Their architecture page seems to confirm this. It seems that their service is explicitly designed to have different performance characteristics from Amazon S3, so maybe they aren't quite a direct competitor to S3, but there are probably a lot of people using S3 for the use cases that Nimbus.IO claims to do better on, simply because S3 was available at the time.
Yes exactly. Nimbus.io is designed for long term archival storage at more affordable prices. We think it's a great time to be competing on price.
We may compete with S3 for low-latency service later on (latency can be made arbitrarily low by spending enough money on caching.) Initial calculations suggest we could be almost as low-latency as S3 and still under price by a good margin.
Latency may be able to be made low through caching, but depending on the distribution the point at which additional cache is uneconomical may be well before the edge of your performance envelope.
How are you calculating your latency? Also, what distribution do you assume your file accesses will come from?
