Initially started in Atlanta in 2014, Storj Labs was growing steadily and looking to expand the company to the western half of the United States. After evaluating several cities, Storj ended up settling in Salt Lake City, Utah in August 2016
Salt Lake City was an ideal location for a myriad of reasons, including the low cost of living, a deep pool of talent, a burgeoning tech community, the presence of a distributed systems community, and an international airport close to the city. Currently, Storj Labs has offices in both the Salt Lake and Lehi Kiln buildings. The Storj open-source cloud storage platform utilizes spare disk drive space (think Airbnb, but for disk space) shared by its community members. This network of individual hard drives create a secure network for developers, operations teams, companies, and anyone else who needs secure cloud storage.
The distributed architecture of the Storj service protects against attacks, improves reliability, increases download/upload speeds, and enhances performance when compared to traditional cloud storage. Storj Labs invented the tardigrade decentralized cloud service, which is the world’s first decentralized cloud object storage service. Tardigrade offers enterprisegrade, decentralized cloud storage that’s automatically encrypted, easily implemented, highly performant, affordable, and ridiculously resilient.
Tardigrade delivers durability, performance, and security that’s better or on par with all other major cloud providers (Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure)—yet it’s still a fraction of the cost, potentially saving companies millions on their cloud storage. Through the Tardigrade Open Source Partner Program, any open source projects that enable users to store data on Tardigrade will receive a portion of the revenue generated by those users.
