
Protonet: secure, private, and beautiful cloud servers - liseman
https://blog.ycombinator.com/protonet-yc-w16-runs-all-your-collaboration-tools-from-a-small-orange-box
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nostrademons
Seems to be in a similar space as
[https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

Interesting to see this come out of Germany...Europeans seem to care a lot
more about privacy than most Americans, which might make it harder for
American companies in this space to get initial traction.

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jelveh
We've talked to sandstorm - we might even combine our forces ;).

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kentonv
Indeed, I (Sandstorm founder) would love to see Sandstorm running on Protonet.

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will_brown
Seems to be one of those HN posts with a lot of negativity and little
constructive criticism.

I on the other hand immediately see a large niche market...lawyers/law firms.
For example, here in Florida the Bar issued an ethics advisory opinion that
deters lawyers from using cloud services altogether. The opinion calls out
some cloud services by name, and specifically "noted a flurry of concern
recently over Dropbox".

If you are interested in talking about the legal market send me a note.

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jelveh
That would be awesome! Should I contact you via the tickettitan form?

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will_brown
No sorry, that was my first successful tech exit. Send to
attorneybrown@sunbizlaw.com

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DKnoll
All the drawbacks of 'the cloud', along with all the drawbacks of on-premises,
at a higher price point than either... what could go wrong?

You can buy a couple new conventional servers (or many more used) for the cost
of this single point of failure appliance. Plus racks look cool and this looks
like a knockoff Mac Pro.

~~~
js2
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

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DKnoll
If you think this is the next iPod... I will gladly take that wager.

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js2
No of course not, it's a completely different market. My point was the product
isn't deserving of a comment that dismisses it completly. People pay for
turnkey solutions.

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mchahn
I love it. We had servers, then we had clouds, and now we have personal
clouds. Uh, isn't that a server?

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jelveh
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)

Yes, it's a server :)

ps. I'm one of the founders

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rahimnathwani
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.

What do you mean by 'cloud'?

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roymurdock
Interesting middle ground between old school high-upfront investment server
rooms with IT guys on call, and new school IT infrastructure as a service.

Take the servers out of the rack in the dark room full of fragile equipment
and tangled wires, color them orange, remove the blinking lights and crazy
loud fans, and sit them on a desk and they don't seem so scary anymore. (The
price is still a little bit scary).

Differentiators of privacy, usability, and good aesthetics have brought this
company far - raising 1m on kickstarter, selling into hundreds of companies,
and now securing a spot at YC. Still, networking is a very complex subject,
and a lot of smart people get paid a lot of money to make sure it gets done
right.

I'm rooting for Protonet to help us democratize networking and bring it
further towards the power consumer/small business market. Shouldn't private
control of one's own data be a basic right in this day and age?

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jelveh
"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!! :)

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throwaway2016a
Why does everything have to be "beautiful"?

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prawn
I think it's an awkward term used to differentiate hardware from beige boxes,
following Apple. It feels very forced and near-meaningless in these contexts
though. Reminds me of the startups with "Made with love" in their footers as
though some early developer passion imbues the code with otherworldly power.

I find both offputting, but then the tactic hasn't really failed Apple.

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ausjke
What is the difference between this and a standard NAS product, especially
Synology with DMS which has pretty all the functionalities Protonet provides.

A small server with remote access that is.

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andrewstuart
How come everyone is laying the smack down on these guys? Maybe encouraging
guidance where things are ambiguous or the product offering doesn't seem fully
thought out.

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grhmc
Deployed safely inside your firewall, and accessible from anywhere.

What?

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Scarbutt
I see everyone here complaining about the hardware, but isn't the real product
here the hardware bundled _with_ the software(SOUL)?

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teddyh
Once you take the servers out of the server room, you must make them
_reasonably_ secure against physical access. Are these servers able to be
physically locked, both to prevent opening and to secure it in place? Do they
use full-disk encryption?

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sweetbabyjesus
I hope this product finds a market, but from the description it sounds like a
simplified NAS with a few additional functions. What will you back up this
device to- another one or a NAS? What's the point of calling it cloud anything
then?

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cakoose
What's if the device's local storage experiences hardware failure?

1\. Can you configure it to make backups?

2\. Can you configure it to replace data with low latency?

3\. If you have multiple, can they work together to increase availability or
data durability?

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jelveh
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.

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icedchai
$3700 for a celeron with 8 gigs of RAM and 4TB storage? Is it gold plated?

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skybrian
I'm not seeing any source code. Is any of it open source?

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jelveh
The source code is fully accessible on every unit. We're open sourcing the
base system - parts of it have been rolled into:

[http://experimental-platform.io/](http://experimental-platform.io/)

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iokanuon
>The source code is fully accessible on every unit.

So it is Open Source, because we get the source code with the compiled
versions.

>We're open sourcing the base system

Uhh, wait, so now it isn't?

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jelveh
You get the full source code. The license is not an OS license though - that's
what I meant. We're moving the base system to a OS license.

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quadhome
Ouch. Even TechCrunch didn't give ProtoNet a writeup before the YC blog
announced them. Good wishes to the founders. Hope things get better for you
over there!

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andrewstuart
I could see this (or something like it) being a useful development unit for
Azure developers who run their own local development version of Azure.

~~~
jelveh
Yeah that would be awesome! We actually have a very high powered version too
that we just released:

\- 8 Core XEON \- 128 GB RAM \- up to 50TB of storage with 250GB SSD cache \-
still passively cooled

[https://protonetinc.com/lp/protonet-launches-new-model-
priva...](https://protonetinc.com/lp/protonet-launches-new-model-private-
cloud-server-carla/)

edit: if you know anyone that'd like to try that setup - drop us a line - we'd
love to help out!

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rememberlenny
The __a Small Orange Box __immediately reminded me of A Small Orange hosting.
Seems like a branding conflict.

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ksec
How is this different to something like Synology NAS, which is DSM 6.0 over
most of those features already.

~~~
jelveh
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.

