10 ms·

The AeroFS Private Cloud

127 points by yurisagalov 13y ago

kirillzubovsky 13y ago
Sounds like a great idea, especially for all the companies that are thinking about building their own cloud. I suspect building is their highest cost, and if by plugging AeroFS in that could be eliminated, that sounds like just the right way to go! I am curious, what other sales mechanisms and/or software packages have you tried before you settled on private cloud w/out touching your servers idea? This may be counter-futuristic, but what if you sold them servers, along with your software? What if you gave your clients the best in classes storage, coupled with the best way to manage it? I suspect you've thought about it before and I want to know what the reaction was like. Enterprise clients are a black box for me, so anything else you share would be interesting to know.
pedrocr 13y ago
I'd much rather have an Ubuntu PPA to deploy this over an existing server with chef/puppet than having to deploy this over virtualization.
- eigenrick 13y ago
  Just mount the VM's volume. Copy everything over. DIff it against a fresh ubuntu install, and Viola! Instant DPKG!
  - pedrocr 13y ago
    You're joking right? They already provide a tar.gz that you can probably hack around into installing it with puppet given enough motivation. But I'd rather have a proper package that I can upgrade automatically, etc.
  - edwintorok 13y ago
    s/Viola/Voilà/
- sreitshamer 13y ago
  You could try Filosync (my product). You can run the server part on any system with a JRE -- it's not a VM image. Just wget the jar file and java -jar jarfile. More instructions here: http://www.filosync.com/help/create-server-standalone http://www.filosync.com/help/create-server-standalone
HorizonXP 13y ago
So I'm actually setting up a private cloud for my company right now. It's a company of 1, so the requirements are quite extensive. :-P I'm building a FreeNAS server with 6x3TB hard drives in a RAID-Z2 config. My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups, but to also use AeroFS as my file sync mechanism when I'm both in the office and on the road. Hopefully it works out smoothly. I'll have to figure out how to access the machine from behind my router, and I'll have to determine how to get it to automatically back up to S3 + Glacier. I think there's going to be a lot of details that I'll have to research here.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  How To Backup FreeNAS to S3: http://www.inetpub.dk/index.php/widgetkit/just-going-through-the-motions/60-remote-synchronization-from-freenas-to-amazon-s3 http://www.inetpub.dk/index.php/widgetkit/just-going-through...
  - bifrost 13y ago
    Unfortunately it leaves out encrypting the backup. I think there is a tarsnap plugin for FreeNAS which does encrypt the data...
- pedrocr 13y ago
  >My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups Note that this is completely unreliable. Time Machine isn't built to work over the network. The network support is badly hacked together and will destroy your backups on network faults. They basically treat the network volume as a block device that gets corrupted when the connection fails. Using it over wifi makes this painfully obvious.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - pedrocr 13y ago
      I'm positive about Time Machine over AFP. iSCSI was indeed pointed out as a potential avenue with less issues, but if I recall didn't really fix it completely. If you're running wired+iSCSI you're probably much less prone to this. Try and yank some network cables during backup and see how it handles it. I ran into more issues than most because the particular AP I have at home doesn't work well with the macbook air I was trying to backup and resulted in a lot of disconnects. So it was a bit of a stress test but the issue is real and well documented. You can find instructions all over the web on how to fsck sparsebundles to try and get back your backups[1]. This is particularly annoying because Time Machine is supposed to be a user friendly version of versioned backups like you can do with rsync+hardlinks. I have a script to do that for me on my personal linux machine and would love to be able to deploy TimeMachine+AFP for the rest of the family. Unfortunately apple decided it really needed to have hard-linked directories for just this case and so decided that the way to do that over the network was to have a single binary blob with a HFS image on the server instead of the proper files in the filesystem (filesystems don't usually support hard linked directories, HFS was hacked to do it). That way you not only lose direct access to the individual files on the server you also lose the whole backups when there's disk corruption... I should probably have a look again to see if iSCSI is a viable solution to this. [1] http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,08,27,169,fix-time-machine-sparsebundle-nas-based-backup-errors.html http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,08,27,169,fix-time-machin...
magic5227 13y ago
Has anyone compared the reliability of this to Bittorrent's solution? I tried Aero a while ago and found it to be very buggy then. Are there any major differences between the two? http://www.bittorrent.com/sync http://www.bittorrent.com/sync
- thematt 13y ago
  I had the same experience. I've been using Bittorrent Sync for awhile now and absolutely love it. It's super fast and I've never had any inconsistencies in syncing. The closed-source nature of it is not ideal, but if that's a concern you're no better off with AeroFS or Dropbox.
  - HorizonXP 13y ago
    Nor are you better off with Bittorrent Sync. It's closed-source as well. That could change of course.
