AetherWorks, Start-Up in Sofware to Avoid NAS or SAN

AetherWorks LLC is located in the 5th Avenue of New York City, NY, a huge agglomeration with few storage start-ups that generally prefer California and Massachusetts. [We have only found four other ones in NYC: Continuity Software, CyberSynchs, Intermine and Varonis].

Now with a seven person team, it was founded in 2010 by three young graduates of the Scotland’s University of St Andrews in Scotland, CEO Robert MacInnis, COO Allan Boyd and CTO Angus Macdonald.

Their idea is not totally new but it’s a recent one that can be compared to peer-to-peer systems having been developed by firms including AeroFS, infinit.io, Symform, and Wuala (that finally gives up this technology).

The software for SMBs, AetherStore, takes the unused storage space on all HDDs of the company’s Windows computers and turns it into a big networked shared storage system to save capacity you already have by creating a private cloud storage. It’s scalable as you can add new machines if business grows. You can access your data on your local network when you’re in the office as well as from a secure cloud when you’re not. It appears to be simple, being used like your HDD. It works like a NAS without any additional harddware. More than that, all data are de-duplicated to save the network bandwidth, and also encrypted.

There could be a problem if some PCs are off to access their data on their disks. To resolve this difficulty, the data are stored on several other disks, four or more, with a chunking mechanism that also avoid any RAID controller for protection as they can be reconstructed using the different copies on the computers and their HDDs attached to the network.

An external secure, Web-based storage service like Amazon, Mozy or IDrive is used for versioning, remote access, and long-term backup.

No price has been revealed for AetherStore.

The start-up is also designing a patent pending platform for the dynamic deployment and runtime management of a heterogeneous, multi-endpoint software service infrastructure.