Space Monkey | The Future of Data Storage

Sneak peak: Three Things You Probably Didn't Know About Space Monkey

Last Spring, when we let the cat out of the bag about what we'd been up to at Space Monkey, folks started describing our vision as "BitTorrent meets Dropbox" or "The cloud on your desk." These were clever taglines, but all one-liners are inadequate. We're creating primary storage for consumers; that means access to your data on any device all the time. All without the overhead of datacenters.

So to pull the curtain back a little, here are three things you probably don't know about Space Monkey:

First, you probably didn’t know that the Space Monkey network currently stretches from coast to coast and from border to border

To the right is a sneak peek at part of our storage network near our Headquarters in Utah. Blue markers show alpha-release Space Monkey devices working to store data, markers with numbers on them show multiple devices in a small area.

Devices in this initial network are in the hands of employees, investors, and family members of employees. This initial deployment serves as our test network, and is an essential step toward getting release-ready product into your hands. In the coming weeks this network will double and triple in size before we release a public beta.

map of Space Monkeys in Salt Lake City

Dashboard of Alpha Space Monkeys near Salt Lake City

Second, managing devices dispersed like this is fundamentally new

Solid remote management of the Space Monkey network prevents surprises

We’ve designed a network that will scale to millions of Space Monkey devices residing in millions of different locations. We’ve built a remote management platform as a core part of the foundation of the Space Monkey software stack. Remotely managing devices that are spread across the globe is a unique problem not solved by any existing software written by traditional cloud storage companies.

So, we’ve spent an enormous amount of energy and resources to make sure we can effectively roll out updates to devices remotely and automatically, without you ever having to lift a finger.

Third, we are metric loco

We measure everything! I mean everything, on every Space Monkey: memory, disk I/O, network I/O, CPU, bandwidth usage, all the way down to the number of microseconds it takes for us to fire off requests in the network.

Active work queues: a measure of the amount of work several Space Monkey devices are currently working on, over a 24-hr period.

graph of system load of several Space Monkeys

In home networks, sometimes devices can't talk directly to one another, so they need the help of a relay. This graph shows how much data traverses Space Monkey relay services, over a 24-hr period.

System load measurement over several Space Monkeys. System load is a measure of how hard a device is working.

We’re building a storage network the likes of which have never been seen. We’ve experienced the future firsthand inside Space Monkey, and we’re excited about it. In the coming months, you will too.

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28 Jan 2013 | by Clint Gordon-Carroll

Cloud Price Wars

Near the end of November, Google announced a large price cut for their cloud storage service. Two days later, Amazon countered with a price drop of their own. Not to be outdone, Google announced yet another price cut the next day. Microsoft decided they wanted in on the action a week later.

This all sounds like it should translate into big wins for consumers, since services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive are built on top of these storage systems. Little talked about, however, is the fact that these price cuts only affect the introductory rates — the rates that companies like Dropbox pay for cloud storage remain untouched.

This price war is real, but as Sun Tzu wrote, centuries ago:

All war is deception

We've written before about the growing gap between what it costs to buy a hard drive and what it costs to put a hard drive in the cloud. Even with the cutthroat price wars going on between the biggest companies in cloud storage, this trend marches on unabated:

This is a picture someone drew of Sun Tzu,
who may or may not have actually been a real person. — This is a picture someone drew of Sun Tzu, who may or may not have actually been a real person.

cloud price graph — *Amazon S3 prices are an excellent proxy for all cloud storage prices -- Google and Microsoft prices do not differ substantially.

cat studying military strategy — *Amazon S3 prices are an excellent proxy for all cloud storage prices -- Google and Microsoft prices do not differ substantially.

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10 Dec 2012 | by Alen Peacock

Woz Was Right

You may know this guy from Dancing with the Stars:

Or you may know him as Kathy Griffin's boyfriend (but not anymore).

What you probably don't know about Woz is that he invented Apple Computer. And how could you? It's a secret. Shhhh.

But here's what's not a secret: Steve Wozniak is worried. Worried about the cloud:

I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years. With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away.

What's his chief concern?

I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.

The industry right now doesn't want you to think about this. They want you to give them your data, squirrel it away in their data centers. Why? As the great American philosopher John Mayer once wrote:

'Cause when they own the information, oooohhh they can bend it all they want.

With Space Monkey in your home, a full copy of all your stuff is in your home too. Your videos are ready to watch on your TV, your pictures to view on your iPad. Instead of transferring all your stuff to someone else's cloud, we send the features you want to where your data already is.