Vembu, best known among managed service providers for their rebrandable StoreGrid, a network storage product that backs up drives locally and to Amazon’s cloud, is making a move into consumer territory. The twist is, they don’t really expect to make much money from it.

Vembu Home, as it’s called, is currently in closed beta, but you can put yourself on the waiting list for an account. When it’s open, it’ll be free to back up to local drives, and what they say will be competitive pay-per-use rates to back up to the cloud. Interestingly, that money is really meant to offset server expenses, not to help them turn a profit.

“Honestly, we don’t believe there’s a lot of money (yet) in the way consumer backups are currently pitched,” wrote Vembu President Lakshmanan “Lux” Narayan in a blog entry on the new service. “We  believe the existing leading consumer backup services are bleeding — and bleeding bad.”

The India-based company is looking at Home as an opportunity to get their brand name out there, not as a replacement for their business markets. They’re also hoping to form partnerships with hardware manufacturers.

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