Storj Labs, Inc. announced the beta release for its V3 software and launched the beta for its decentralized cloud storage service Tardigrade, a subsidiary of Storj Labs.

Tardigrade is a decentralized cloud storage service designed to deliver enterprise-grade SLAs, performance, and reliability. The platform, built on V3, is where partners, developers, and cloud storage users can go to purchase enterprise cloud object storage services powered by the company.

“The $80 billion cloud storage industry is demanding new innovative solutions that lower costs and improve security and privacy, without sacrificing performance and reliability. V3 and Tardigrade will change the paradigm for object storage in the cloud,” said Ben Golub, executive chairman, and interim CEO, Storj Labs. “Today’s release allows our partners, customers, and users to evaluate decentralized cloud storage by running their enterprise applications and services on a production-like network. We’re excited to see how our Open Source Partner Program members and other customers adopt and utilize Tardigrade to innovate their product offerings.“

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Along with the launch of the Tardigrade beta, the company is also welcoming select developers onto the network. Over 11,000 developers who are currently on the waiting list can begin deploying applications using Tardigrade as their storage back end. In addition, all of the firm’s Open Source Partner Program members can begin storing data on Tardigrade. Members passively earn revenue every time users of their software store data on Tardigrade. These partners can now invite users to begin testing and evaluating Tardigrade for their backup and production environments.

The V3 network is more scalable, decentralized, and economical than the previous version of the network and is designed for the needs of enterprise users. It prioritizes performance, availability, and reliability on par with similar major cloud providers but at half the price.

Using the Minio S3 gateway, existing applications can switch to storing on Tardigrade by changing just a few lines of code, allowing users to evaluate the Storj network and Tardigrade platform without having to integrate APIs through its developer library.

“As the earliest partner of Storj Labs, we’re eager to put the platform into the hands of our users and allow them to take control of their data once again,” said Roberto Galoppini, director, strategy, FileZilla. “We firmly believe in open, private, secure platforms and FileZilla and Tardigrade can deliver that for users looking to share files with their friends and colleagues.“

The V3 network from the company solves many challenges found in decentralized cloud storage solutions. By incorporating Reed Solomon erasure coding, the firm’s team has been able to reduce expansion factor for data stored on the network, decreasing it from 8x to less than 3x. The V3 network is also much more scalable and can support storing exabytes of data. It also enables straightforward decentralization using technologies and approaches like allowing anyone to operate a Satellite metadata region; incorporating Macaroons and deterministic, hierarchically-derived encryption keys for access management; and utilizing IP filtering to ensure data stored on the network remains distributed.

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Beta release delivers key features
Tardigrade enterprise users depend upon for cloud object storage needs, including:

• Scalability – Has been designed to scale to support exabytes of data.

• Performance – Will deliver performance comparable to Amazon S3 and other centralized cloud storage providers. Even while in beta, it has delivered upload and download speeds that are on par with or better than S3. For example, a 10MB file can be uploaded to the network with a median time of 2.15s and downloaded with a median time of 1.69s. Even at the 95th percentile, those times change by less than a quarter of a second.

• Durability – Since the final alpha network wipe, has delivered 100% durability (i.e. no file loss).

• Retrievability – The ability to download a file on the first attempt is over 99.93%.

• Affordability – At half the price of centralized cloud storage providers, can save users millions on their cloud storage bills.

• Easy-to-use – Designed for users to be intuitive and simple to use with built-in Amazon S3 compatibility.

To get started with Tardigrade, users can incorporate the Minio S3 gateway and start storing data on the network in just a few minutes.

The platform can also be integrated into applications using the CLI and libuplink developer library in Golang, C, and Android to take advantage of the network’s capabilities. These libraries provide similar ease-of-development commands and bindings that are consistent with common languages, making integration intuitive.

Resources:
Blog: Announcing Beta: Pioneer 1 V3 and Tardigrade Are Here
Blog: The Role of Qualification Gates in Getting to Beta and Beyond
Storj pays you for your unused hard drive capacity and bandwidth       
The Open Source Partner Program

Read also:
Storj Labs: Public Alpha V3 Platform to Opening Doors for Developers Interested in Building on Decentralized Cloud Storage
With white paper which outlines architecture and key components behind upcoming V3 decentralized cloud storage network
November 9,  2018 | Press Release