
The AeroFS Private Cloud - yurisagalov
http://blog.aerofs.com/the-aerofs-private-cloud/
======
rdl
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).

~~~
cmsdog
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](http://www.getfilecloud.com)) which have been
solving this pain very nicely.

~~~
giovannibajo1
I've been struggling to find a good Dropbox alternative for on premise. Aerofs
is missing the option to share a folder/file through a link to non-aerofs-
users which is vital to our workflow.

This filecloud is interesting, thanks. Any other product that you are aware
of? I thought I had found them all, but you never know :)

~~~
sreitshamer
Filosync (my product) has share via link to non-users (users who don't have
the client app installed). [http://www.filosync.com](http://www.filosync.com)
(I'm the guy who wrote Arq, the Mac backup app, too).

~~~
giovannibajo1
Thanks, very interesting and looks promising. We're a mixed Linux and Mac
shop, so we would need a Linux client as well.

~~~
sreitshamer
OK. Those are on our to-do list.

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HorizonXP
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.

~~~
nostromo
Why not just use BTSync for syncing? I use it for this purpose and it's
fantastic.

For backup you can use one of many solutions to archive to S3. I wouldn't
recommend Time Machine.

~~~
mindslight
Why not use Unison? It only does pairwise synchronization, but is Free
software and extremely mature.

(sigh, it seems the tech community has become blind to anything that isn't
heavily blogvertised.)

~~~
yapcguy
Unison is no longer under active development, right? Would love to use it but
going forward, is there a big enough community to fix bugs, add new features
etc?

[http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/status.html](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/status.html)

~~~
mindslight
It has not been a problem in my experience. There isn't major development
(proper support for inotify and flexible topology would be nice), but Unison
does what it says extremely solidly. There's certainly an active user
community and the occasional bugfix/feature. Reread that notice again
concentrating on the good parts, and take a look at the changelog. There's
certainly activity, it's just not time intensive - this is both the blessing
and apparent curse of using a high level language.

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magic5227
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](http://www.bittorrent.com/sync)

~~~
yurisagalov
I'd kindly ask you to give us another chance :)

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.

~~~
eps
Yuri, can you tell how you got these large companies on board? Is this
something that YC helped with?

~~~
yurisagalov
It depends on your definition of "helped". YC helped us in a lot of non
tangible ways (the company probably wouldn't exist without their help, for
example :).

But YC did not directly help us land these customers in the forms of
introductions. For the most part, they've come to us through word of mouth and
internal employee references.

~~~
eps
Interesting, thanks.

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rajbala
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.

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Bjoern
I'm new to AeroFS. How does it measure up against eg. Owncloud? Any important
pro's and cons?

~~~
koyote
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.

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kirillzubovsky
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.

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bifrost
AeroFS is the solution to so many of my problems, its really pretty great.

I've been advising my customers to look at it for quite some time now :)

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zentrus
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.

~~~
yurisagalov
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.

~~~
zentrus
Thank you for clarifying. Does the AeroFS Team Server also have upgrades that
behave the same way?

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smtddr
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.

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anthonys
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.

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pedrocr
I'd much rather have an Ubuntu PPA to deploy this over an existing server with
chef/puppet than having to deploy this over virtualization.

~~~
eigenrick
Just mount the VM's volume. Copy everything over. DIff it against a fresh
ubuntu install, and Viola! Instant DPKG!

~~~
pedrocr
You're joking right? They already provide a tar.gz that you can probably hack
around into installing it with puppet given enough motivation. But I'd rather
have a proper package that I can upgrade automatically, etc.

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hemancuso
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.

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jbobes
This is what I'm working on [http://cloud306.com](http://cloud306.com)

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moreentropy
We used to call that a fileserver.

