Sep 24th, 2009 |
How many times have you gone on a trip only to discover that you left some important file behind. Sometimes you’re lucky and you have something like a SharePoint server up at your company, but nowdays it’s just as likely that you work from home and that those missing files are on the USB drive on your home office desk. Or you meet up with an old buddy and you really want to show them the video of your kids at the beach. Regardless, many of us have gone the road of putting in a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device in our home so that we could have a common storage area for the family. If you’re particularly brave you’ve fought the battle of poking holes in your home firewall, paying the fees to get dynamic DNS, and pulled out wads of hair when things like uPnP only slightly work.
What a colleague introduced me to is called the “Pogoplug” from Cloud Engines, inc. This simple device really is meant for the home and could easily be installed in just a few minutes. No fuss, no muss and it just works. The Pogoplug is a simple white block of plastic that plugs into the wall and has only two other connections on it. A single Ethernet connection that goes to your home router and a single USB 2.0 socket that can be connected to either directly to a USB storage device (hard disk, thumbdrive, etc) or to a USB 2.0 hub with multiple storage devices on it. What makes this radically different from the NAS market is that you no longer have to depend upon knowing how to do port forwarding (aka poking a hole) into your firewall or depend upon the uneven and often unreliable upnp (universal plug and play) “auto configuration” system now found on many home network devices. This system instead creates an outbound encrypted connection to the Cloud Engines data center where the entire user authentication and other heavy lifting tasks are done. Authenticated users then ride back over that same connection and since this is in answer to the initial outbound connection, the firewall treats it as if a webserver was just answering you back after you type in a URL into your web browser.
Saying this a bit differently, when a web browser opens up a website, this is considered an outbound connection. The web server answers back in response to this outbound connection and the typical firewall treats this as the second half of the conversation and allows it through. If however, someone tries to open a web (or anything else for that matter) connection uninvited through your firewall, this is then counted as a new inbound connection which would then be turned away by most firewalls unless a specific access rule was created to allow this. So it’s all about who started the conversation. If the conversation starts from inside the firewall, then it’s considered a trusted conversation and the firewall allows the answers to come back in. If the conversation starts from outside, then it’s turned away.
What Cloud Engines has done is create a platform for the home network that does NOT require an IT specialist to setup, but still provides remote access to your storage device from anywhere in the world. The Pogoplug clients are available for the web, 32 bit Windows, 64 bit Windows, Mac OSx, 32 bit Linux (beta), 64 bit Linux (beta) and the iPhone. The remote storage just shows up on your client just like any other local storage device. Sharing various levels of access to those devices is as simple as clicking a button.
The significance of this product isn’t just that you can now store and share your files from just about anywhere; it’s that the Pogoplug is a development platform. Instead of leaving in a massive amount of legacy applications like a typical NAS, Cloud Engines has literally started with a clean sheet to design a new network file system, network transport, application programming interface, software development kit and then created a community of developers that are passionate about extending the capabilities of this tiny device.
So folks, now you can install the iPhone client and grab pics, video or whatever from your home all without fuss or muss.
