Distributed cloud backup service provider Symform is bringing bartering to the cloud. The company is offering unlimited online capacity to customers in exchange for their excess local disk capacity.

The new program, which Symform terms”Bytes or Bucks,” allows customers to pay 15 cents per GB per month for its Symform Cloud Storage Network service or provide 2 GB of space to Symform for each GB of data backed up on the Symform system. According to Margaret Dawson, vise president of product management for Symform “Our number one priority is getting more capacity available for customers,” she said. “In the market today, we’re seeing between 7 cents and 40 cents per GB per month. So we’re still very competitive. We’re not providing raw storage. We’re expanding data protection to the cloud.”

Symform is also offering customers discounted support for their excess capacity, Dawson said. “If the customer ends up providing more local drive space in excess of the 2-to-1 ration needed to maintain their ‘Bytes’ balance, we provide a discount for their support.” Applying peer-to-peer concepts to cloud storage is nothing new for Symform. The company came out of stealth mode in 2009 with its distributed cloud backup technology that protects customers’ data by dividing it into blocks, encrypting those blocks and then dispersing them across excess capacity on multiple customers’ storage devices.