Protonet: secure, private, and beautiful cloud servers | Hacker News Reader

Protonet: secure, private, and beautiful cloud servers

blog.ycombinator.com

85 pointsliseman55 comments

Seems to be in a similar space as https://sandstorm.io/

Interesting to see this come out of Germany...Europeans seem to care a lot more about privacy than most Americans, which might make it harder for American companies in this space to get initial traction.

We've talked to sandstorm - we might even combine our forces ;).

Indeed, I (Sandstorm founder) would love to see Sandstorm running on Protonet.

There's also https://cloudron.io which is also out of Germany.

I see them more as a Synology NAS drive competitor. Can anyone tell me the primary difference between the two?

Seems to be one of those HN posts with a lot of negativity and little constructive criticism.

I on the other hand immediately see a large niche market...lawyers/law firms. For example, here in Florida the Bar issued an ethics advisory opinion that deters lawyers from using cloud services altogether. The opinion calls out some cloud services by name, and specifically "noted a flurry of concern recently over Dropbox".

If you are interested in talking about the legal market send me a note.

That would be awesome! Should I contact you via the tickettitan form?

No sorry, that was my first successful tech exit. Send to attorneybrown@sunbizlaw.com

All the drawbacks of 'the cloud', along with all the drawbacks of on-premises, at a higher price point than either... what could go wrong?

You can buy a couple new conventional servers (or many more used) for the cost of this single point of failure appliance. Plus racks look cool and this looks like a knockoff Mac Pro.

Also given that 'no IT is required', I assume this has no AD integration, is accessible telepathically and does not require a network?

We didn't build these devices for IT pros - you need to know how to plug in power, ethernet and push the one button that it has. That's it!

That much is clear to me.

Seems a bit irresponsible to suggest that is all you need to do however... do you not need backups? I'm looking at the specs and you list the RAID level of your storage under 'Data Protection'. Any IT pro will tell you that RAID is for availability, not protection. What happens when this falls off the desk it's on (as you suggest storing it) and all the drives fail?

I understand that it does not require any 'IT pros', but whom do you call during the warranty period? Are you not professionals? Do you sell maintenance contracts outside the warranty term? If I need to replace a failed drive in the array, will you be dispatching a technician to my location, or will I need to pay one of the baneful aforementioned 'IT pros'?

Why are you using RAID 5 in favour of RAID 6 or 10 when you already spec the server with 4 drives? A significant number of people and companies, among them some of the world's largest storage vendors, will warn you against using RAID 5 for any reason due to it's low performance and reliability. Since you only need a loss of 2/4 drives in the array to cause irreparable RAID failure, I assume each drive comes from a different batch?

You've made a claim that the server is 'secure' but you advise people to place it on their desks, and as far as I can tell from the limited documentation provided, you do not offer a means of full disk encryption. If I grab this off the desk while dressed as a DHL employee carrying a clipboard and do a runner, what stops me from accessing all the data?

Yes you need backups and no RAID is not a backup. That would also cover the falling of the table scenario.

Backups can be easily done via USB, remote encrypted offsites or using a second device for synching and cold standby.

You can always call us during the warranty period - from our experience this rarely happens. Yes we do sell maintenance packages outside the warranty terms. We dispatch technicians and with those maintenance packages you don't need to pay for that.

We use ZFS RAID 5 and while it's a great way to make sure that you can recover from 1/4 drive failures, 2/4 drive losses will be bad.

And yes you're right on the full disk encryption - and this is something we'll be shipping in one of our upcoming releases which happen on a monthly basis.

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

If you think this is the next iPod... I will gladly take that wager.

No of course not, it's a completely different market. My point was the product isn't deserving of a comment that dismisses it completly. People pay for turnkey solutions.

Don't overuse this tacoism. It'll lose it potency.

I love it. We had servers, then we had clouds, and now we have personal clouds. Uh, isn't that a server?

Not quite, it's still someone else that takes care of the physical aspect and the hardware fail-over for you. Even so the distinction is becoming more and more blurry.

The long term point of convergence is that the whole concept of a 'machine' will go away as far as the cloud is concerned. It will still involve machines but you won't know (or care) about how many of them and where they are located.

Something along the lines of Heroku, only then a bit more generic. Computing-by-the-yard, if you wish.

But if you care about privacy or security, you do care where they are located.

If they're located on your property, then they're protected by 200+ years of case law (in many countries). If not, then you have no protection save the company's privacy policy and willingness to enforce it in the face of government pressure or commercial temptation to sell your data.

Awesome point.

With all of the talking about anonymity, crypto, etc, which are all ephemeral things, one of the strongest things that you have going for you as a US resident is an object inside the perimeter of your home.

I'd trust strong crypto more than the law. I don't leave piles of cash in my house despite the law against taking it.

Generally speaking, the law wins.

That's true. But good crypto can also protect you in the outlier cases. If someone is taking your stuff they either disregard the law or they are the law. Crypto protects you at least a bit in both cases.

The US, UK, and most nations friendly to the US are not those countries.

There have been too many cases of police and/or security services rolling up at private addresses or small offices, bundling all the hardware they find into a van, and forcing innocent people to spend huge sums on lawyers to have any hope of getting it back.

A box on your desk is not the right answer to this problem.

Some kind of massively redundant disintermediated public data network might be, but we don't really have one of those yet.

To be fair this is not new, a truck pulling up and movers taking all the filing cabinets (or slapping government seals on them) is the way it used to be done.

