Object storage, made in the UK
For some people, location really matters.
Laws govern in which countries certain data can be stored, or the speed of light restricts how far away you can put it, or a desire to know who you're trusting with your valuable assets constrains your choice of suppliers. And, sometimes, perception matters more than anything else. "Buy British" carries weight with customers, as does supporting local business.
Leeds-based cloud infrastructure provider Brightbox just announced their latest offering in this space; "the UK's first geo-redundant object store," Orbit.
Orbit is based on OpenStack's storage project, Swift, and stores three copies of every data object with data replication across Brightbox's two data centres in the Manchester area.
Orbit costs £0.05 per GB per month (after a free trial period until the end of January). Compare that to AWS just across the Irish Sea in Dublin, which costs $0.03 (£0.019), and it looks expensive. But compared to Rackspace Cloud Files, which costs £0.07 per GB per month in the UK, it looks cheap.
Amazon makes broadly similar claims to Brightbox's regarding multi-data centre redundancy, while Rackspace appears to store redundant copies across different availability zones within a single facility. Of course price isn't the only consideration in any of this, but Brightbox co-founder Jeremy Jarvis notes that customers with huge data storage requirements might prefer Brightbox to give them a private managed instance of Swift; which would work out cheaper at scale.
For existing Brightbox customers, and for anyone with a need or desire to store data on this island, Orbit is worth a look.
