Post by kieransan on Jun 5, 2013 6:57:29 GMT
IS THIS the death of the cloud as we know it? Space Monkey certainly seems to think so – it is planning to build a better one. When its Kickstarter campaign ended last week, the startup had received more than three times its $100,000 funding target.
Set to launch in the next few months, Space Monkey aims to replace public cloud service providers such as Dropbox and Google Drive with a cloud of thousands of devices that sit in our homes. For a monthly fee, Space Monkey will lease subscribers a device containing a 2-terabyte hard drive and software that connects to all other Space Monkey devices on the internet.
Only half the storage space is for you – the rest is filled with other subscribers' data. Everything stored on a Space Monkey device is copied and split into many encrypted pieces distributed over the network. If you want to watch one of your videos away from home, it will be put together from the pieces copied onto devices closest to your current location. It is much like torrent downloads from file-sharing websites, which assemble fragments of a file from different machines on a peer-to-peer network.
Space Monkey claims that its cloud will give users upload and download speeds that are 12 times as fast as those offered by existing services – and as the network of subscribers grows the rate could be 60 times faster. "Each new user adds bandwidth," says co-founder Alen Peacock.
But it is likely to be concerns about data ownership that prompt people to make the switch. There is a lack of trust in the traditional cloud, says Peacock. The current cloud storage model is a "temporary situation", agrees Richard Mortier at the University of Nottingham, UK, who is designing next-generation personal clouds. He wants to let people control their data so they can choose whether or not to opt into a relationship with a company like Google, which makes money from user data. "At the moment it's too asymmetrical," he says.
While early examples of personal web services exist, they have been hard to manage for non-specialists. Space Monkey should make personal clouds more accessible for the average user.
"Even if you know what you're doing it's a pain," says Mortier. A system like Space Monkey that works out of the box is a big help. "But you're going to be hosting other people's data," he says. Your stuff could also be distributed across international legal jurisdictions. "The liabilities are unclear," he says.
Mortier and colleagues at the University of Cambridge hope to make it easy for people to manage a personal cloud by releasing software that automatically links up phones, laptops and external hard drives in a virtual network that can be reached remotely. Their system repurposes the domain name server (DNS) standard to let users give internet names to each of their devices. These can then be accessed via the internet by anyone who has permission.
Transferring the vast amounts of video and image data we create each day to and from remote cloud servers will be a real challenge for traditional cloud models, says Peacock. Keeping data in our homes will be quicker, cheaper, and use less energy. "All of these things point to a future where moving data to the edge of the internet, instead of into data centres, is a clear win," he says.