By Alex Anderson, Contributing Author, SMB Nation
Seattle-based Symform, Inc. is gearing up to launch the next version of its innovative backup and storage solution, effectively killing rumours that had begun circulating in some industry circles, questioning the company’s future.
Those rumours, which were more than a little surprising given the fact that barely two years ago the Seattle, WA-based organization raised $11 million, bringing the company’s total financing to $19.5 million, were the result of a lack of public activity from the company, with announcements and social media channels being more or less dark since early last year.
Pictured: Mark Ashida, CEO, Symform
According to Mark Ashida, Symform CEO, the, the company was focusing all its effort and attention on creating the next version of its backup and storage solution. “We were working on the new Symform Beta. We wanted to put 100% of our effort into making that a great experience. We were heads down, spending all our time and energy on making this new thing.”
The new direction, as Ashida calls it, is the democratization of data. In the past, the only people who really needed access to the virtual data center were the IT staffers. That isn’t the case anymore and that shift has created an opportunity Ashida is hoping to fill.
“We feel the whole market has shifted from traditional back up to where people are using other consumer backups as their backups. You may have some file server in the middle of your enterprise, but I’ll bet you a lot of your people are using Dropbox. It’s all converged into one marketplace,” Said Ashida.
These days, cloud backup and data center services are as common as dirt, but Symform is continuing to shake things up with new ideas and new technology. Already offering a free service (The first 10 GB is free and after that you can opt to pay for data or contribute your own excess memory capacity in exchange for storage), the company’s engineers have adapted the quantum-esque approach of P2P bittorrent to exponentially increase the speed of downloads.
“It downloads almost instantly,” says Ashida, who claims it’s possible to store a movie or video clip and download and watch it in real time. “We detect which streams are going slower or faster and modulate them, just like a bittorrent.”
Security, which is more than a minor concern when storing your data on someone else’s server, comes through the use of a web-based interface using an encrypted 256-bit connection and from RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) 96 which encrypts, fragments and distributes the data in 64 MB blocks to 96 geographically disparate devices. This approach also dramatically increases the survivability of the data in the face of local disasters.
“We saw this during Hurricane Sandy,” says Ashida. “We lost lots of end-points with nodes going down, but we didn’t lose any data. We are not vulnerable to localized disaster events, or even widespread outages. We store data literally across the world. We don’t want to have too many nuts on one node, we want to spread the risk.”
Another new feature Symform is introducing is multi-device support. You can now back-up, access and sync your data across your computers and your mobile devices.
“You can be on the road and be at a kiosk, you can view movies and images. We have an iPhone App you can download from the Appstore. We’ve gone way beyond back up. We’ve made it very simple, Very affordable. And very secure.”
For more on the new Symform check out www.symform.com.
