Space Monkey Changing Cloud Storage To Crowd Storage

KickStarter Friday - Space Monkey moves Cloud to many locations

The current idea of Cloud storage is to have huge warehouses of computers where information is stored, along with web sites which are critical to business. The loss of a Could storage location can be huge until it is back up. Take the Amazon outages and you know the impact. But, what if you you could do something like the SETI Project and take advantage of a whole lot of computing power to distribute information so that there is no one point of failure. That would be the dream for all.

This week's KickStarter Project is Space Monkey which is providing a big twist on how Cloud storage is going to work. Instead of having rows of computers centrally located in warehouses, they have flipped things around and are crowd-sourcing so to speak. By having individuals all over the country act as Cloud Servers, they have spread things out so that there is no single point of failure. They do this by providing you with a small device which has a 1 TB drive inside and we assume that some will be larger.

For $10 per month, you will have the ability to store up to 1 TB of storage on that drive. And it will be replicated on selected drives in other people's homes or businesses. And you do not have to worry as all your data on other people's Space Monkey drives will be encrypted. Your files will be distributed and broken up so that you can get to them from anywhere, even if your Space Monkey drive is not on or connected to the Internet. This is distributing the Cloud to potentially as many people who have a Space Monkey device.

If you remember the SETI project, which is still going on, they are processing computations on over 3 million individual computers. This distributed model uses volunteers to crunch numbers and data for them and return the results. The Space Monkey replacement for Cloud computing is distributed much in the same way. By providing the Space Monkey as a subscription service starting at $10 per month, they are quickly going to have thousands of them through out the US. With the distributed devices and stored data, you will be able to access your information from any location and with very fast speed.

They are approaching $300,000 pledged for their $100,000 goal and you still have the opportunity to join in as they are going to extend the participation. If you pledge at least $119 dollars, you will get a Space Monkey device and a paid subscription for at least 12 months. If you are storing things in the Cloud, the Space Monkey looks to be a far better alternative. Look for deliveries to begin some time in July.