Start-Up iostack in New Zealand

Founded by principal Andrew Haslam in June 2010, iostack Corporation, in Auckland, New Zealand, is the creator of MonsterDrive.

It is a cloud-based storage drive formatted with NTFS to store files, looking like an HDD where you drag-and-drop them.

 Haslam was previously at Symantec. He is a veteran coder and ex-architect from Ghost, the original disk cloner, desktop deployment and disaster recovery app.

In MonsterDrive, AES-256 bit encryption is used to protect the data before being stored, and then SSL to double encrypt it during transit. It captures only the portions of modified data and then compresses those changes. It’s possible to invite people to open a read-only view of the MonsterDrive using secure invitations.

The maximum size is determined by the largest volume size that Windows NTFS file system supports: just under 256TB.

MonsterDrive utilizes Amazon’s S3 as backend cloud store and supports only Windows, up to now. iostack plans to add Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone platforms soon.

Pricing has not yet been finalized but for the duration of the beta program – currently fully subscribed -, MonsterDrive is free to use up to the following monthly storage and transfer limits:

• 3GB storage (standard or reduced redundancy)
• 10,000 upload or list requests
• 10,000 download requests
• 1GBb data transfer out

Once these limits are exceeded, the customer is automatically billed at Amazon S3 rates.