By: Christos Makridis
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, discussions about data storage and localization often conjure images of opaque server farms and complex cloud services locked behind cumbersome proprietary standards. However, one North American company, 45Drives, is changing the conversation, offering a vision of the future that is open, modular, and deeply rooted in community, content creators, and content-driven solutions.
45Drives’ proprietary “New Enterprise” approach—a complete rejection of restrictive legacy enterprise models at every turn—defines the way the firm sees itself, its customer, products, and refers also to its approach in servicing, all with an impassioned ethos rooted in freedom, versatility and user-friendly access.
Its journey from a hardware maker to a community-driven enterprise model challenges the status quo of data storage by emphasizing reliability, performance, and modularity over proprietary systems and locked down, inflexible agreements and terms. Another differentiator is the open source commitment at virtually every turn with dialogue and ideation exists among its three primary educational content creators, and the community of users, customers and hardcore enthusiasts who interact with them regularly on the firm’s burgeoning video channels.
Origins of 45 Drives
The next-generation data storage market is projected to grow from $60.7 billion in 2023 to $86.2 billion by 2028, according to a MarketsandMarkets report. Organizations often assume that the legacy vendors and/or cloud providers are the only source for tried and tested solutions. While there is value for some, the high costs and inflexibility of these solutions, coupled with a proprietary “locked-in” approach, no longer best serve an evolving tech landscape where interoperability and change is the norm. “New Enterprise” solutions offer modular, durable and flexible systems, while providing crucial cost savings as businesses scale up their data needs.
Over a decade ago, 45Drives started as a hardware manufacturer with a simple goal: to share knowledge and solutions with a growing community of tech enthusiasts. Doug Milburn, the company’s president and founder, explained, “We started out primarily by creating this digital content [about our technology] purely out of enthusiasm. Simply by sharing the way we solve problems, or intended to try to solve a problem, we quickly began resonating with the community. We went from a hardware maker to a community maker that thought more deeply through the pain points, which is generally what happens when you set up a channel to speak, but of course, to truly listen to your base.”
While many believe that software is the primary competitive differentiator, 45Drives found that hardware matters just as much. Offering solutions with both open hardware and open-source software components provides an ownership experience that surpasses other models, where finger-pointing between vendors is common.
“We learned that people who want to do large data storage need mission critical reliability and performance,” said Brett Kelly, Head of R&D. “Legacy systems are very proprietary. That model served the consumer well at the time, but we don’t need that now anymore and it’s not interoperable,” he continued.
Community-Driven Services
This community-first ethos has powerful ramifications, fueled by the expansion of open source standards. Open source software has been growing rapidly and an estimated 97% of applications are using open source code. The direct contribution of open source software to gross domestic product is estimated at $36.2 billion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is roughly 10% of the value from non-open source software in 2019.
Open source hardware solutions have also expanded, according to research published in the Journal of Open Hardware, and 45Drives is already capitalizing on this trajectory by involving creators, which Doug identifies as the backbone of their business model, in shaping their products and services.
Open source is not merely an ideological stance but a robust business strategy for 45Drives. While traditional data storage companies operate on proprietary technologies, 45Drives provides an “ownership experience that is superior to other models,” according to Rob Macqueen, Head of Customer Service.
Drew Sawyer, Founder, Moonshine Post, said, “45Drives is redefining the vendor-customer relationship in the data space. They empowered our scale with their technology and support, but allowed us to steer. It’s a transformative approach.”
The IT landscape has long been fraught with ‘vendor lock-in,’ a situation where customers are dependent on a vendor for products and services and cannot easily move to another vendor without substantial costs. 45Drives’ open-source hardware and software defy this norm through offering solutions that promise seamless interoperability, eliminating the common scenario where one vendor points fingers at another when issues arise.
45Drives found recurring demands for storage solutions that wouldn’t fail in a short time and were modular. These were particularly highlighted by Chief Architect Mitch Hall, who himself was part of online open-source forums and had a keen sense of market needs. “I already had a good presence on Reddit, so I already knew the types of people we should be reaching out to” he said. “More and more, we heard the emphasis on something that wouldn’t just break in another year or two, and something that is modular and can be improved upon.”
“The City of Hagerstown has been using 45Drive’s NAS’s for nearly 10 years,” said Tim McCarty, I.T. systems administrator at City of Hagerstown. “45Drives spends significant time and resources presale making sure they tailor solutions perfectly for our organization. We were planning on Windows-based storage, but attending one of their many free educational seminars showed us an open-source platform is still easy to manage, and provides us greater freedom to choose what we do with the device. 45Drives is essential to our backup strategy,” he continued.
