Winning: Mozy
I started at Mozy in 2006 as their only support person- answering emails, taking customer questions. I left Mozy in 2011 as a Software Architect responsible for the huge, 70+ Petabyte storage infrastructure. Awesome!
I started at Mozy in 2006 as their only support person- answering emails, taking customer questions. I left Mozy in 2011 as a Software Architect responsible for the huge, 70+ Petabyte storage infrastructure. Awesome!
Stash was the last project I had a chance to work on at Mozy - and something I count as a crowning achievement, regardless of its eventual outcome. About a year prior to my departure from Mozy, I started working on a concept: supporting folder-based, cross-device synchronization with Mozy's outstanding infrastructure. This idea gave birth to the skunkworks project that would one day be called Mozy Stash.
If you want to read a bit more about the backstory, jump over to my blog.
You'll notice that there are some similarities between Stash and other synchronization services: it's folder-based, it lives in your menu bar, and tries to do the Right Thing without getting in your way. It's kind of like an LED light bulb versus your old-school incandescents: Mozy's Stash hides a whole world of differences under the simplest of user interfaces.
Consider both what we had to work with and what we had to create to get the Stash you can use today:
Clearly, we had plenty to take advantage of- more than literally any other backup or synchronization vendor on the planet. Still, we had to build a bit to make the Stash you know and love:
Mozy's Stash, built on Mozy's cloud and with Mozy's client technology, is one of the fastest, most reliable, most secure file synchronization tool on the planet today. It's really that simple.
Using the cross-platform Mordor library and its unique fiber-based eventing system gave Stash speed - unparalleled speed. There are two benefits:
Building Stash on Mozy's cloud allows it to take advantage of Mozy's security infrastructure, including private key encryption support (when you don't want anyone to read your data - evar). It also gave Stash the benefit of a true, differential-aware cloud. When you make a change to a file, we don't send the whole file to the cloud- just your changes. The same is true on download. You gain bandwidth savings and a serious boost in speed!
My start at Mozy was certainly lowly. While I was the seventh employee to join Mozy, I did so as their first dedicated support personnel. I remember those days - answering emails on my old Dell laptop, trying to figure out exactly how Mozy actually worked.
To be honest, there were plenty of rough times. It was hard to win the trust of the very venerable engineering staff. There are times when I think I still struggle there.
Difficulties aside, over my 5 year tenure at Mozy, I moved from the first support person to a software architect. I enjoyed that time. Mozy was (and is) a fantastic company with amazing people.
As a software architect responsible for Mozy's enormous storage infrastructure, I had many opportunities to work on a plethora of projects.
Mozy's SSO (Single Sign-On) infrastructure was one of these projects: I specced out and designed what would become the defacto mechanism for secure authentication and authorization of all Mozy products, including the client applications downloaded by millions of people all over the world.
We faced a number of serious challenges at Mozy as the storage system scaled from terabytes and into the multi-petabyte range. Doing so required no end of design challenges we had to meet. At Mozy, I worked with some of the smartest people in the world - a privilege I've been blessed to continue with at Instructure.