Top 5 Questions from NAB 2019

I'm just wrapping up a week in Las Vegas, splitting my time between the NAB show and the Channel Partners Expo. Everybody needs storage, so it was a great week for us signing up some important new customers and resellers. But I kept hearing some of the same questions over and over again, so I thought I would post some answers because in all likelihood you, the readers, probably have the same questions.

Q: How can you be so much cheaper than Amazon?
A: We're cloud storage experts. About 12 years ago (about the same time that Amazon introduced S3) we started a backup company called Carbonite which stores hundreds of petabytes of backups. We learned a lot. Wasabi is a completely new generation of storage architecture utilizing a new disk technology called SMR. Our engineers know how to actually “grab hold” of the heads on the disk drives and put the bits on disk where we want them to go. We are able to use more of the physical bits on disk and we are able to extend the life of the drives by minimizing head movement. And many other tricks we learned over the years. Amazon's product is now 12 years old and is written on top of Linux. You'll never get to our cost point or speed with that kind of 12-year-old technology.

Q: How can you afford to eliminate egress charges?
A: Customer hate egress charges, so we decided to eliminate them, and all other “hidden charges” that appear on a typical Amazon bill. It turns out that free egress isn't that onerous from a financial standpoint. Typically our users access only 10-20% of their data on a monthly basis. This means that we have a lot more data coming in than going out. So we have a lot of excess outbound bandwidth. Allowing customers to have free egress, therefore, is almost free.

Q: How is Wasabi different from S3?
A: Well, to start with we're about 1/5th the price of S3 and up to 6x faster. A terabyte of storage with Wasabi costs $6/month whereas a terabyte in S3 costs $23/Mo. Plus, if you access 20% of your data every month, that would add 200GBx$.09 = $18 to your Amazon bill, for a total of $41. Wasabi egress is free, so your Wasabi bill would still be $6, in this case about 1/7th the cost of Amazon S3. We know from our Carbonite days that most data loss is due to human error, bugs in application software, and sabotage. If you store your data in a Wasabi immutable bucket, nobody can overwrite or delete it for a fixed period of time. This is great when you know you're going to store your data for an extended period.

Q: Why is now the right time to move to the cloud?
A: Because now it's cheaper than on-prem storage. If you have EMC, NetApp, or other storage equipment, it's eventually going to go out of warranty and become obsolete. You can store a petabyte of data in Wasabi for less than just the annual maintenance on a petabyte of on-prem storage. And then you never have to worry about upgrade, maintenance, hardware refreshes, or ability to provide remote access. Dropping the price of cloud storage by 80% has really changed the equation, so the time is now!

Q: Can I easily migrate from LTO tape to Wasabi cloud storage?
A: Yes, and all that content that is nearly inaccessible on LTO will suddenly be at your fingertips in milliseconds. There are numerous products on the market that make migration straightforward, and we have partners like Iron Mountain who are experts at migration to the cloud. Contact us for details and help.

Q: How do I get started?
A: You can sign up for a free trial on the Wasabi web site, or just click the “Contact Sales” button and we'll connect you with someone who can answer all your technical questions.