Sneak peek: Three Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Space Monkey

Last Spring, when we let the cat out of the bag about what we’d been up to at Space Monkey, folks started describing our vision as “BitTorrent meets Dropbox” or “The cloud on your desk.” These were clever taglines, but all one-liners are inadequate. We’re creating primary storage for consumers; that means access to your data on any device all the time. All without the overhead of datacenters.

So to pull the curtain back a little, here are three things you probably don’t know about Space Monkey:

First, you probably didn’t know that the Space Monkey network currently stretches from coast to coast and from border to border

To the left is a sneak peek at part of our storage network near our Headquarters in Utah. Blue markers show alpha-release Space Monkey devices working to store data, markers with numbers on them show multiple devices in a small area.

Devices in this initial network are in the hands of employees, investors, and family members of employees. This initial deployment serves as our test network, and is an essential step toward getting release-ready product into your hands. In the coming weeks this network will double and triple in size before we release a public beta.

Second, managing devices dispersed like this is fundamentally new

Solid remote management of the Space Monkey network prevents surprises

We’ve designed a network that will scale to millions of Space Monkey devices residing in millions of different locations. We’ve built a remote management platform as a core part of the foundation of the Space Monkey software stack. Remotely managing devices that are spread across the globe is a unique problem not solved by any existing software written by traditional cloud storage companies.

So, we’ve spent an enormous amount of energy and resources to make sure we can effectively roll out updates to devices remotely and automatically, without you ever having to lift a finger.

Third, we are metric loco

We measure everything! I mean everything, on every Space Monkey: memory, disk I/O, network I/O, CPU, bandwidth usage, all the way down to the number of microseconds it takes for us to fire off requests in the network.

Active work queues: a measure of the amount of work several Space Monkey devices are currently working on, over a 24-hr period.

In home networks, sometimes devices can’t talk directly to one another, so they need the help of a relay. This graph shows how much data traverses Space Monkey relay services, over a 24-hr period.

System load measurement over several Space Monkeys. System load is a measure of how hard a device is working.

We’re building a storage network the likes of which have never been seen. We’ve experienced the future firsthand inside Space Monkey, and we’re excited about it. In the coming months, you will too.

Originally published on January 28th, 2013 by Clint Gordon-Carroll