Ninefold brings cloud storage out of private beta

Local cloud provider Ninefold has moved its cloud storage service into public beta, offering to waive fees for a week.

The service had been in private beta for several weeks with an undisclosed number of customers.

For its public beta, Ninefold offered to waive storage and transaction fees until 31 March, with users to pay only outbound traffic costs at $0.90 a GB a month.

After the beta period, users would be charged a flat fee of $0.092 a GB a month for storage, regardless of the amount of data they put into the cloud.

By comparison, Amazon charged $0.093 a GB a month up to the first Terabyte for its "four nines" S3 storage service (99.99 percent uptime), but offered discounts when users hit certain storage volume tiers.

Ninefold managing director Peter James foreshadowed the release of a "whole range of pricing mechanisms" in the coming months.

He believed customers would be swayed by jurisdiction (data stored in Australia) and low latency, not just price.

Ninefold also charged $0.01 for each 10,000 transactions. Eventually, fees would be applied for inbound traffic, although James did not disclose when that would occur.

Ninefold's service aimed to provide three nines' reliability (99.9 percent uptime).

What was unclear was the technology platform that underpinned Ninefold's cloud storage service.

James repeatedly told iTnews that the company was "vendor neutral" and had technology from about 12 vendors in its architecture.

He declined to name the vendor of any piece of technology Ninefold used – including the underpinning storage platform - insisting that every piece of technology and the way the pieces were integrated was too commercially sensitive to disclose.

He said only that the underpinning storage hardware had been "purpose-built".

Ninefold was a subsidiary of Macquarie Telecom. It was hosted in Macquarie's Sydney CBD data centre.

The company also provided a cloud compute platform that competed with Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.