If you haven't checked out the AetherStore 2.0 Early Release yet, now you can do it for a good cause!
With Earth Day coming up, we're going to donate to have one tree planted for every machine AetherStore 2.0 (totally free!) is deployed on until the end of April. Download here!
We'll update everyone with information about where trees will be planted so you can see your work in action. Please feel free to post questions/comments about AetherStore here, or PM me!
Happy (early) Earth Day!!
We tallied the numbers earlier this week from the "Deploy AetherStore, Plant a Tree" campaign we ran for Earth Day, and were able to plant 222 trees!
Thanks to everyone who participated 
The donation was made to The National Forest Foundation if you'd like to learn more about where our contribution went.
Big pat on the back for everyone who planted a tree(s) by deploying AetherStore!
We're glad we were able to be part of the inaugural MangoCon! It was great to see everyone and meet some new faces. We had a blast!
Call for additional flaming Dr. Pepper footage!
We want to recreate the flaming Dr. Pepper scene at Touche for Rob's hololens - does anyone have additional pictures/video to add to the thread to help us put something together? (I see there are already some great shots added above.)
If you have any other AetherStore-related pictures/video from over the years we'd love to see those too! I'll PM to transfer video files if there's anything that helps us build out the picture.
Thanks, @Minion-Queen! AetherStore is excited to be up on ML I like the idea of being able to contact a member of the vendor directly, @LAH3385, something to consider for future ads.
In the meantime, I'm @shannon for all AetherStore-related questions and comments!
@Breffni-Potter (and all) Thanks for the great questions! Sorry we're a bit slow to the thread but we thought we'd answer the initial AetherStore questions firsthand:
Resource Efficiency:
You can use AetherStore with any software you’d use otherwise to schedule copies and backups. We appear as a mounted drive, and proactively replicate to keep data safe. The software has many mechanisms in place to ensure AetherStore's not sending data un-necessarily across the network, such as deduplication and local caching. We’ve run it on a 10/100 switch in the office and it runs well, we’d love to hear what you think when you try it!
Encryption:
We currently use a local self-signed certificate. The data is not stored in the same places as the meta-data, so even with decryption you can't just recreate files to exist as they should.
Replication:
As long as the file table is backed up, you can re-mount AetherStore on another machine to regain access to your data. A distributed backup of the file table will be available through AetherStore.
Mount Points:
The upcoming AetherStore release is designed to provide a single-mount . We do have multi-mount functionality to build in but it's not quite ready yet. --- Noted on NTFS!!
AetherStore will absolutely be available in 2015! We hope to have some exciting news for you all in the very near future. We look forward to convincing those who may or may not have had their coffee just yet!
Hey Everyone, we're getting excited for the Mango Meetup in NYC!
Since we've just gone live with AetherStore 2.0, we have an offer for those planning to make the trip: for anyone who upgrades to AetherStore Unlimited within the week, we'll reimburse your travel to the meetup up to $100.
We think the numbers work out pretty well, and hopefully can help more people make it into town! Use this link to upgrade. If you're new to AetherStore, use this link to create your account.
How it will work: upgrade using the link above, send us your travel receipts, and we'll reimburse all AetherStore Unlimited customers for travel immediately following the meetup. We're looking forward to seeing as many of you here as possible!
@BRRABill said in 4 PB on USB3 Drives Single Storage Array:
Speaking of storage ...did the new licensing model for AetherStore come out yet?
Hey everyone! We haven’t officially released pricing for AetherStore 2.0 yet but as many of you know from MangoCon, AetherStore 2.0 will be Freemium. Exact pricing to be publicly announced soon. Hint: it’s going to be VERY affordable (think less expensive than Glacier).
We’ve already talked to several of you about installing the 2.0 Early Release, which we’ll start circulating soon. If you haven’t already talked to us and would like access to the Early Release PM me!
We are thinking of making a choco package for early release and pinging the package name around before it’s publicly available. How many of you use choco?
Three of us from AetherStore will be there! Can't wait to see everyone again, and to put faces to usernames for everyone we haven't met in person yet Seeya there!
Hey Everyone, tons of great questions on AetherStore here! We’ve been enjoying watching the thread keep expanding over the past few days and have clarified some important points below. Please let us know if there are any other questions, we’re happy to expand on anything you want to know more about.
Redundancy: 4x is the default but this is customizable. We price per usable (fully replicated) space, so if you believe you need increased availability, the pricing model rewards higher replication. AetherStore also proactively maintains your redundancy level. As machines go down it will recopy chunks to live nodes to maintain full replication. Also important: machines going offline does not cause data loss. If you need to read or write to the drive, yes - some machines need to be turned on.
