LaCie Acquired Wuala
To enter into TRUE cloud (and grid) storage
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 20, 2009 at 3:54 pmThe press release of LaCie
LaCie and Wuala Merge
to Create a Cloud of Storage Devices
LaCie announced a merger with Caleido AG, the creators of the innovative online storage service, Wuala.
Luzius Meisser, Co-Founder of Caleido said: “Wuala is an exciting technology that builds its reliable and secure cloud storage by harnessing idle resources.”
Wuala assembles centralized and distributed storage; the result is a reliable and scalable service. Once files are placed in Wuala, they are securely encrypted before being cut into several redundant fragments disseminated and stored on a cloud of computers.
“Users will gain online storage while trading disk space; that way, they will securely protect their valuable data. They can access it from anywhere and easily share files with selected peers. As privacy tends to be a major issue when talking about digital life and data management, everything is encrypted and a robust rights management system protects files from unauthorized access,” said Dominik Grolimund, Co-creator of Wuala, “We will also bring this technology to enterprises and professional customers, who will soon take advantage of our services with both cloud and data center-based storage.”
LaCie has plans to implement this first real ‘cloud storage’ technology into its ranges of storage devices, offering a powerful and combined solution for storage–local storage on devices for fast access, and secured remote storage on the cloud, for easy sharing and complete data versatility.
"For 20 years, LaCie massively promoted hard drive technologies; today, as a leader on storage market, we will be a first mover in the next leading technologies: flash-based storage, and cloud storage. With this merger, LaCie will morph from a pure hardware manufacturer to a solution provider. These new technologies will be amazing for our customers and will enhance their experience," Philippe Spruch concluded.
The press release of Caleido
Online Storage Solution Wuala Merges
With External Storage Manufacturer LaCie
Caleido AG, the Swiss maker of online storage solution Wuala, has merged with LaCie, the French manufacturer of external storage devices.
Together they plan to revolutionize the storage industry by building a unique and sustainable cloud storage service.
"We’re very proud to announce that we join forces with LaCie," says Dominik Grolimund, cofounder and CEO of Caleido AG. "This is a major leap forward for Wuala and will bring us to the next level. LaCie is the perfect match for us. Together we will realize the vision we embarked on more than four years ago while researching the basics of Wuala at the ETH Zurich: to build a reliable and secure cloud storage by integrating millions of devices around the world."
"LaCie has a strong vision for where the future of storage is headed. This merge has allowed us to acquire a very innovative online storage solution that will transform our company from a leading hardware manufacturer to a comprehensive digital storage provider,” said Philippe Spruch, founder and CEO of LaCie. "LaCie believes storage versatility will influence the industry, and we look forward to providing our customers with new, cutting-edge ways to store their valuable data through our upcoming product offerings."
Since the launch in August 2008, Wuala has gained substantial traction. Users have quickly adopted the software as a central hub for managing files online. Wuala’s rapid growth is not only attributed to its ease of use, but also to the unique way of protecting the user’s privacy. All files stored in Wuala are safely encrypted on the user’s computer before they are stored online. The users can then grant their peers, regardless if users or non-users, individual access to each folder. The user’s password never leaves the computer and therefore, no one – not even Wuala – can decrypt the user’s private files.
"We’re very excited about this. This merger will transform our start-up into a world-class digital storage provider," says Luzius Meisser, co-founder and CTO of Caleido AG. "While other cloud operators invest in huge data centers consuming Megawatts for powering servers and
cooling them, Wuala builds its reliable and secure cloud storage by harnessing idle resources at the edge of the Internet. This has many advantages for the end user and results in a product that unites the fast access of local storage with the convenience of online storage, namely secure off-site backups, and sharing and collaborating with friends, family, co-workers and even external partners due to our right management system."
Research and development for Wuala’s award-winning technology began at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. After finishing their studies in 2007, Dominik Grolimund and Luzius Meisser founded their company, Caleido AG, located in Zurich. The nine staff members that influence the development and operation of Wuala will remain with the company. They will join a team of LaCie members who will drive efforts to evolve the technology, adding new features and capabilities that will be integrated into a range of LaCie storage solutions.
Comments
For Wuala, pronounced Voila, a French word meaning “Here it is”. To our knowledge, it's the first product on the market, opened since August 2008 and available for Linux, Mac and Windows platforms, to implement REAL cloud storage.
That's the reason LaCie probably paid a high sum (not already revealed) to get it, as some other big companies were also interested to buy it. But Wuala preferred to deal with a relatively small company pushing its product rather than to see it immersed into a big catalog.
Other organizations like OceanStore (UC Berkeley), Past (Microsoft Research) or CFS (MIT) worked on this kind of cloud storage but without releasing any commercial product.
Why is it real cloud storage? Conventional online backup is an initial form or cloud storage where you store your data on an outside data center. Here you can do it (1GB for free and up to 1TB for €1,000 per year) via a simple interface (we just tried it).
But it's much more than that. On the P2P network, each user can offer part of its own HDD to form a community, not only to backup but also exchange files. You can store your confidential data on Wuala, but, for the other ones, on the cloud - this time for free - , comprising all the HDDs of the Wuala subscribers, and also exchange with friends or groups, public or private. Give me 50GB on your disk and I give you the same capacity on mine. As said Wuala:" Instead of buying additional storage, you can also trade local disk space. (...) Local storage is turned into online storage, accessible from anywhere and making it easy to share with friends."
Your friends do not have to register to access your files - they only have to click on the link you have sent them.
On April 2, 2008, Caleida did a joke, announcing that it was acquired by The Coca-Cola Company to launch a new brand called Woca-Wola consisting of a new bottle with four new caps: "My Cola", "My Friend's Cola", "My Group's Cola", "World's Cola."
The secret behind that is a proprietary distributed file system based on P2P technology on which the Swiss start-up worked since 2004. The files are sliced into fragments, each one being stored on different PCs from Wuala users. Of course, for availability, it means that your machine is running, but not always, as each fragment is replicated on several computers. For trading storage online, Wuala asks your computer to run four hours per day. Furthermore, the blocks forming a single file are downloaded in parallel for a faster speed. All the files and metadata are encrypted with 128-bit AES.
The product will probably evolve in the future with more functionalities, for example a backup software that is missing, or to sell a NAS with "Wuala inside". According to the company, so far 40 million files have been securely stored on Wuala by consumers and professionals in the world.
It's the first step into real cloud storage, and maybe tomorrow social 'green' cloud storage - a dream - where the unused capacity of all the disk drives in the world could be filled by any Internet user to optimize the worldwide capacity of the HDDs, and tomorrow SSDs.
To view a video on YouTube where Dominik Grolimund, CEO and co-founder in 2007 of Caleido, is presenting the use and the technology of Wuala (48mn)
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