    - kayoone 13y ago
      Thats exactly what he said.
      - HorizonXP 13y ago
        I must have had a brainfart yesterday or something. Apologies.
- yurisagalov 13y ago
  I'd kindly ask you to give us another chance :) The product has come a long way in the past year. In particular, our Private Cloud offering is deployed at a number of large organizations, all of which are quite happy. Regarding comparison with BT Sync -- I think their product is great, but we try to go beyond simply syncing files between devices by allowing for a lot more administrative control to the IT organization while still giving the users a really simple Dropbox-like syncing experience. Things like remote wipe, version management, conflict resolution, and so on.
Bjoern 13y ago
I'm new to AeroFS. How does it measure up against eg. Owncloud? Any important pro's and cons?
- conception 13y ago
  Yeah, don't see any real advantages over Owncloud.
- koyote 13y ago
  I was just going to say, in my opinion this gives you less control over the whole environment and you have to trust AeroFS to fix any bugs and add features when/if they are needed. I guess on the plus-side, you get phone support, if that is what you need. Owncloud is open-source and really quite powerful, I am surprised it was not mentioned more in these comments.
bifrost 13y ago
AeroFS is the solution to so many of my problems, its really pretty great. I've been advising my customers to look at it for quite some time now :)
rdl 13y ago
Silicon Valley startups might not think it's a big deal, but being able to run entirely on a private network (either "behind a firewall", or an entirely disconnected network) is pretty huge. Without AeroFS, your choices today kind of suck, especially for 10-500 person companies (or bigger companies where your corporate option sucks or isn't available). Dropbox doesn't work if you care about security. You're left with various forms of SMB crap, more backend-type things like iSCSI, or either blasts from the past (nfs, afs) or science projects (zfs).
- tteam 13y ago
  You can checkout our Tonido FileCloud (http://getfilecloud.com http://getfilecloud.com) product. It will allows you to host your own Box.net or Dropbox like solution behind your company firewall.
- cmsdog 13y ago
  I don't know where you get the idea that there are not good choices for on-premise, file share and sync solutions. There are products like filecloud (http://www.getfilecloud.com http://www.getfilecloud.com) which have been solving this pain very nicely.
  - rdl 13y ago
    On iOS, even AeroFS kind of sucks, due to some horrible decisions Apple made. Basically every app has to adopt every storage provider's API, and right now, only Dropbox and maybe Box have any takeup. (and iCloud, of course, but iCloud sucks a lot, isn't self-hostable or even enterprise hostable, and is horrible.)
    - dublinben 13y ago
      That sounds like a problem with iOS, not AeroFS.
  - giovannibajo1 13y ago
    I've been struggling to find a good Dropbox alternative for on premise. Aerofs is missing the option to share a folder/file through a link to non-aerofs-users which is vital to our workflow. This filecloud is interesting, thanks. Any other product that you are aware of? I thought I had found them all, but you never know :)
smtddr 13y ago
I've been using AeroFS for awhile on Linux(Mint & Debian). I have to say it's pretty nice. I don't actually know what makes it better than dropbox and all the other choices; never looked into any advanced features. A buddy just sent me an invite & I started using it and now it's part of my workflow since it works reliably between my work & home machine.
rajbala 13y ago
An "enterprise Dropbox" conversation is one that many customers will have with AeroFS. I know this from experience trying to sell this very type of product. The challenge is that sales cycles are long and potentially high touch. One way to mitigate that is by getting sales distribution through 3rd parties. But avoid integrating with a bunch of 3rd party storage platforms unless you get commitments for leads from the vendors. In other words view integration efforts as an engineering to sales arbitrage.
hemancuso 13y ago
So AeroFS had been in beta for like 4 years so they could do serverless peer to peer dropbox. And now they are launching a private cloud server product. Can't help but worry that these guys don't have any clear product they are committed to.
anthonys 13y ago
It'd be interesting to know your process for creating and maintaining the appliances you distribute to clients and any tools/packages you chose to help do it.
zentrus 13y ago
Overall I think their approach for easy installation and configuration is a good one. I struggle with these same issues at my job--we sell products with a complex application stack to customers that often have no system administrators. The only issue I see here is with the upgrade path. Particularly for a product that is meant for file storage, I can't imagine downloading a 1TB backup file and uploading it again every time there is a new release.
- yurisagalov 13y ago
  The Appliance actually does not store any file data on it, so your appliance upgrades likely won't include 1TB backup files :) The (optional) AeroFS Team Server is what would store file data in the company if you wanted to, but many of our customers actually just end up using the direct peer-to-peer syncing without a team server.
  - zentrus 13y ago
    Thank you for clarifying. Does the AeroFS Team Server also have upgrades that behave the same way?
moreentropy 13y ago
We used to call that a fileserver.
jbobes 13y ago
This is what I'm working on http://cloud306.com http://cloud306.com

