Megaupload successor to offer 50GB free storage

A year to the day after his Megaupload sites were shuttered by the U.S. Department of Justice for copyright infringement, Kim Dotcom unveiled plans for a new file-sharing site offering 50GB of free space to members.

Dotcom posted the announcement on Twitter this week, saying that he also hopes to transfer all data from his defunct Megaupload site to the new site, Mega. Mega will be listed under the New Zealand-based domain Mega.co.nz

In his initial tweets, Dotcom wrote that it will have "very generous limits for free users. For example you get 50GB storage for free ;-)."

Dotcom plans to launch Mega on Jan. 20 during a news conference.

Dotcom posted screenshots of the new service on Twitter, showing a file tree-style user interface.

Mega screenshot

The free storage being offered by Mega far exceeds that offered by other current online consumer cloud storage and file-sharing sites such as Dropbox, Carbonite, Google Drive and Microsoft's SkyDrive, which offer from 2GB to 7GB of free capacity on signup.

Additionally, Dotcom tweeted that he is working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in court in the hopes of being able to migrate data from his defunct Megaupload site to the new Mega site.

Mega screenshot

Mega was initially announced in October 2012. At that time, the DOJ filed an opposing motion, andindicated that a new file-sharing site might violate the terms of Dotcom's bail, meaning he could face new criminal charges.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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Violin Memory buys Gridiron for fast flash storage access

Flash storage vendor Violin Memory has acquired Gridiron Systems for an undisclosed sum and plans to use the company's application acceleration smarts with its flash arrays.

Gridiron's operations units have already been integrated into Violin. The two companies are set to formally announce the deal on Monday. Both companies are privately held.

Gridiron sells an appliance that slots in between an enterprise's storage and servers and speeds up access to data in existing storage arrays. It uses flash, memory, software and proprietary hardware and can make databases and applications run 10 times faster, according to Gridiron's website.

Violin plans to use Gridiron's algorithms, which learn about I/O traffic patterns and cache the active dataset of an application, in its flash storage arrays. Gridiron's technology is well-suited to online transaction processing, data warehouses, virtualization and big-data analytics, according to Violin.

Violin also plans to continue selling Gridiron's appliances, eventually making merged products, said Ashish Gupta, Violin's director of product marketing.

Gridiron is based in Sunnyvale, California, while Violin is located in nearby Mountain View.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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SugarSync online storage service releases 2.0 beta

Synchronization service firm SugarSync has dramatically overhauled and simplified its user interface in the new 2.0 release out in a form of software public beta today. The revised software bears little resemblance to the previous version, and adds a number of features in a consolidated, simplified Mac OS X application. Product manager Drew Garcia said, the firm went back "to square one from a design perspective to make the cloud as simple as possible."

SugarSync in old and new versions can pick any folder on a desktop computer to synchronize with its central cloud storage. However, version 2.0 adds the ability to copy a file into cloud storage and then disconnect synchronization from the local folder, essentially pushing an independently accessible and modifiable copy into the cloud as if it were a networked file server.

The software also allows a user to pick which folders synchronize with given computers, as in the earlier release. Any folder synced on one machine may also be added to any other machine associated with the same account. The updated service allows searching the contents of all files associated with SugarSync, whether locally synced or stored in the cloud.

The update uniquely allows both cloud synced and locally synced folders to appear the same in the Finder by using MacFUSE to make remote folders appears as items in a single mounted volume. Locally synced folders appear both in the location that the user specified on a local volume, and alised in the virtually mounted drive. Cloud-only folders show up just in the mounted drive, and files are opened and saved just as if they were on a networked file server.

SugarSync 2 allows both collaborative sharing and public-link sharing. As with Dropbox, a user may select to allow other users to access (and optionally synchronize locally) any synced folder. Shared users have access to the folder to add items, modify existing documents, or delete files, but these shared folders don't count against storage quotas. Public links are read-only or download-only and can be copied as a link or shared directly to Facebook or Twitter through Mac OS X integration.

The public beta works with the same data stored in its systems with the older desktop and mobile software, which remains available for use by old and new customers alike, although the 2.0 software is required to use the new features. The beta covers the revised Mac OS X and Windows user interface, as well as an Android client. A full release of the software is expected in January along with a revised iOS app and apps for othr mobile platforms.

SugarSync's pricing remains unchanged in this version. A free version includes 5GB of storage. Paid versions come with a free 30-day trial, after which pricing starts at $5 per month or $50 per year for 30GB of storage and runs up to $40 per month or $400 per year for 500GB. Additional storage is added to free and paid accounts for new-member referrals.

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