After starting six companies with fellow tech veteran Jeff Flowers since 1980, Wasabi Technologies Inc. co-founder David Friend (@Wasabi_Dave) (pictured, left) has clearly learned to name names when it comes to competition.

“If you know what Amazon S3 cloud storage is, you pretty much know what Wasabi is — except we’re one fifth the price and six times as fast,” Friend told Sam Kahane (@Sam_Kahane), during an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio.

Wasabi’s cheap commodity storage design came to Flowers when he and Friend were at the backup and restore solutions company they founded called Carbonite Inc. Friend left the company to flesh out this design, which took such impressive shape that Flowers decided to leave Carbonite and join Flowers in launching Wasabi.

From the start, the two pulled no punches from cloud providers like Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. making bank from complicated tiered storage systems. These tiers are meant to protect those companies’ high price spreads, Friend said, calling them “silly.”

Storage is not so complicated as these companies make it, and Wasabi aims to prove this by delivering it as a commodity just like electricity or bandwidth, Friend said. Cheap bandwidth made streaming apps and services like Netflix possible, and Wasabi might enable a bunch of new storage-intensive apps like Instagram and Pinterest, Friend predicted.

“Anytime you drop the price of anything by 80 percent, unexpected things are going to happen,” he said.

So why would anyone continue using S3 with Wasabi now available?

Immutable variable

The one functional difference between S3 and Wasabi is that Wasabi’s built-in immutable buckets, which are like folders for object storage files. Attempts to delete or alter any data in an immutable bucket returns an error message — that is what WannaCry ransomware would see if it attempted a breach, said Friend, noting the obvious security bonus.

The downside of immutability is that once data is in a bucket, Wasabi users cannot go in and “clean it up,” in Friend’s words. “You’re going to be stuck paying to store that data for a long time, but at our price of .39 cents per gigabyte per month, I don’t think anybody would bother ever trying to clean it up anyway,” he added.

The many eager customers that swamped Wasabi’s launch are buying what the company is selling, according to Friend. “By 48 hours in, we were over 150, and by one more day, we were at over 200, and we kind of had to shut down new signups, because it was just more than we could handle,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below:

Photo: SiliconANGLE