[ahaslam]

I also like the technology potential - the question I am asking myself is what use to put it to where there is real demand.

Yes - it is a cloud SAN. And it could easily be bundled with a software iSCSI stack in a virtual machine image as a virtual cloud storage gateway appliance for private datacenters. But for enterprise, I don't see the use case as primary storage ie. as the underlying storage for a DB. More likely as 'near-line' or archival storage where it is retained in a form that is readily mounted and accessible using standard FS api's for indexing, data mining etc. As I've been focused on consumer, I haven't done enough research into the comparable cost against other archival mechanisms like tape.

When I built it, I guess I was inspired by addressing my own pain points: I didn't have a flexible, easily interfaced data protection system that automatically made sure I had a copy of my files offsite. Like having the equivalent of a massive offsite external USB drive. I also wanted a solution that kept my files 'live' - rather than locked up in some arcane backup application image.

* Thanks for the feedback on the terms around security - will take this into account.

* Encryption is AES 256 on-the-fly - so it's encrypted before it hits local storage or remote storage - and it uses SSL for the transfer.

* The 256 Tb capacity is really just a way of moving the upper limit on capacity so that users don't have to worry about exhausting the available space in the volume - something that file-based solutions don't need to worry about. Users can choose whatever size volumes they want.

[TuaAmin13]

For the case of near-line storage I believe this would work. I understand why you would need this in that case.

At that point you'd simply have to address pricing. With some napkin math I just paid $15/TB/month (for duration of warranty) for near-line storage. I'm taking liberties here with assumptions (no power or cooling but this offsets the cost of longer transfers to the cloud vs internal to your data center). I'm also not factoring in personnel costs.

For consumers I have absolutely no idea what the pricing would be like. $15/TB/month seems cheap and I would probably be expecting something between 25 and 100GB for that same price if you told me what your product does.

[databace78]

Impressive technology...but there are a number of products that do what you've built (or come close). Someone already mentioned Nasuni.

TwinStrata might be closer (block oriented I think, iSCSI interface). http://www.twinstrata.com

I think Gartner refers to these products as "cloud storage gateways." Also known as "hybrid cloud storage." Google either of those to get a list.

Good question about the pain points TuaAmin. Those usually include: a) never having to run out of storage again b) never having to deal w/ tape backups again c) knowing you can recover data to anywhere in the event of a disaster

[drumber]

I think you should look at StorSimple too: http://www.storsimple.com as well; there are indeed already fairly mature products in the market that tackle this market opportunity with pretty compelling solutions.