AetherStore passes the 30,000 users over 150 countries

AetherStore (www.aetherstore.com), product developed by AetherWorks team, continues to penetrate the market with their brilliant P2P storage solution. Great, I'm a true believer of that with my own project KerStor several years ago.

Visited in New-York in September 2012 during the IT Press Tour #9, 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 me 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:

1. Stop to buy and over provision with new hardware,
2. Increase the used ratio of the current deployment storage entities,
3. 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. I’m sure 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. Guess what, Seagate shut downed the Wuala service. It’s difficult to promote a service that could participate of the erosion of hard drives sales.

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 of the planet. Hey FogCoin and ActiveAether are all that.

And it will be fantastic as the team has decided to join The IT Press Tour to pitch us about FogCoin and ActiveAether.