>> Hi everyone, I'm Sam Kahane and you're watching theCUBE, on the ground, extremely excited for our segment here. Wasabi just launched last week on Wednesday. We have their co-founder and CEO with us here today on theCUBE. David, thank you for coming on today. >> Hey, nice to be here Sam. Thank you. >> So, unbelievably exciting. Can you tell the world about Wasabi? >> So 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. (laughing) >> Incredible. So, you know, co-founder and CEO of Carbonite decided to start Wasabi. Tell us, why Wasabi? >> Why the name Wasabi? >> Well, the name as well. >> Cause it's hot. (laughing) My co-founder Jeff Flowers, who's one of the great technical geniuses I've ever met in my life, came to me about three years ago, with this paper design for a new storage architecture, and said, "I think we could do something that's going to be far faster and far more efficient in storage than what the cloud providers Google, Amazon and Microsoft are doing," and I said okay, "Well you should go check it out." So he left Carbonite, and we spent about a year doing design work, and eventually we ended up with this design that was so compelling to me that I decided it was time to jump on board, and join Jeff again, and this is this is the sixth company that we founded together since 1980. So we kind of know how to complete each other's sentences. It's been a winning combination, there's been quite a lot of successes there. >> So, I'd love to hear about the vision of Wasabi. >> My vision of Wasabi and cloud storage in general is that cloud storage ought to be like electricity or bandwidth, it should just be a commodity. Right now you have all these silly tiers, you have Coldline and Nearline and Standard and Glacier, and these artificial tiers that Amazon, Google and Microsoft have made to try to protect their high price spread. Wasabi is faster than the fastest of them and it's cheaper than the cheapest of them, so why do you need all these silly things in the middle? It's just like electricity, you go to plug your computer or your blender into the wall, you don't have three different plugs, one for great electricity, one for so-so electricity and one for crumby but cheap electricity, you know, you just have one. So one size fits almost all needs, and I think that's the way cloud storage is going to be as well. When we get to that, it'll be best man wins, right? The guy with the best performance and the lowest cost is going to win, and we feel we can compete in that environment. >> So a buzzword I've been hearing is 'immutable buckets', can you tell me about that? >> Yeah, so that's the one functional difference between Amazon S3 and Wasabi, otherwise Wasabi is completely 100% plug compatible with Amazon. You can unplug Amazon, plug in Wasabi and all your applications should work, and the other way around too. That's part of being a commodity, right? Your suppliers should be interchangeable. But, immutable buckets is something which really came from our Carbonite heritage. We know from Carbonite that most data loss is not due to failing disk drives and things like that today, it's stupid mistakes, you know people accidentally overwrite or delete a file? It's bugs in application software cause data to get overwritten or deleted. Then you get things like Wannacry, which come in, grabs all the data on your computer and encrypts it. So immutability means if you store data in an immutable bucket, it cannot be altered, and it cannot be deleted. It can't be deleted by you, it can't be deleted by us, and it certainly can't be deleted by a hacker or somebody breaking in from the outside. So, about 10 or 20 years ago, people invented something called the WORM tape, write-once-read-many, that was really one of the first forms of immutable digital storage. Once you put your data on there, that was it, when the tape is full, you take it off, put it in the drawer, and it's safe. That's not a very good system by today's standards, but we've built immutability into Wasabi, so that when you create a bucket in Wasabi, and for those people who don't know about object storage technology, a bucket is like a folder, and an object is like a file, when you create a bucket in Wasabi, you can flip a switch and you can say, "I want to make this bucket immutable for 10 years," let's say, and any time you go in and try to erase or alter any of the data that's been written, you just get an error message, which is what the wannabe virus would have gotten had it tried to encrypt that data. So the only downside of immutability is once you put something in there, you can't go in and clean it up. You're going to be stuck paying to store that data for a long time, but at our price of 0.39 cents per gigabyte per month, I don't think anybody would bother ever trying to clean it up anyway. You know, it's like when's a good time to go empty that U-Haul storage locker? Eh, I'll write another cheque for $40 and think about it next time. (laughing) >> So your tag-on is a hot storage? >> Hot storage, yeah. >> So you launched one week ago, on Wednesday. Tell us about that first week, how crazy was it? >> Well the only thing we did was some PR, so there were a number of articles that appeared about us, and we were expecting maybe 15, 20 companies would come sign up in the first week, do a free trial. But 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 sign-ups because it was just more than we could handle. We were just worried that we would get overwhelmed. Now we're trying to catch up, we just put more storage online in the last 24 hours, and now we're working through the stack of people. I don't know how many more have come in since then, but it's been a lot, so we're working through that now to give people their passcodes so that they can get on the system, hopefully by this time next week we'll be caught up. >> Well congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks! >> Any last words that you want to leave the people with about Wasabi? >> Well anytime you drop the price of anything by 80%, unexpected things are going to happen. When bandwidth suddenly got cheap, you got Netflix and movies over the internet and that kind of stuff, which people hadn't even dreamed about. I'll be really interested to see what people do with really cheap, fast storage. When you think about all these storage intensive apps like Pinterest, Instagram and things that involve videos and so forth, storage has got to be your biggest cost. And most of these apps are free, so the only revenue you're going to get is going to be advertising. I'll bet there are a lot of business models that just won't work at Amazon's prices, but drop those prices by 80%, and now suddenly you say, "Wow, this could be profitable." I'm not going to invent those apps, but I'm sure that some of the people who are signing up for Wasabi today are thinking about things that didn't work in the old regime, but with commodity cloud storage at these low prices, it starts to make sense. So we'll see, I think it's going to change the world. >> I hope so, and it's going to be exciting to watch. >> Yeah, it'll be fun. >> We'll need to catch up again soon and check back in on the growth. But David, thank you for coming on theCUBE tonight! >> You're welcome Sam, thank you. >> And CUBENation, thank you for watching. (Outro music)