Protonet: secure, private, and beautiful cloud servers

Seems to be in a similar space as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandstorm.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandstorm.io&#x2F;</a><p>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.

Seems to be one of those HN posts with a lot of negativity and little constructive criticism.<p>I on the other hand immediately see a large niche market...lawyers&#x2F;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 &quot;noted a flurry of concern recently over Dropbox&quot;.<p>If you are interested in talking about the legal market send me a note.

All the drawbacks of &#x27;the cloud&#x27;, along with all the drawbacks of on-premises, at a higher price point than either... what could go wrong?<p>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.

I love it. We had servers, then we had clouds, and now we have personal clouds. Uh, isn&#x27;t that a server?

Interesting middle ground between old school high-upfront investment server rooms with IT guys on call, and new school IT infrastructure as a service.<p>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&#x27;t seem so scary anymore. (The price is still a little bit scary).<p>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.<p>I&#x27;m rooting for Protonet to help us democratize networking and bring it further towards the power consumer&#x2F;small business market. Shouldn&#x27;t private control of one&#x27;s own data be a basic right in this day and age?

Why does everything have to be &quot;beautiful&quot;?

What is the difference between this and a standard NAS product, especially Synology with DMS which has pretty all the functionalities Protonet provides.<p>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&#x27;t seem fully thought out.

Deployed safely inside your firewall, and accessible from anywhere.<p>What?

I see everyone here complaining about the hardware, but isn&#x27;t the real product here the hardware bundled <i>with</i> the software(SOUL)?

Once you take the servers out of the server room, you must make them <i>reasonably</i> 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&#x27;s the point of calling it cloud anything then?

What&#x27;s if the device&#x27;s local storage experiences hardware failure?<p>1. Can you configure it to make backups?<p>2. Can you configure it to replace data with low latency?<p>3. If you have multiple, can they work together to increase availability or data durability?

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

I&#x27;m not seeing any source code. Is any of it open source?

Ouch. Even TechCrunch didn&#x27;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.

The <i></i>a Small Orange Box<i></i> 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.