Wasabi Cloud Storage

Designed to be a drop-in replacement for AWS S3 for multi-cloud solutions, Wasabi is value-oriented, high-performance, low-latency, and highly-available cloud object storage offering.

Guidance

Wasabi is S3-compatible cloud object storage, which is intended to be a drop-in replacement for Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (S3). It can be integrated with AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure solutions, using the same protocol and tools. There are no archival or warm storage tiers; it is all low-latency “hot” storage. Since Wasabi does not charge the same ancillary fees for manipulating data, it's easier to predict a month-to-month cost.

Use this option when you…

Need a cost-effective cloud storage solution.
Don't want to worry about GET, PUT, transitions and other operational or transaction costs.
Want greater predictability when estimating monthly storage costs.
Can't reliably separate or identify which data is static, dynamic, archive-ready or highly transactional.
Are comfortable integrating different cloud vendors.
Need optional versioning.

Example Use Cases

Delivering web application assets and content.

Target for backup software.

Hold data for analysis.

Integration with service pipelines.

Cost Considerations

Your cost will vary each month, based on usage.

Your department Chartstring will be charged each month.

There is a minimum charge equal to 1 TB.

See the FAQ below for more information.

Support

The Berkeley IT Storage and Backup team will:

provision a Wasabi account and charge a department Chartstring every month based on actual usage.

provide initial environment information and access.

be responsible for communication and working with Wasabi in regards to major incidents.

By using the Berkeley IT Storage and Backup Wasabi service a user gets full access to Wasabi technical support via email.

Your service is self-managed, you will be responsible for all aspects of security compliance associated with your Wasabi account.

For additional product information please see the FAQs below or visit the Wasabi website.

Service details

Service Owner

Berkeley IT | Campus IT Infrastructure | Network & Data Center Services

Service category

Systems and Data Infrastructure

FAQ

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What is Wasabi?

Wasabi is an inexpensive, fast and reliable, popular cloud object storage service. It’s designed to be 100% compatible and interoperable with the Simple Storage Service (S3) available from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Consider Wasabi as a drop-in replacement for S3 when designing cloud-based storage solutions.

What are the benefits of Wasabi over alternatives?

Lower and more predictable costs

Using cloud object storage from Amazon, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure results in charges for transactions with your data. Common and necessary operations, including transitioning between storage tiers, retrieving data, restoring files, and deleting data "early" resulting in penalties, make it challenging to predict your monthly costs. Cloud vendors’ calculators are frustrating to use, and misjudgments can be expensive.Wasabi charges for only two activities: the month-to-month storage of data and early object deletion before 30 days. You are not charged:

data ingress or egress fees.
API operational or a transaction fee (e.g., for using GET, PUT, or transitions).
tiering (i.e., there is only one tier of storage — hot storage).
early object deletion after 30 days (reduced from 90 or even 365 days used by other cloud storage services).

As a result, Wasabi is substantially less expensive than comparable alternatives.

Security and compliance (PL1/PL2)

Like other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, Wasabi employs a shared-responsibility model for comprehensive data security and privacy. They maintain the infrastructure, provide automatic encryption of all storage at rest and require TLS when transmitting over a network. Wasabi maintains data centers that are highly secure, fully redundant, and certified for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance. They also meet the infrastructure requirements for various compliance regimes, including HIPAA, HITECH, and FERPA.

The shared-responsibility model imposes data protection measures on the users of these services. The University’s Minimum Security Standards outline these actions and apply to everyone in the UC Berkeley community. Enabling encryption of data prior to leaving the source helps protect Moderate and High-Risk data from unauthorized access.

Reduced data retrieval delays

Wasabi offers only hot storage, without the lengthy retrieval times usually associated with cold or archive storage tiers.

Versioning and immutability

Options for versioning and immutability are available.

NOTE: The service does not include support for backups or data transfers, but the Berkeley IT Storage and Backup team does provide a free consultation to help campus customers get started with their Wasabi storage environment.

What are some examples of ways I might use Wasabi?

Backup and recovery target destination - One of the most common uses for cloud object storage is to be the target destination for commercial backup and recovery software, like MSP360 (formerly CloudBerry Backup), CommVault, Cohesity, and Veeam. Popular free and open source backup and recovery software like BorgBackup, restic, duplicati, kopia, and Bacula work with Wasabi, too.

Serve and store digital content - Wasabi can be integrated with your existing AWS EC2 virtual machines, too, just like native S3 storage. Digital assets like images and files can be hosted in Wasabi but served by your Amazon virtual machine. Compute services in Amazon can input and output data in Wasabi, too.

Cloud-based Elastic File Service - Enterprise services like ObjectiveFS can use Wasabi as a POSIX-compatible hierarchical file system with cloud object storage backend for use with AWS, Google Cloud Platform or on-premise compute clusters.

Non-technical users have options - They can also use software like Mountain Duck or ExpandDrive to present an infinitely expandable virtual hard drive on their laptop, with caching, high-performance synchronization, and offline access to frequently used files. Users can simply drag and drop their files to the virtual disk’s folders like a traditional file server.

What tools are compatible with Wasabi?

Nearly any service or tool that can interact with AWS S3 can also interact with Wasabi. This includes the free AWS-cli, gcloud, rclone command-line tools from Amazon and Google, respectively. Wasabi provides a free cloud storage browsing tool, Wasabi Explorer, with a graphical user interface (GUI) available free of charge . Open source projects like Cyberduck, Mountain Duck, S3 Browser provide a polished experience when browsing, synchronizing, and transferring data. Backup software like restic and MSP360 also are compatible with Wasabi.The vendor maintains a database of certified tools and software that’s been evaluated to work without issue.

Who can use the Storage and Backup Wasabi service?

The Wasabi storage service is available to individuals and units with a full-service calnet id and UC Berkeley chartstring billing account. The service does not include support for backups or data transfers, but the Storage and Backup team will provide initial environment information and access, and the team will be responsible for communication and working with Wasabi in regard to major incidents.

What does the Wasabi service cost?

The cost is what Wasabi charges the UC Berkeley IT Department Storage and Backup team with no markup.

Our rate for Wasabi is $5.99 per terabyte, per month (starting minimum 1TB).

How does the Storage and Backup team bill you for the Wasabi service?

The Berkeley IT Storage and Backup team receives billing data from Wasabi every 30 days and passes along each subscriber's cost for their individual use. Your UC Berkeley chartstring is billed monthly.

How does Wasabi bill the Storage and Backup team?

Wasabi calculates storage charges for each gigabyte, each day. They also calculate the same price per gigabyte for the whole month, if that gigabyte of data is deleted before the 30-day minimum retention has passed. Wasabi uses base-2 to define gigabytes and terabytes for storage calculation.

Wasabi’s billing period is 30 days