As @scottalanmiller pointed out, AetherStore will not allow you to write to the drive if it cannot achieve full replication. In past versions a write could be completed locally even if not enough machines were online, assuming redundancy would be achieved when machines come back on. We’ve changed the way writes are completed in AS 2.0 to prioritize redundancy instead. So now, every time you’ve completed a write you know it’s been successfully written to (n) machines. In the future, we look forward to introducing write profiles, so you can select how you would prefer to write.
Speed: AetherStore is a robust, affordable and secure backup target that provides quick enough read times to serve its intended purpose well – reducing downtime, helping you meet RTO when the crunch is on. That said, if fast write speeds are your most important requirement AetherStore may not be the product for you right now. For every write, data is chunked, encrypted (twice) and stored across many machines. The same is true for the metadata, and there are environmental factors in every network to consider. These things take time. AetherStore’s complexity under the hood is what enables it to be a truly resilient, secure, flexible product.
Resource Consumption on Machines: @NetworkNerd: what @JaredBusch said - nothing noticeable. We run AetherStore constantly and have not observed effects on the machines nor has it been reported by users. We do have numbers on this, our QA engineer is currently updating them for the 2.0 release so I will send them through when I have them!
Mount Machine: What you guys are referring to as the “head node” here. You’re correct that AetherStore supports one mount machine at a time. You can change the mount machine after deploying a Store at any time using the dashboard. If the mount machine goes down, just use the Dashboard to select a new one. The mounted drive is locked and password protected. It can also be unmounted completely which provides a cool veiled mode for the drive. Data remains perfectly intact but the drive is invisible/inaccessible until remounted. As @scottalanmiller pointed out, you don’t need the mount machine to contribute a certain amount of storage. However, choosing a fast/good machine as the mount will definitely help performance!
Linux: we don’t support Linux in the current release but it’s far not off. I’ll keep you updated on it!
AetherStore 2.0 Release: we’re in the process of rolling this out now! If you gave us your info at MangoCon you will already be in one of the Early Release groups and should receive an email shortly.
Thanks again for all the great input!
-Shannon
We announced yesterday that we'll donate to have a tree planted for EVERY computer AetherStore is deployed on until the end of April. To kick things off for Earth Day, we're going to pick THREE users in ML who deploy TODAY to win a $50 gift card!
All you need to do is deploy AetherStore 2.0 today (can be done <2 minutes). Anyone who has not yet deployed 2.0 is eligible.
We will announce the ML winners today at 5pm EST. It's a one day contest so your chances are pretty good Good luck everyone, help us plant some trees!
Hey Everyone, we’re also very excited about our new partnership with NTG! Thanks Danielle for starting the thread!
Picking up on Jared’s point to provide updated write speed information for the beta and now production versions: we typically see write speeds from 12-20MB/s – vastly improved from the alpha!
Congrats to @travisdh1, @JaredBusch and @NerdyDad!!! You'll receive a gift card via Amazon to the email address used to deploy your Store.
Thanks everyone! Remember, we're planting trees for each computer you all deployed to as well!
Have a great weekend!
Hey Everyone, we put together a step-by-step guide with screenshots that explains how to create a new drive with AetherStore.
For those that have never used AetherStore, this a peek at exactly how the software works and how easy it is to use! For those in ML that have used AetherStore, we've had a few UI updates in recent releases you many appreciate! We'd love to hear what you think.
http://blog.aetherstore.com/2016/03/create-a-drive-in-5-steps/
Thanks!
Shannon
@scottalanmiller On it. I'll start stocking the AetherBar now...
Hey everyone! I'm Shannon, working for AetherStore in New York. Great to meet you all and Happy Birthday ML!
We just put out a new release with the functionality to "Add Node" to your existing Store, check it out on your Downloads page!! If you haven't created an account yet you can do so here.
Several of you have have asked about/known this update was coming (@BRRABill @Dashrender and others) so we're looking forward to hearing what you think!
Glad everyone made it back safely! Spiceworld After Hours was too much fun.
Thanks for getting in touch on SW, @Breffni-Potter!
@dafyre is right on, most use AetherStore as a backup target, and the built-in redundancy and self-healing design (data will also automatically be recopied to active nodes when machines turn off) prevent against failure. One way to improve write speeds is increasing the size of the mount node, but we are working on some updates to improve write speed.
To all - feel free to email me ([email protected]) with questions or for trial info! Thanks again @Breffni-Potter & @dafyre!