Innovating with open source at BitLeap
Tonight’s CPLUG meeting was really interesting. Rather than the normal format of two talks (one pre-pizza, one post), Ian Berry and Lindsay Snider presented a talk called “Innovating with Open Source at BitLeap.”
BitLeap is a startup company (est. 2004) founded by the two. In a nutshell, they do offsite backups using custom Gentoo boxen. You sign up with them, they give you a box, you plug it in, and it they handle just about everything else. But although it sounds rather simple… the technology behind it is really really slick.
Between splitting the data up into tiny chunks, encrypted tunnels, MD5/SHA hashes, patching PHP, remotely managing and updating Gentoo boxen across the country, OpenVPN, and a ton of other hacking… it was a fascinating talk.
Some pictures are available after the jump…
September 12th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
[...] I guess I was just hoping for a talk more in the style of the BitLeap one from the CPLUG meeting back in January. It wasn’t a “sales pitch” at all really, just a technical discussion of what makes their software cool. And in many ways, that was far more pursuasive than the typical ROI/TCO pitch. It is, after all, a room full of Dilberts rather than of PHBs. [...]
March 6th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
We have their solution. It is quite remarkable and even though we are a small company, we can afford it. Super tech support (although I really didn’t need any.) Pretty funny, we moved the BitLeap box to a shelf in a server rack. forgot to turn it on! They called me to inquire. We are very happy to have found BitLeap! I moved the device so we could see the lights.
Jen
March 6th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Hi Jenifer, thanks for the comment.
The BitLeap guys seemed to be really on-the-ball during their LUG presentation, and I’m sure that comes through in their company. Glad you like their product/service.