As a product becomes popular, it becomes commoditized and the price goes down. That’s an inevitable law of business. So it goes with online backup and storage. With more and more players entering the market, the race to the bottom has begun. Now Cloud Leverage is out to beat everyone with real cheap storage. How cheap? Enterprise Storage Forum has the numbers.
A new cloud data storage company came out of stealth mode this week, promising enterprise-class online storage a for a nickel a gigabyte per month with no data transfer or bandwidth charges.
Asked how Cloud Leverage can afford to offer enterprise-class cloud storage for so little, company President and CTO Jonathan Hoppe replied, “Great question. I wish more people would ask other providers why they are charging so much.”
Hoppe said Cloud Leverage “does not take any shortcuts in terms of performance, redundancy and security,” and is profitable at its price of a nickel a gigabyte per data center, particularly if customers use the service for a full year.
“Storage costs have decreased steadily over time, and we have been able to leverage these lower prices,” Hoppe said. “If you look at the history of storage, when Amazon came out with their storage offering, SATA storage had just reached a new all-time low of roughly $1 per gigabyte. Today, Amazon’s storage is only slightly cheaper, but SATA storage is now 10 cents per gigabyte (based on a 2TB disk drive). So all the providers using commodity storage, like Amazon, do not seem to be lowering their prices to reflect their cost savings.”