Storadera as an European alternative to AWS and Wasabi

I invited Storadera to participate to the 1st European edition of The IT Press Tour we organized in September 2022 in Paris. Globally at that time, it was the 45th edition as we continue to promote our US and European tours.

During that Paris tour, we discovered a young player developing an alternative solution to AWS S3 or Wasabi even, Backblaze B2 cloud storage references. And it was the perfect time last week for the 61st edition to meet Tommi Kannisto, CEO and founder of Storadera, for a company and product update.

Storadera, an Estonian company, has made great progress with a new data center in Amsterdam in addition to the historical one in Tallinn. And the team is looking for new partners to open new data center to deploy its cloud storage software service. At the same time, to accelerate its growth, the firm is open for cash ingestion to support its expansion.

To refresh our readers, the company develops a cloud object storage offering exposing a compatible AWS S3 API for, essentially, data protection usages such as backup and archive. The vast majority of I/Os are writes and it invited the team to optimize its S3 stack to deliver high performance in this mode. The language used for the software is Go.

The implementation doesn't rely on gateway or proxy in front of storage units but rather on servers directly connected to Internet. Also these servers leverage local JBODs, the team picked Western Digital Data102 with CMR-HDD for the moment. As these machines are exposed directly to incoming data flows, they receive small and large files. And it turns out that small files are very common, for instance with Veeam, and not a good mode for HDDs, being more suited for SSDs. But introducing SSD would impact the service price and will segregate data instead of using a horizontal effective model with Intel, Linux, Ethernet, HDD... Usually a HDD can deliver 150-200 IOPS which appears to be almost ridiculous today when we read SS specifications confirming that HDD are good for bandwidth. So something has to be done to deliver enough performance for small files targeting HDDs. And here we touch one of the key IP of Storadera with the Variable Block Size Technology. Tommi Kannisto is a true believer that a lot of things can be done in software especially to compensate some HDD drawbacks and solve the equation HDD + Software approaches SSD. We all remember what Infinidat built many years ago with HDD and RAM vs. SSD. The main idea is to delay physical writes with data accumulating in memory then flushing large data chunks.

Data protection is achieved with local Reed Solomon based erasure coding (EC) coupled with optional geo replication. EC is implemented with configurable 4+2 or 6+2 tolerating 2 failures. It means that the deployment model is based of a minimum of 3 independent servers. Each disk receives large block stored in large data chunks. This data spreading is essential for the resiliency of the platform but also contributes to the global performance impacted by even more small data parts of data segmentation would influence that behavior.

Beyond what we already mentioned, Storadera supports a rich features set with S3 v4, object lock, regular data integrity checks to avoid silent corruption and encryption at-rest and via HTTPS. Some AI for storage will be added to improve reading and deletion, globally to optimize the data lifecycle. The team is thinking also about adding host-managed SMR-HDD to gain storage capacity, increase margin and potentially reduce power for long term data preservation.

One of the values of Storadera service is the service price with 6€/TB/month without any traffic, import or export, charge. So it is very predictable. The company will open other data centers with Germany in 2025 and thinking about UK, USA, Canada and APAC.