French telco Iliad quietly launches an AWS Glacier competitor

Through its subsidiary, Online.net, the French telecommunications company Iliad has quietly launched a new “cold storage” cloud service that developers can use to store files that they don’t need to access extremely quickly.

The new C14 service became available yesterday, when Online.net posted a page about it on the company’s website. There was no press release or blog post announcing the news.

In the world of public cloud infrastructure, Iliad is not a big name. Instead, when people want to rent out computing resources to host their applications, they’re more likely turning to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure. (Although Iliad did do something distinctive in 2014, when it introduced an ARM-based cloud service.)

AWS offers the Glacier cold storage service, Google has the Cloud Storage Nearline option, and Microsoft recently announced its Cool Blob Storage for Azure.

So Iliad has to stand out in some way. Can you guess the strategy?

That’s right! The company is trying to undercut other services by offering lower prices. This is a common tactic in the cloud infrastructure business.

“It’s the most affordable cloud storage platform on the market (€0.002/GB, cheaper than both Backblaze and Glacier), specially designed for long-term archival,” Yann Léger, vice president of cloud computing at Online.net, told VentureBeat in an email.

The data will be stored more than 80 feet underground in Iliad’s fallout shelter in Paris. The service has a 1GB minimum, and at less than 1 cent per GB per month, it is, undoubtedly, a cheap way to back up important data.

The question is how popular C14 will get at that price, given that it’s not one of the top cloud providers.