Silicon Valley startups might not think it's a big deal, but being able to run entirely on a private network (either "behind a firewall", or an entirely disconnected network) is pretty huge. Without AeroFS, your choices today kind of suck, especially for 10-500 person companies (or bigger companies where your corporate option sucks or isn't available). Dropbox doesn't work if you care about security. You're left with various forms of SMB crap, more backend-type things like iSCSI, or either blasts from the past (nfs, afs) or science projects (zfs).
I don't know where you get the idea that there are not good choices for on-premise, file share and sync solutions. There are products like filecloud (http://www.getfilecloud.com) which have been solving this pain very nicely.
If you are willing to trust your privacy to strong crypto (something you probably would want to use even on a private network), ObjectiveFS (https://objectivefs.com) might be worth looking into.
Yeah. We do a lot of security work and have clients inside the Federal government. We run Github inside our firewall. Something like this would be pretty rad, I just emailed it to one of our infrastructure guys.
So I'm actually setting up a private cloud for my company right now. It's a company of 1, so the requirements are quite extensive. :-P
I'm building a FreeNAS server with 6x3TB hard drives in a RAID-Z2 config. My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups, but to also use AeroFS as my file sync mechanism when I'm both in the office and on the road.
Hopefully it works out smoothly. I'll have to figure out how to access the machine from behind my router, and I'll have to determine how to get it to automatically back up to S3 + Glacier. I think there's going to be a lot of details that I'll have to research here.
>My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups
Note that this is completely unreliable. Time Machine isn't built to work over the network. The network support is badly hacked together and will destroy your backups on network faults. They basically treat the network volume as a block device that gets corrupted when the connection fails. Using it over wifi makes this painfully obvious.
Check out the recovery probabilities of raidz2 vs raid10. You're winning ~17% more space at the cost of a substantial performance hit, and almost no difference in reliability, depending on how you estimate HDD failure rates. Raidz2 is not fast when everything is working well, and if any of your drives develop a speed problem, the whole array will be reduced to that speed.
I have a 11x4T raidz2, and will be migrating to 3x4x4T raid10. My last array was 2x4x1.5T raidz1, 3 drive failures in its 5 year lifetime, but not concurrent so no data lost.
I use CrashPlan to get data from one place to another; I back up NAS to CrashPlan, PCs to CrashPlan, and PCs to NAS. If you don't use CrashPlan's app to back up to their cloud, it doesn't stop you from using it to back up to other machines you own. And it works on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and with a bit of hacking, FreeBSD.
Has anyone compared the reliability of this to Bittorrent's solution? I tried Aero a while ago and found it to be very buggy then. Are there any major differences between the two?
http://www.bittorrent.com/sync
The product has come a long way in the past year. In particular, our Private Cloud offering is deployed at a number of large organizations, all of which are quite happy.
Regarding comparison with BT Sync -- I think their product is great, but we try to go beyond simply syncing files between devices by allowing for a lot more administrative control to the IT organization while still giving the users a really simple Dropbox-like syncing experience. Things like remote wipe, version management, conflict resolution, and so on.
We are a small company and are very happy with BTSync.
However, if you want tight admin control, you may have some issues. For example: If an employee leaves, we're not sure how to revoke privileges for them once they have access to the folder.
So, I recommend very small companies use BTSync since it's easy and free. But if you're a larger company, you have probably outgrown BTSync and should get something like AeroFS.
I had the same experience. I've been using Bittorrent Sync for awhile now and absolutely love it. It's super fast and I've never had any inconsistencies in syncing. The closed-source nature of it is not ideal, but if that's a concern you're no better off with AeroFS or Dropbox.
An "enterprise Dropbox" conversation is one that many customers will have with AeroFS. I know this from experience trying to sell this very type of product.
The challenge is that sales cycles are long and potentially high touch. One way to mitigate that is by getting sales distribution through 3rd parties. But avoid integrating with a bunch of 3rd party storage platforms unless you get commitments for leads from the vendors. In other words view integration efforts as an engineering to sales arbitrage.
I was just going to say, in my opinion this gives you less control over the whole environment and you have to trust AeroFS to fix any bugs and add features when/if they are needed.
I guess on the plus-side, you get phone support, if that is what you need.
Owncloud is open-source and really quite powerful, I am surprised it was not mentioned more in these comments.
Sounds like a great idea, especially for all the companies that are thinking about building their own cloud. I suspect building is their highest cost, and if by plugging AeroFS in that could be eliminated, that sounds like just the right way to go!
I am curious, what other sales mechanisms and/or software packages have you tried before you settled on private cloud w/out touching your servers idea?
This may be counter-futuristic, but what if you sold them servers, along with your software? What if you gave your clients the best in classes storage, coupled with the best way to manage it? I suspect you've thought about it before and I want to know what the reaction was like.
Enterprise clients are a black box for me, so anything else you share would be interesting to know.
