HITS

Wasabi Challenges Hardware Storage Giants With Innovative, Disruptive Pricing Model (HITS)

Wasabi announced a disruptive new Reserved Capacity Storage pricing model that allows customers to purchase a reserved amount of cloud storage for a fixed price for periods of 1,3, or 5 years. This new pricing model allows customers to easily compare the cost of cloud storage to the cost of on-premises storage hardware.

RCS also makes it easy for Wasabi channel partners to sell cloud storage capacity as a SKU in the same way that they would sell a new on-premises storage appliance.

When it is time for a technology refresh or time to update hardware, Wasabi RCS is a perfect solution to support back-up, archive and other cloud storage strategies like hybrid and multi-cloud architectures in a more cost-effective manner than on-premises storage hardware. For example, a 100 TB storage appliance from one of the leading manufacturers has a list price of approximately $130,000. With maintenance, the five year total cost would be well over $240,000, not including data center and people costs. By contrast, a 100 TB/5 year Wasabi’s Reserved Capacity Storage package costs under $40,000, including premium technical support.

RCS is an ideal option for those businesses that prefer one-time payments to monthly billing such as educational institutions, government agencies, nonprofits, large enterprises as well as channel partners such as value added resellers and system integrators. Wasabi’s research has shown that these institutions prefer the predictability of a fixed price PO to variable monthly bills. Channel partners can also expand their margins by purchasing RCS and then reselling it to their customers.

One of Wasabi’s first RCS customers Cory Pierce, IT Manager and Associate Principal of Midwest-based Architectural and Engineering design firm The Clark Enersen Partners shares, “As a multidiscipline firm working on projects spanning multiple industries, we are highly protective of our data and will only utilize partners we can trust. Wasabi was easy to use and interfaced well with our existing storage solutions. With Wasabi’s RCS pricing model we were able to realize substantial cost savings and modernize an aging archive workflow which gave us more immediate access to our data. Storing our data with Wasabi with the RCS pricing model was a logical choice.”

As cloud storage becomes increasingly popular, many companies conclude that not all of their data should reside off-site. RCS fits the hybrid cloud model where some data is stored on-premises and other data is stored in the cloud. Popular uses for RCS include backups, second copies of data, and archives. Best practices mandate that companies keep one copy of their data off-site, and RCS offers a simple and extremely cost effective way to move copies of data to secure Wasabi locations, all at a guaranteed fixed price.

The model is also beneficial for Wasabi’s channel partners who are transitioning clients to the cloud. Unlike reserved capacity pricing from the hyperscalers, Wasabi has no fees for egress or API requests, so the RCS price is exactly how much the customer will pay for storage, no matter how many times they access their data.

“As customers migrate their data to the cloud, we want to be able to offer them a pricing model that compares favorably to how they purchase on-premises storage hardware. Companies are used to buying hardware and issuing one-time purchase orders. We want to make buying cloud storage just like buying hardware. RCS helps customers with budgeting, purchasing, and planning their storage,” says David Friend, CEO of Wasabi. “With most of the world’s data still stored in on-premises hardware, we want to make it easy for people to migrate their data to the cloud and start saving enormous amounts of money in the process.”