127 points by yurisagalov 13y ago

Sounds like a great idea, especially for all the companies that are thinking about building their own cloud. I suspect building is their highest cost, and if by plugging AeroFS in that could be eliminated, that sounds like just the right way to go! I am curious, what other sales mechanisms and/or software packages have you tried before you settled on private cloud w/out touching your servers idea? This may be counter-futuristic, but what if you sold them servers, along with your software? What if you gave your clients the best in classes storage, coupled with the best way to manage it? I suspect you've thought about it before and I want to know what the reaction was like. Enterprise clients are a black box for me, so anything else you share would be interesting to know.

pedrocr 13y ago

I'd much rather have an Ubuntu PPA to deploy this over an existing server with chef/puppet than having to deploy this over virtualization.

eigenrick 13y ago
Just mount the VM's volume. Copy everything over. DIff it against a fresh ubuntu install, and Viola! Instant DPKG!
- pedrocr 13y ago
  You're joking right? They already provide a tar.gz that you can probably hack around into installing it with puppet given enough motivation. But I'd rather have a proper package that I can upgrade automatically, etc.
- edwintorok 13y ago
  s/Viola/Voilà/
sreitshamer 13y ago
You could try Filosync (my product). You can run the server part on any system with a JRE -- it's not a VM image. Just wget the jar file and java -jar jarfile. More instructions here: http://www.filosync.com/help/create-server-standalone http://www.filosync.com/help/create-server-standalone

HorizonXP 13y ago

So I'm actually setting up a private cloud for my company right now. It's a company of 1, so the requirements are quite extensive. :-P I'm building a FreeNAS server with 6x3TB hard drives in a RAID-Z2 config. My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups, but to also use AeroFS as my file sync mechanism when I'm both in the office and on the road. Hopefully it works out smoothly. I'll have to figure out how to access the machine from behind my router, and I'll have to determine how to get it to automatically back up to S3 + Glacier. I think there's going to be a lot of details that I'll have to research here.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
How To Backup FreeNAS to S3: http://www.inetpub.dk/index.php/widgetkit/just-going-through-the-motions/60-remote-synchronization-from-freenas-to-amazon-s3 http://www.inetpub.dk/index.php/widgetkit/just-going-through...
- bifrost 13y ago
  Unfortunately it leaves out encrypting the backup. I think there is a tarsnap plugin for FreeNAS which does encrypt the data...
pedrocr 13y ago
>My goal is to allow my Mac to use it for Time Machine backups Note that this is completely unreliable. Time Machine isn't built to work over the network. The network support is badly hacked together and will destroy your backups on network faults. They basically treat the network volume as a block device that gets corrupted when the connection fails. Using it over wifi makes this painfully obvious.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - pedrocr 13y ago
    I'm positive about Time Machine over AFP. iSCSI was indeed pointed out as a potential avenue with less issues, but if I recall didn't really fix it completely. If you're running wired+iSCSI you're probably much less prone to this. Try and yank some network cables during backup and see how it handles it. I ran into more issues than most because the particular AP I have at home doesn't work well with the macbook air I was trying to backup and resulted in a lot of disconnects. So it was a bit of a stress test but the issue is real and well documented. You can find instructions all over the web on how to fsck sparsebundles to try and get back your backups[1]. This is particularly annoying because Time Machine is supposed to be a user friendly version of versioned backups like you can do with rsync+hardlinks. I have a script to do that for me on my personal linux machine and would love to be able to deploy TimeMachine+AFP for the rest of the family. Unfortunately apple decided it really needed to have hard-linked directories for just this case and so decided that the way to do that over the network was to have a single binary blob with a HFS image on the server instead of the proper files in the filesystem (filesystems don't usually support hard linked directories, HFS was hacked to do it). That way you not only lose direct access to the individual files on the server you also lose the whole backups when there's disk corruption... I should probably have a look again to see if iSCSI is a viable solution to this. [1] http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,08,27,169,fix-time-machine-sparsebundle-nas-based-backup-errors.html http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,08,27,169,fix-time-machin...

magic5227 13y ago

Has anyone compared the reliability of this to Bittorrent's solution? I tried Aero a while ago and found it to be very buggy then. Are there any major differences between the two? http://www.bittorrent.com/sync http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

thematt 13y ago
I had the same experience. I've been using Bittorrent Sync for awhile now and absolutely love it. It's super fast and I've never had any inconsistencies in syncing. The closed-source nature of it is not ideal, but if that's a concern you're no better off with AeroFS or Dropbox.
- HorizonXP 13y ago
  Nor are you better off with Bittorrent Sync. It's closed-source as well. That could change of course.
  - kayoone 13y ago
    Thats exactly what he said.
    - HorizonXP 13y ago
      I must have had a brainfart yesterday or something. Apologies.
yurisagalov 13y ago
I'd kindly ask you to give us another chance :) The product has come a long way in the past year. In particular, our Private Cloud offering is deployed at a number of large organizations, all of which are quite happy. Regarding comparison with BT Sync -- I think their product is great, but we try to go beyond simply syncing files between devices by allowing for a lot more administrative control to the IT organization while still giving the users a really simple Dropbox-like syncing experience. Things like remote wipe, version management, conflict resolution, and so on.

