[alenlpeacock]

1. there have been several attempts (including two of my own!), but it's an ambitious project

2. yes, we're actually very interested internally in opening up large parts of the system long term. We're also very interested in creating a system that could outlive the company.

3. internal drives are currently 2-4TB. It's better than RAID. RAID is susceptible to correlated failures, does not survive fire, theft, or flood, and is much more labor intensive (swapping out failed drives within short windows, rebuilding arrays, etc).

4. Reliability/availability: all chunks of data are encrypted, chopped up into dozens of pieces with parity data added, and spread to dozens of locations (currently 40), only half of which need to be present for complete recovery. When availability of those pieces drops below a certain level, a self-healing process automatically recreates the missing bits. Performance: data can be streamed from the network at a high data rate, and we're currently at more than 10x the speed of competing cloud services for getting data into Space Monkey, but there's lots of room for improvement (we're not as fast as a local NAS yet, but soon will be)!

[blaze33]

Thanks for your detailed answer! I wish you a Happy New Year and good luck with your project, definitely one I'll be following this year.