

Data stored in Glacier can shift to higher-cost access tiers should users access the data more frequently than intended. Glacier, Amazon's colder storage tier, offers a similar price point as IDrive but has slower access times.

It's the low end of the cloud storage market." "They slightly more than Amazon Glacier offer slightly faster performance. "It makes a lot of sense for archive data," Staimer said. Use cases such as Veeam backups fit for a service such as IDrive, Staimer said, because they don't demand the litany of features sold by a hyperscaler such as AWS or Microsoft Azure, nor will the data cost as much to store. IDrive e2 has eight data centers in the U.S., but the company plans to expand its footprint with data centers in Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. "It's a plug-and-play approach."īeyond S3 compatibility, IDrive e2 also includes features such as bucket versioning and object lock as well as a web console to manage data. "You don't have to train or educate anyone on S3," Kulkarni said. He specifically noted that Veeam customers could use IDrive e2 to store backups. Taking the time to develop that interoperability is worthwhile, as it expands IDrive e2 use cases to popular application and service connections using the S3 protocol, Kulkarni said. You don't have to train or educate anyone on S3. "It was a natural extension for our engineers."ĭespite the ubiquity of the S3 protocol among cloud developers and storage services, the Amazon Simple Storage Service remains a proprietary protocol of AWS, Staimer said. "We are a little bit late to the game, so to speak, but we wanted to create something that was very unique," he said. The experience of building up the data center infrastructure and storing data for both personal use and smaller businesses made the addition of object storage a natural progression, Kulkarni said. The company currently manages about 400 PB of data across 4 million users, according to Raghu Kulkarni, CEO of IDrive. IDrive has been in business since 1995, primarily selling online backup software and storage to individuals and small businesses, with some expansion of its backup services into the enterprise market. Why not try to sell it?" Business-class storage

"They took a page out of Backblaze's book," Staimer said. The price and feature list put them into direct competition with other S3-compatible object storage services providers, such as Backblaze, Wasabi and Seagate's Lyve Cloud, said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting. IDrive said it charges no ingress or egress fees for the service and doesn't charge for downloading data.įor comparison, AWS charges around $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB per month for the S3 Standard storage class.

IDrive e2, now generally available, offers the first 10 GB of object storage for free with additional space priced at $0.004 per GB, per month.
