My initial thinking and writing about creating a regional cloud storage provider was undertaken in response to the build-out of a fiber-optic network in southwestern New Hampshire called New Hampshire FastRoads.
I began a conversation with a colleague and friend who works for a local economic development corporation, which created New Hampshire FastRoads. In our conversations we discussed various cloud services that could make use of the New Hampshire FastRoads fiber-optic network. Eventually we focused on storage as something we thought would be a good, regionally salable, cloud service to provide.
MonadCloud was conceived as a New England region provider of scalable cloud storage that is compatible with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3). I've written more about why AWS S3 compatibility is a key requirement, but suffice to say that S3 represents a de facto standard for creating object-based storage architectures. Object based storage is different than legacy storage systems based on file and block storage protocols. MonadCloud uses object based storage software running on a cluster of storage servers. Object based storage is capable of storing Petabytes of data...up to hundreds of them. To give you a sense of how large a Petabyte is consider that it takes 1000 Gigabytes to equal 1 Terabyte and it takes 1000 Terabytes to equal 1 Petabyte. I think you get the idea. Object based storage is massively-scalable.
So, if you can already do this kind of data storage with AWS S3, why would anyone want to store their data on a MonadCloud cluster? Good question and one that we thought about before moving forward with our project. The reasons are customers using a MonadCloud cluster can leverage recently built fiber-optic networks in New England to deliver high-speed, low latency network connections to their employees and/or customers. Another MonadCloud advantage is, as they say in real estate, location, location, location. Because MonadCloud clusters are local, the people using them will always know where their data is being stored and who is storing it. Deploying your own MonadCloud cluster won't put AWS S3 out of business, but it does give you the benefit of keeping your data closer than say Virginia or Oregon.
Finally, there is growing awareness of the importance of creating a regional economy by developing and supporting local and/or regional producers and providers of goods and services. We have a lot of talented and entrepreneurial business people in New England. Being able to build local data storage clusters for customers is something we can do by ourselves and for ourselves. MonadCloud can help strengthen the regional economy by keeping the data we depend on closer at hand. MonadCloud can design, build, monitor, maintain and support data storage clusters for its customers on their premises or in a service providers colocation site. Our motto at MonadCloud is cloud local. MondCloud is ready to introduce New England customers to the next big thing in data storage technology that reduces the cost of storage and increases the durability of their data.