Auburn's ioSafe aims for invulnerable data storage
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From: Ablang on 28 Mar 2010 09:06 Auburn's ioSafe aims for invulnerable data storage By Mark Glover Published: Sunday, Mar. 21, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1D http://www.sacbee.com/2010/03/21/2620515/auburns-iosafe-aims-for-invulnerable.html Robb Moore, CEO of Auburn-based ioSafe Inc., certainly has a flair for the dramatic. To demonstrate the quality of his company's "disaster-proof," toaster- size external hard drive enclosure, Moore recently traveled to Las Vegas, where the British Broadcasting Corp. filmed him putting a torch to it, submerging it in water, dropping it from more than 20 feet and finally crushing it under the treads of a massive excavator. On the video, Moore digs through a pile of dust and removes the central hard drive protected by steel and armor plating and plugs it into a computer. Presto, the photos he previously loaded are still crisp and clear. For Moore, this is a no-brainer presentation to prospective clients: "The choice is, if you're buying an external hard drive, do you want the pretty red one or one that's super-safe?" Just five years after Moore founded ioSafe, more than 10,000 clients worldwide have opted for what he calls "an aircraft black box for your digital data." The company employs 17 people to manufacture its product in a facility adjacent to Auburn Municipal Airport. Moore, 42, declined to reveal the annual sales of his privately held company. He said about 60 percent of his clients are businesses mostly small- and medium-size and about 40 percent are individual computer owners. He said all have a common need: preservation of data they don't want to lose. For individuals, that typically means digital photographs and videos of children and other family members, video of precious memories and holiday gatherings or family histories saved for future generations. For companies, the can't-lose-it data might be proprietary information, credit card transactions, medical records, financial statements, surveillance video or extensive employee files. Leakproof coverings Moore said ioSafe is a byproduct of his own background. Born in Ohio, Moore moved numerous times before landing in Live Oak. He earned his mechanical engineering degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and quickly applied his skills to making a living. He developed parts for America's aerospace program. In 1996, he formed Kollabra Consulting Inc., an online product development and engineering firm. Kollabra, which still operates out of Auburn and offices in Southern California, serves multiple industries, from optical to aerospace to toys. Moore is Kollabra's CEO, but he said most of his attention for the past five years has been focused on ioSafe. "I needed an ioSafe," he said. "There really wasn't anything out there to protect data from disaster. The old idea was to put (a hard drive) inside a safe and shut the door. But when you shut the door, you end up with an oven." Moore went to work on building a better system, employing leakproof hard drive coverings, air-flow channels, super-strong materials and high-water-content insulating materials that vent steam away from a drive in a fire. The basic ioSafe Solo external hard drive is the company's most popular product. Starting at $150, it's billed to protect data in fires up to 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes. It can be submerged in up to 10 feet of fresh or salt water for three days without data loss. Solo drives can hold from 500 gigabytes to 2 terabytes of data (a terabyte equals 1 trillion bytes). ioSafe internal hard drives start at $200, and product offerings range up to network-attached storage servers starting at nearly $13,000. Skeptics might ask: Why buy an ioSafe hard drive when you can just back up your data online? Moore replied that, for starters, many people who intend to back up their data never do it. Also, there are time and capacity challenges. "Online backup is a great way to protect data as long as you only have 20 or 30 gigabytes of data," he said. "If you need to protect terabytes of data or protect an entire computer and the operating system, online backup strategies start to break down. "It can take up to 10 months to upload a terabyte of data. Getting your data back quickly is also an issue if you have a complete disaster. It's faster to have FedEx ship a hard drive back from across the country than it would be to try and download a terabyte. "Transferring a terabyte from an external hard drive can be done within hours, not weeks or months." A household use To date, most sales of ioSafe products have been processed through online outlets that include Costco.com, Amazon.com and BestBuy.com. By the end of this year or early next year, Moore said he hopes to make it onto the shelves of big-box retailers. Moore envisions a not-too-distant day when a typical household will demand storage for 12 terabytes of data, everything from photos to video to music files. "That one video they made of the kids might be 30 gigabytes," he said. Moore predicts businesses and organizations also will have a growing appetite for storage. Potential growth areas for ioSafe include medical records, banks, surveillance businesses, digital video recorder manufacturers, credit card companies, security companies and casinos. Jerome Wendt, a national technology expert and president of Austin, Texas-based Data Center Infrastructure Group, called ioSafe external hard drives "a revolutionary concept Before I talked to Robb, I never really considered this approach to data protection. I know that's really a challenge with external hard drives, the whole idea (that) he's come up with of putting it in a lockbox." Wendt said the ioSafe demonstrations are impressive, but "the big burden of proof going forward will be how well they hold up in a real major disaster." Mike Smith of Severna Park, Md., doesn't need to wait; he said the ioSafe external hard drive he bought last year proved its worth when his home burned down Feb. 19. "We had family pictures, including some we scanned of my mom and dad," Smith said. "It's the sort of thing that if you think about, if you lose it, it really hurts." Smith said he was walking through the post-fire mess of his home "when I remembered (the hard drive) was under my desk. I dug down through all the debris, and there it was. It was scorched, all right I shipped it back to (ioSafe), and they recovered everything, our pictures and tax records, everything." |