SpiderOak unveils Amazon S3 rival, Nimbus

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: SpiderOak, a cloud back-up, sync and sharing service provider, announced Nimbus.io, an open-source alternative to Amazon's S3 cloud storage service.

This makes source code and detailed documentation available to developers wishing to participate in the project.

"Nimbus.io is a fresh design based on what we've learned operating the SpiderOak archival storage service since 2007," said Alan Fairless, CTO, SpiderOak. "Its free and open source backend software and hardware enables developers to either purchase storage from us or run their own storage clusters locally for a fraction of the price of similar services. There's work left to do, but we're well on our way towards turning Nimbus.io into a world-class long-term archival storage system."

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Instead of data replication, Nimbus.io uses parity-based redundant storage suited for cool data, addressing the need for a low-cost, off-the-shelf solution for reliable long-term archival data storage.

"Nimbus.io delivers long-term archival storage at dramatically lower prices than companies including Amazon S3, Google and Rackspace, while providing high throughput for the large requests associated with the creation and restoration of archival data," claims the company in a release.

At $0.06 per gigabyte, the upcoming commercial Nimbus.io storage service is priced substantially lower than leading services, and could lower customers' monthly bills by as much as two-thirds. Nimbus.io's server software is free software made available under the AGPL license, the release adds.

Its client components, also free and open source, are available under LGPL. This opens up a wide range of possibilities for developers to use cloud storage on their own websites.

Although the present version of Nimbus.io is available only by invitation, SpiderOak expects the commercial service to go live during the first quarter of 2012. Nimbus.io is scheduled to be deployed in production use at SpiderOak during Q1 2012, and to fully replace all previous storage systems by the end of 2012.