AetherStore Crosses 30,000 Users in 150 Countries

AetherWorks LLC, a software research and venture development firm based in New York, reached over 30,000 users across 150 countries.

It pools spare storage from a home or office’s existing computers to create large, encrypted, on-site drives. Offering high availability, fast local data reads, and intelligent self-healing, AetherStore provides onsite storage without the cost of purchasing and maintaining additional hardware. When used as a backup target, it complements the cloud by providing a fast, private, local copy of the data without having to download it from Internet.

“The list of countries where we have deployed software is incredible,” says Allan Boyd, COO, AetherWorks. “We have always considered the global market in our design, with the ultimate goal being to provide the service to anyone, regardless of location, and the quality of their infrastructure. AetherStore’s swift and broad uptake suggests we have achieved that. We are very much looking forward to the next phase.”

“AetherStore’s rapid adoption proves there is an appetite among IT Professionals, and even tech-savvy home users, to take control of their storage resources,” echoes Shannon Cody, marketing and communications Manager. “We’ve been able to explore channels that reach users in all corners of the globe and of all technical acumen because of how simple it is to download, install and deploy the software.”

The AetherWorks mission is to bring original, high quality technology to market through development and investment. The firm, which was started by CEO and founder Robert MacInnis, Ph.D., specializes in fault-tolerant distributed systems, and has patented technology in software-defined storage and fog computing.

The reach of AetherStore has truly become global with many emerging and frontier markets included in their deployment list.

Comments

Visited in New-York in 2012, AetherStore has made great progress since that meeting.

The adoption is pretty rapid with now more than 30,000 users in 150 countries globally. It marks a special milestone as the market changed a bit since the first projects in different world cities.

It reminds some pretty similar p2p, cloud, decentralized or dispersed storage approaches on private or public clouds, with players like Aerofs, Blockade, Cloudplan, Kerstor, Ubistorage, Ugloo, Sia.tech, Space Monkey, Storj, Symform, Transporter, Tudzu or Wuala. Some of them still exist, others disappeared, got acquired or changed their model to offer p2p backup.

Like others, AetherStore targets now a backup use case that reduces the original promises made by all the players in that category.

Initially these solutions bring on the table several key advantages:
- Stop to buy and over provision with new hardware,
- Increase the used ratio of the current deployment storage entities,
- Then the storage optimization is improved in favor on a real better used TB/$.

The difficulty came from initially the drop of the storage cost but above all the lack of partnership as nobody in the sales chain wished to reduce the storage sales. You remember the Swiss company named Wuala who approached the market with a trade model. The company got acquired by LaCie in 2009 and LaCie got acquired three years later by Seagate in 2012. Seagate shut downed the Wuala service. It’s difficult to promote a service that could participate of the erosion of hard drives sales. Met also in 2012 Symform got acquired by Quantum in 2014 and story got similar path, Quantum killed the service mid 2016. Tudzu is stopped. Space Monkey, acquired by Vivint in 2014, has disappeared from the web site or integrated into the Vivint Smart Drive of the Vivint Playback DVR. Even Aerofs merged last September with Redbooth.

Last month, AetherWorks announces the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for FogCoin, the blockchain-based cryptocurrency that powers ActiveAether. The ICO will be open to accredited US investors in November through FogCoin.io, with compliance services provided by CoinList.

Pooling free storage space on distributed computing, geo dispersed potentially, is a great concept, it would be good if the AetherStore team thinks about doing the same approach with compute, building a gigantic virtual computer to address cpu-bound demanding applications. And if you link that to bitcoin. Wow, you can have a huge impact on the planet.

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