If your local server filesystems are encrypted, then it's actually safer from that sort of thing than the file cabinets used to be.

Exactly, I believe there's a clear cycle going on (mainframes - pc - clouds - personal clouds).

Fueled by:

- moores law (massive compute power and storage at cheap prices) - bandwidths growing - new tools and devices that create constant streams of data (smartphones, collaborative & filesharing tools etc.) - commoditization of our most-used online tools (see dropbox) - a desire to have one integrated point of access/control

and a raising awareness of how important it is to own/control our data (caused in part by constant news coming out on hacks, data breaches and how basically data companies are the new oil companies)

Yes, it's a server :)

ps. I'm one of the founders

The article refers to 'private cloud', and you refer to 'personal clouds'. From reading the rest of the article, though, it appears this is a single on-premise server.

'Cloud' usually refers to some abstraction above the physical hardware layer, that allows you to not worry about the fate of a single physical computer. This seems to be the opposite of that.

What do you mean by 'cloud'?

no because it sits on your desk.

>now we have personal clouds. Uh, isn't that a server?

I expect the next generation will be the mobile personal cloud.

What do you call a disruption that re-rupts something previously disrupted?

Interesting middle ground between old school high-upfront investment server rooms with IT guys on call, and new school IT infrastructure as a service.

Take the servers out of the rack in the dark room full of fragile equipment and tangled wires, color them orange, remove the blinking lights and crazy loud fans, and sit them on a desk and they don't seem so scary anymore. (The price is still a little bit scary).

Differentiators of privacy, usability, and good aesthetics have brought this company far - raising 1m on kickstarter, selling into hundreds of companies, and now securing a spot at YC. Still, networking is a very complex subject, and a lot of smart people get paid a lot of money to make sure it gets done right.

I'm rooting for Protonet to help us democratize networking and bring it further towards the power consumer/small business market. Shouldn't private control of one's own data be a basic right in this day and age?

"Shouldn't private control of one's own data be a basic right in this day and age?"

That's what's driving me (and us)! :) We need to regain control over our own data and become first class citizen in this digital age (and yes also in the monetary aspect of it). Our hypothesis is: if you make it beautiful, easy to use and fun & given a similar feature set, people will go with what gives them more individual freedom. So thank you - for rooting for us!! :)

Why does everything have to be "beautiful"?

Because they're passionate about it.

I think it's an awkward term used to differentiate hardware from beige boxes, following Apple. It feels very forced and near-meaningless in these contexts though. Reminds me of the startups with "Made with love" in their footers as though some early developer passion imbues the code with otherworldly power.

I find both offputting, but then the tactic hasn't really failed Apple.

Society and culture has ingrained in us that beauty is equal to success.

What is the difference between this and a standard NAS product, especially Synology with DMS which has pretty all the functionalities Protonet provides.

A small server with remote access that is.

How come everyone is laying the smack down on these guys? Maybe encouraging guidance where things are ambiguous or the product offering doesn't seem fully thought out.

Deployed safely inside your firewall, and accessible from anywhere.

What?

I see everyone here complaining about the hardware, but isn't the real product here the hardware bundled with the software(SOUL)?

Once you take the servers out of the server room, you must make them reasonably secure against physical access. Are these servers able to be physically locked, both to prevent opening and to secure it in place? Do they use full-disk encryption?

I hope this product finds a market, but from the description it sounds like a simplified NAS with a few additional functions. What will you back up this device to- another one or a NAS? What's the point of calling it cloud anything then?

What's if the device's local storage experiences hardware failure?

1. Can you configure it to make backups?

2. Can you configure it to replace data with low latency?

3. If you have multiple, can they work together to increase availability or data durability?

The device comes with different raid levels - preconfigured and on-site support if anything happens.

1. Making backups is really easy - the most simple way is a USB backup, additionally: offsite encrypted and using a second unit to be synched and ready as a cold standby unit.

2. not sure what you mean by that.

3. we're working on this - currently only the synching and cold standby scenario works and is often used by our customers.

$3700 for a celeron with 8 gigs of RAM and 4TB storage? Is it gold plated?

I'm not seeing any source code. Is any of it open source?

The source code is fully accessible on every unit. We're open sourcing the base system - parts of it have been rolled into:

http://experimental-platform.io/

>The source code is fully accessible on every unit.

So it is Open Source, because we get the source code with the compiled versions.

>We're open sourcing the base system

Uhh, wait, so now it isn't?

You get the full source code. The license is not an OS license though - that's what I meant. We're moving the base system to a OS license.

Ouch. Even TechCrunch didn't give ProtoNet a writeup before the YC blog announced them. Good wishes to the founders. Hope things get better for you over there!

I could see this (or something like it) being a useful development unit for Azure developers who run their own local development version of Azure.

Yeah that would be awesome! We actually have a very high powered version too that we just released:

- 8 Core XEON - 128 GB RAM - up to 50TB of storage with 250GB SSD cache - still passively cooled

https://protonetinc.com/lp/protonet-launches-new-model-priva...

edit: if you know anyone that'd like to try that setup - drop us a line - we'd love to help out!

The a Small Orange Box immediately reminded me of A Small Orange hosting. Seems like a branding conflict.

How is this different to something like Synology NAS, which is DSM 6.0 over most of those features already.

You should try our trial (just hit the button) - it's basically the same system that runs on the boxes and once you decide to buy one we can just provide it setup with everything you did online.

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