These questions provide information about the Wasabi Cloud Storage service offered by UIT.
- What is Wasabi?
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Wasabi is a 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 solutions.
- What are the benefits of Wasabi over alternatives?
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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 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.
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Network performance and high availability
Stanford uses their West Coast (Oregon) data centers, which provide 99.999999999% object durability.
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Security and compliance
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 Stanford community. Enabling encryption of data prior to leaving the source helps protect Moderate and High Risk data from unauthorized access. Stanford Single Sign-On (Shibboleth) with two-factor authentication is a feature when accessing the Wasabi web console.
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Reduced data retrieval delays
Wasabi offers only hot storage, without the lengthy retrieval times usually associated with cold or archive storage tiers.
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Versioning and immutability
Options for versioning and immutability are available.
NOTE: The service does not include support for backups or data transfers, but UIT provides a free consultation to help match clients with professional technology service providers on campus.
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- What are some examples of ways I might use Wasabi?
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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, and Bacula works with Wasabi, too.
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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.
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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 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.
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- 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 and gcloud command-line tools from Amazon and Google, respectively.
Wasabi provides a free cloud storage browsing tool with a graphical user interface (GUI) available free of charge. Open source projects like Cyberduck and Mountain Duck 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 Stanford’s Wasabi service?
- The Wasabi storage service is available to individuals and units with a full-service SUNet ID and a Stanford billing account. It’s available for all data risk classifications, provided its use meets Stanford's Minimum Security Standards.
The service does not include support for backups or data transfers, but UIT provides a free consultation to help match clients with professional technology service providers on campus. - What does Stanford's Wasabi service cost?
- Stanford has negotiated a discount with Wasabi, along with more favorable terms and a Business Associate Agreement. To take advantage of these benefits, you must request Wasabi storage through UIT. Use the Request Wasabi Cloud Storage form.
One hundred percent of the discount is passed through to subscribers. The cost is what Wasabi charges Stanford with no markup. Additionally, UIT charges a flat $5.45 per subscriber, per month, to recover the cost of administration, irrespective of the amount of data stored.The Stanford rate for Wasabi $5.70 per terabyte, per month (minimum 1TB). Additionally, each subscriber is charged $5.45 per month (regardless of service utilization) fee to recover Stanford's billing and service administration expenses.
- How does UIT bill you for the Wasabi service?
- UIT receives billing data from Wasabi every 30 days and passes along each subscriber's cost for their individual use. Additionally, each subscriber is charged $5.45 per month (regardless of service use) to recover billing and administration expenses. Your Stanford account is billed monthly.
- How does Wasabi bill UIT?
- 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 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. - How do I sign up for the Stanford Wasabi service?
- To get started with Stanford Wasabi, complete the Request Wasabi Cloud Storage form.