Overall I think their approach for easy installation and configuration is a good one. I struggle with these same issues at my job--we sell products with a complex application stack to customers that often have no system administrators. The only issue I see here is with the upgrade path. Particularly for a product that is meant for file storage, I can't imagine downloading a 1TB backup file and uploading it again every time there is a new release.
The Appliance actually does not store any file data on it, so your appliance upgrades likely won't include 1TB backup files :)
The (optional) AeroFS Team Server is what would store file data in the company if you wanted to, but many of our customers actually just end up using the direct peer-to-peer syncing without a team server.
I've been using AeroFS for awhile on Linux(Mint & Debian).
I have to say it's pretty nice. I don't actually know what makes it better than dropbox and all the other choices; never looked into any advanced features. A buddy just sent me an invite & I started using it and now it's part of my workflow since it works reliably between my work & home machine.
It'd be interesting to know your process for creating and maintaining the appliances you distribute to clients and any tools/packages you chose to help do it.
You could try Filosync (my product). You can run the server part on any system with a JRE -- it's not a VM image. Just wget the jar file and java -jar jarfile. More instructions here: http://www.filosync.com/help/create-server-standalone
So AeroFS had been in beta for like 4 years so they could do serverless peer to peer dropbox. And now they are launching a private cloud server product. Can't help but worry that these guys don't have any clear product they are committed to.
[+] [-] rdl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmsdog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] objectivefs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prostoalex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tteam|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] HorizonXP|12 years ago|reply
I'm building a FreeNAS server with 6x3TB hard drives in a RAID-Z2 config. My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups, but to also use AeroFS as my file sync mechanism when I'm both in the office and on the road.
Hopefully it works out smoothly. I'll have to figure out how to access the machine from behind my router, and I'll have to determine how to get it to automatically back up to S3 + Glacier. I think there's going to be a lot of details that I'll have to research here.
[+] [-] pedrocr|12 years ago|reply
Note that this is completely unreliable. Time Machine isn't built to work over the network. The network support is badly hacked together and will destroy your backups on network faults. They basically treat the network volume as a block device that gets corrupted when the connection fails. Using it over wifi makes this painfully obvious.
[+] [-] nostromo|12 years ago|reply
For backup you can use one of many solutions to archive to S3. I wouldn't recommend Time Machine.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrkel|12 years ago|reply
I have a 11x4T raidz2, and will be migrating to 3x4x4T raid10. My last array was 2x4x1.5T raidz1, 3 drive failures in its 5 year lifetime, but not concurrent so no data lost.
I use CrashPlan to get data from one place to another; I back up NAS to CrashPlan, PCs to CrashPlan, and PCs to NAS. If you don't use CrashPlan's app to back up to their cloud, it doesn't stop you from using it to back up to other machines you own. And it works on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and with a bit of hacking, FreeBSD.
[+] [-] magic5227|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yurisagalov|12 years ago|reply
The product has come a long way in the past year. In particular, our Private Cloud offering is deployed at a number of large organizations, all of which are quite happy.
Regarding comparison with BT Sync -- I think their product is great, but we try to go beyond simply syncing files between devices by allowing for a lot more administrative control to the IT organization while still giving the users a really simple Dropbox-like syncing experience. Things like remote wipe, version management, conflict resolution, and so on.
[+] [-] nostromo|12 years ago|reply
However, if you want tight admin control, you may have some issues. For example: If an employee leaves, we're not sure how to revoke privileges for them once they have access to the folder.
So, I recommend very small companies use BTSync since it's easy and free. But if you're a larger company, you have probably outgrown BTSync and should get something like AeroFS.
[+] [-] thematt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajbala|12 years ago|reply
The challenge is that sales cycles are long and potentially high touch. One way to mitigate that is by getting sales distribution through 3rd parties. But avoid integrating with a bunch of 3rd party storage platforms unless you get commitments for leads from the vendors. In other words view integration efforts as an engineering to sales arbitrage.
[+] [-] Bjoern|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koyote|12 years ago|reply
I guess on the plus-side, you get phone support, if that is what you need.
Owncloud is open-source and really quite powerful, I am surprised it was not mentioned more in these comments.
[+] [-] conception|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirillzubovsky|12 years ago|reply
I am curious, what other sales mechanisms and/or software packages have you tried before you settled on private cloud w/out touching your servers idea?
This may be counter-futuristic, but what if you sold them servers, along with your software? What if you gave your clients the best in classes storage, coupled with the best way to manage it? I suspect you've thought about it before and I want to know what the reaction was like.
Enterprise clients are a black box for me, so anything else you share would be interesting to know.
[+] [-] bifrost|12 years ago|reply
I've been advising my customers to look at it for quite some time now :)
[+] [-] zentrus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yurisagalov|12 years ago|reply
The (optional) AeroFS Team Server is what would store file data in the company if you wanted to, but many of our customers actually just end up using the direct peer-to-peer syncing without a team server.
[+] [-] smtddr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthonys|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedrocr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sreitshamer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eigenrick|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hemancuso|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbobes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moreentropy|12 years ago|reply