Bjoern 13y ago

I'm new to AeroFS. How does it measure up against eg. Owncloud? Any important pro's and cons?

conception 13y ago
Yeah, don't see any real advantages over Owncloud.
koyote 13y ago
I was just going to say, in my opinion this gives you less control over the whole environment and you have to trust AeroFS to fix any bugs and add features when/if they are needed. I guess on the plus-side, you get phone support, if that is what you need. Owncloud is open-source and really quite powerful, I am surprised it was not mentioned more in these comments.

bifrost 13y ago

AeroFS is the solution to so many of my problems, its really pretty great. I've been advising my customers to look at it for quite some time now :)

rdl 13y ago

Silicon Valley startups might not think it's a big deal, but being able to run entirely on a private network (either "behind a firewall", or an entirely disconnected network) is pretty huge. Without AeroFS, your choices today kind of suck, especially for 10-500 person companies (or bigger companies where your corporate option sucks or isn't available). Dropbox doesn't work if you care about security. You're left with various forms of SMB crap, more backend-type things like iSCSI, or either blasts from the past (nfs, afs) or science projects (zfs).

tteam 13y ago
You can checkout our Tonido FileCloud (http://getfilecloud.com http://getfilecloud.com) product. It will allows you to host your own Box.net or Dropbox like solution behind your company firewall.
cmsdog 13y ago
I don't know where you get the idea that there are not good choices for on-premise, file share and sync solutions. There are products like filecloud (http://www.getfilecloud.com http://www.getfilecloud.com) which have been solving this pain very nicely.
- rdl 13y ago
  On iOS, even AeroFS kind of sucks, due to some horrible decisions Apple made. Basically every app has to adopt every storage provider's API, and right now, only Dropbox and maybe Box have any takeup. (and iCloud, of course, but iCloud sucks a lot, isn't self-hostable or even enterprise hostable, and is horrible.)
  - dublinben 13y ago
    That sounds like a problem with iOS, not AeroFS.
- giovannibajo1 13y ago
  I've been struggling to find a good Dropbox alternative for on premise. Aerofs is missing the option to share a folder/file through a link to non-aerofs-users which is vital to our workflow. This filecloud is interesting, thanks. Any other product that you are aware of? I thought I had found them all, but you never know :)

smtddr 13y ago

I've been using AeroFS for awhile on Linux(Mint & Debian). I have to say it's pretty nice. I don't actually know what makes it better than dropbox and all the other choices; never looked into any advanced features. A buddy just sent me an invite & I started using it and now it's part of my workflow since it works reliably between my work & home machine.

rajbala 13y ago

An "enterprise Dropbox" conversation is one that many customers will have with AeroFS. I know this from experience trying to sell this very type of product. The challenge is that sales cycles are long and potentially high touch. One way to mitigate that is by getting sales distribution through 3rd parties. But avoid integrating with a bunch of 3rd party storage platforms unless you get commitments for leads from the vendors. In other words view integration efforts as an engineering to sales arbitrage.

hemancuso 13y ago

So AeroFS had been in beta for like 4 years so they could do serverless peer to peer dropbox. And now they are launching a private cloud server product. Can't help but worry that these guys don't have any clear product they are committed to.

anthonys 13y ago

It'd be interesting to know your process for creating and maintaining the appliances you distribute to clients and any tools/packages you chose to help do it.

zentrus 13y ago

Overall I think their approach for easy installation and configuration is a good one. I struggle with these same issues at my job--we sell products with a complex application stack to customers that often have no system administrators. The only issue I see here is with the upgrade path. Particularly for a product that is meant for file storage, I can't imagine downloading a 1TB backup file and uploading it again every time there is a new release.

yurisagalov 13y ago
The Appliance actually does not store any file data on it, so your appliance upgrades likely won't include 1TB backup files :) The (optional) AeroFS Team Server is what would store file data in the company if you wanted to, but many of our customers actually just end up using the direct peer-to-peer syncing without a team server.
- zentrus 13y ago
  Thank you for clarifying. Does the AeroFS Team Server also have upgrades that behave the same way?

moreentropy 13y ago

We used to call that a fileserver.

jbobes 13y ago

This is what I'm working on http://cloud306.com http://cloud306.com