Joyent has introduced a new on-line disk service Bingo that gives you 100 gigabytes of disk storage for $199 a year. You will get one user account and the ability to serve files from a public folder (for images, podcasts, whatever). Joyent is also trying to promote its existing collaboration product ‘Connector’ by giving complimentary 5-user subscription to Connector with each Bingo subscription. Product development for Bingo was lead by Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman. Last year, Joyent had acquired TextDrive, an advanced application hosting solutions provider.
Joyent has packaged Bingo with some excellent specs like storage on Sun X4500s. Bingo service allows 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month over WebDAV with additional bandwidth for 20 cents per gigabyte. You can also associate Bingo to your domain like bingo.startupsquad.com. Users can access Bingo from Windows XP, Mac or Unix machines just like a local hard disk and download files with any web browser. As for protection against disk failure and to improve reliability, Bingo spreads the data across up to 45 disks. In future Joyent will be integrating Bingo with other Joyent products including Connector, TextDrive Containers and hosting services.
As for data encryption, you will have to use a WebDAV client that natively supports https to encrypt your data.
David Young at Joyent provided me with access to trial setup of Bingo. I was able to add Bingo on Windows through the “My Network Places” and set backup of my selected folders through GenieSoft. This process was much easier as compared to setting up Amazon S3 for personal use. Again, you need to pay upfront for Bingo, while Amazon S3 is on usage basis.
The advantage of Bingo is not only from its storage space specs. By combining it with other Joyent products, Bingo is a great offering.
Tags: StartupSquad, Storage, OnlineStorage
