Tiny startup could challenge Wasabi, iDrive, and BackBlaze with sovereign EU cloud storage solution at rock-bottom prices

• At just €6 per terabyte, Storadera undercuts US cloud giants
• It skipped SSDs for HDDs to slash costs while maintaining solid speeds
• Storadera plans to expand into Germany, the UK, and beyond

Storadera, a Tallinn-based cloud startup, is offering some of the best cloud storage for photos with S3-compatible storage at €6/TB/month. This puts it head-to-head with providers like Backblaze, which offers a slightly lower rate of €4.75/TB/month.

The company's pitch lies not just in low pricing but also in jurisdiction. Being a Europe-based startup, its stored data is beyond the direct jurisdiction of non-EU countries, making it appealing to organizations that require data sovereignty.

Storadera’s architecture relies on HDDs rather than SSDs for primary writes. “If we can offer fast enough service on 10x less expensive hardware, then it sounds like magic,” Tommi Kannisto, the founder of Storadera, explained.

Hyperconverged setup

While SSDs are used for metadata, accounting for just 0.05 percent of total disk space, all major writes are done to traditional disks. "QLC 100-plus TB SSDs are still too expensive – and probably will be for the next ten years,” Kannisto said.

The company uses a hyperconverged setup, with all servers writing to JBODs – racks containing 102 conventional Western Digital hard drives – using erasure coding schemes such as 4+2 and 6+2, with 8+2 coming soon. Each server has 32GB of RAM and runs services written in 100,000 lines of Go code.

“All software runs in all servers and all servers write to all JBODs. There is no load balancer unit,” Kannisto said.

The system adapts to load, using “small blocks at times of low load with bigger blocks used at high load times,” and can achieve “close to 300MBps with 2MB files.” It is also preparing to implement higher-capacity shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives to reduce capital expenditure by up to 25 percent. Storadera also offers bucket geo-replication, object locking for immutability, and integrity checks every 60 days.

The company says it is doing well financially, with around 100 customers, including Telia and the Estonian government. It has positioned itself as one of the best cloud storage and cloud backup options available.

Despite making slightly less than €1 million a year, the company says it is sustainable and eyeing further growth. “We are profitable… we make a very good profit [and] we’re growing 5 percent/month in revenue,” Kannisto said.

Storadera plans to expand into Germany by mid-2025, and aims to enter the UK, and possibly North America or the Asia-Pacific region, later in the year

Via Blocksandfiles

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