the heads of the disks on the hard drives as opposed to handing off the task to Linux like competitive solutions.
This allows the company to pack more data on the disks and minimize head movement. The company is the second largest purchaser of SMR drives made by Seagate. SMR stands for shingled magnetic recording and allows for increased storage density and capacity by overlapping disk writes on parts of previously recorded ones.
“Our goal is to make storage into a commodity, like electricity and bandwidth. It’s so cheap and fast, there is no need to run in-house storage,” said David. “There is one tier. It’s faster than Amazon S3 and cheaper than Amazon Glacier. There is no need for 6-7 tiers between and it is identical to S3 in terms of interface.” He concluded, “It works with Amazon’s own products and has 11 nines of durability.”
We are what “Iron Mountain is to a box of paper. The default choice for storage, always the cheapest and fastest,” he exclaimed.
Wasabi has leveraged its Carbonite relationship to receive low prices for drives.”
Wasabi Promotional video comparing self to Amazon S3
This allows them to offer storage at $6 per terabyte per month compared to Amazon at $23 for the first 50 TB.
“Amazon charges for everything,” he exclaimed.
He went on to say, egress, API, put, get and delete.
Wasabi on the other hand charges just for storage. “One line item Vs. 20,” he exclaimed.
The company took five months to sell the first petabyte and now sells this amount every few days, growing 14-20% month-over-month. They currently have data centers in Virginia, Oregon and Amsterdam.
They think Europe is going to be big. Their go-to-market strategy is entirely channel for the EU. Speaking of which, they have 700 channel partners and are looking to grow this approach with a new partner interface, partner API and a segmented bill, allowing the partner to determine how much storage each customer is using.
This is done programmatically and integrates to their billing and provisioning systems.
“My guess is channel is going to be the predominate way of growing in the US market,” said David.
“The channel can make 50% margin and be half the price of Amazon,” he exclaimed. “You can run a petabyte on Wasabi for less than price of maintenance for EMC.”
Wasabi is being used in numerous areas including content management, data backup, CDNs, analytical software, surveillance, IoT, biometrics, genomics, satellite imagery, medical imagery, AI and ML.
“Demand is just exploding and the world is just starting to move storage to the cloud so we are at the right place at right time with the right product,” he exclaimed.
He told us channel partners want to do business with people who don’t compete with them – the Amazon rep often muscles out the MSP.
“I feel really good about the channel,” he exclaimed. “Everyone wants cloud storage in their bag of tricks.”
Wasabi allows partners to white label the solution and change the logo or identity. David reminded us one final time that they are the utility and an ideal product for the channel.
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