The culmination of 45 Drives’ commitment to community-building and digital content creation was the inaugural Creator Summit 2023 held in Nova Scotia this August, where technologists, practitioners, and creators came together to exchange ideas and shape the future of data storage. Boasting a combined subscriber count just shy of 2M and growing, renowned creators Techno Tim Stewart, Tom Lawrence of Lawrence Systems, Wendell Wilson of Level 1 Techs, Jeff Geerling, and Jeff Soleim of Craft Computing comprised a slate of featured luminaries that descended on Cape Breton Island for the three-day event. It was so successful, it has become an annual occurrence.
Redefining Customer Support
For 45Drives, customer service is more than an afterthought—it’s a genuine and effective problem-solving approach that isn’t just functional; it’s enjoyable, a refreshing departure from scripted troubleshooting. Rob Macqueen put it bluntly: “We will sell you the hardware, support you with the software, and give you great service on a robust, high-availability solution at around 10% the cost of a petabyte of cloud storage over a 5-year period of time. Once people find out about this, the cloud value proposition all of a sudden doesn’t seem so great.”
Milburn added, “We are going to become valuable by solving problems for our customers, not by exploiting laws and incumbent systems.” This philosophy aligns with global shifts toward data sovereignty driven by regulations like GDPR and CCPA, making 45 Drives’ approach both timely and prescient.
“Integrating 45Drives has significantly impacted the way we manage and store content, enhancing our data reliability, scalability and overall efficiency while empowering us to manage content more strategically,” said LaDarien LaBlue, Lead Network Engineer of IT Infrastructure at the E.W. Scripps Company. “It has also helped us lay the foundation for future innovation at Scripps: 45Drives’ support for various protocols and file-sharing solutions has made it easier for our Scripps teams to work together, both locally and remotely. As a Fortune 1000 media company, this kind of collaboration across our local and remote teams is essential,” he added.
By seamlessly blending an open-source model with a community-engaged approach, 45 Drives is not merely following market trends; it is setting them. In an era where organizations worldwide grapple with escalating data needs and localization challenges, 45 Drives’ solutions offer a clear path forward. They exemplify what’s possible when companies listen to their communities and remain committed to open, collaborative problem-solving.
Clustering, On-Premise, and A Guaranteed Ransomware Solution
45Drives’ Ceph Clustered Solutions offer redundancy via replication or erasure coding, meaning multiple copies of files are spread across multiple nodes to ensure high availability. They are also fault tolerant, enabling customers to lose disks and/or servers while maintaining full “up time.” Moreover, “clustering is an embodiment of the global movement for firms to reclaim agency over their valuable data”, said Rob Macqueen. “We see a return in so many industries these days to move away from the templated hyperscale approach when it is clearly out of touch. Customers want to be nimble, and this is almost always the best way to do things,” he continued.
When it comes to software solutions that are reshaping this current epoch of computing, there is “SnapShield”, 45Drives’ “ransomware activated fuse” – agentless software that runs on the server and listens to traffic from external access points. If it detects ransomware content, SnapShield pops the connection to the server instantly, just like a fuse. Damage is stopped, and it is business as usual for the rest of a clients’ network while the IT personnel clean out the infected workstation.
SnapShield also keeps a detailed log of the malicious activity and has a restore function that instantly repairs any damage that may have occurred to the data. “Previous solutions fail because they don’t run on behavior analysis, which allows 45Drives to guarantee that SnapShield renders any attack a “non-event”, regardless of the sophistication of the attackers’ latest software,” said Milburn. The arms-race in this category potentially ends with wide adoption of a solution like this, which is truly remarkable for the municipalities, federal agencies, colleges and universities, and other mission-critical industry verticals who depend on this technology.
On September 13, 2023, 45Drives launched “45Homelab” a new division aimed at bringing its core design to a traditionally under-served market of homelab computer enthusiasts. The company is demonstrating its commitment to the community it serves by making its gear accessible to fans and homelab community members. Responding to the passionate voices of its community, 45Drives is addressing the longstanding desire of users to experience its hardware within the confines of their homes and explore the endless possibilities of homelab storage, and a more fluid conversation between mission-critical office and home life. Previously, the company’s B2B orientation made its enterprise solutions cost prohibitive to consumers. The new division allows 45Drives to maintain its steadfast commitment to leading the way in the B2B realm while simultaneously rewarding, serving and delighting its beloved “hardcore” evangelists.
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