Absolutely agree, I fly long distance a lot and really really enjoy flying in the A380, specifically due to the air quality and feeling of space it has. I usually try to pick this plane flying out of SFO so I reallu hope that this plane will be in service for a long time to come.
"Shouldn't private control of one's own data be a basic right in this day and age?"
That's what's driving me (and us)! :) We need to regain control over our own data and become first class citizen in this digital age (and yes also in the monetary aspect of it). Our hypothesis is: if you make it beautiful, easy to use and fun & given a similar feature set, people will go with what gives them more individual freedom. So thank you - for rooting for us!! :)
You should try our trial (just hit the button) - it's basically the same system that runs on the boxes and once you decide to buy one we can just provide it setup with everything you did online.
The device comes with different raid levels - preconfigured and on-site support if anything happens.
1. Making backups is really easy - the most simple way is a USB backup, additionally: offsite encrypted and using a second unit to be synched and ready as a cold standby unit.
2. not sure what you mean by that.
3. we're working on this - currently only the synching and cold standby scenario works and is often used by our customers.
Seems a bit irresponsible to suggest that is all you need to do however... do you not need backups? I'm looking at the specs and you list the RAID level of your storage under 'Data Protection'. Any IT pro will tell you that RAID is for availability, not protection. What happens when this falls off the desk it's on (as you suggest storing it) and all the drives fail?
I understand that it does not require any 'IT pros', but whom do you call during the warranty period? Are you not professionals? Do you sell maintenance contracts outside the warranty term? If I need to replace a failed drive in the array, will you be dispatching a technician to my location, or will I need to pay one of the baneful aforementioned 'IT pros'?
Why are you using RAID 5 in favour of RAID 6 or 10 when you already spec the server with 4 drives? A significant number of people and companies, among them some of the world's largest storage vendors, will warn you against using RAID 5 for any reason due to it's low performance and reliability. Since you only need a loss of 2/4 drives in the array to cause irreparable RAID failure, I assume each drive comes from a different batch?
You've made a claim that the server is 'secure' but you advise people to place it on their desks, and as far as I can tell from the limited documentation provided, you do not offer a means of full disk encryption. If I grab this off the desk while dressed as a DHL employee carrying a clipboard and do a runner, what stops me from accessing all the data?
Yes you need backups and no RAID is not a backup. That would also cover the falling of the table scenario.
Backups can be easily done via USB, remote encrypted offsites or using a second device for synching and cold standby.
You can always call us during the warranty period - from our experience this rarely happens. Yes we do sell maintenance packages outside the warranty terms. We dispatch technicians and with those maintenance packages you don't need to pay for that.
We use ZFS RAID 5 and while it's a great way to make sure that you can recover from 1/4 drive failures, 2/4 drive losses will be bad.
And yes you're right on the full disk encryption - and this is something we'll be shipping in one of our upcoming releases which happen on a monthly basis.
Exactly, I believe there's a clear cycle going on (mainframes - pc - clouds - personal clouds).
Fueled by:
- moores law (massive compute power and storage at cheap prices)
- bandwidths growing
- new tools and devices that create constant streams of data (smartphones, collaborative & filesharing tools etc.)
- commoditization of our most-used online tools (see dropbox)
- a desire to have one integrated point of access/control
and a raising awareness of how important it is to own/control our data (caused in part by constant news coming out on hacks, data breaches and how basically data companies are the new oil companies)
The article refers to 'private cloud', and you refer to 'personal clouds'. From reading the rest of the article, though, it appears this is a single on-premise server.
'Cloud' usually refers to some abstraction above the physical hardware layer, that allows you to not worry about the fate of a single physical computer. This seems to be the opposite of that.
