|
:: Home >> IT Consulting >> Core Competencies >> Mirra Personal Servers >> Product Reviews >> eWeek Review
mirra personal server review from eweek magazine
Up Close with the Mirra Personal Server
December 8, 2003: Extreme Tech
Written
by Loyd Case
The sheer volume of our personal data is exploding. Digital photography, music, video and games gobble up hard drive space like Cookie Monster set loose in Mrs. Fields. As we load up our home systems with more storage-consuming media, the value of that media becomes greater than the dollar cost of the underlying hardware. It's one thing to have a box of unsorted family photos sitting in your bookcase. It's quite another to have all those photos on your home PC – and then suffer a drive crash.
Traditionally, this would be where we'd lecture you about backup. But backup has always been a chore. Sure, you can back up your valuable data, but what if you make some changes and then decide to roll back to the originals? Backup software can handle version restores, but what if you want to keep multiple versions available? Or, if you're tech-savvy enough to take care of these details, what about the rest of your family? Maybe your kids have a PC, or your wife, or your grandmother in Duluth. Then there's the issue of file-sharing. What if you want to share some of those family pictures with far-flung family members? One solution is to have a family website, but then someone has to maintain it. If you're living in a home with a broadband connection, you may be concerned about worms and other security issues, so you need a hardware or software firewall in place. So, the idea of having a shared system that can easily be accessed from the Internet probably makes your teeth itch.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to automatically back up your valuable data, share files and roll back to older versions? Now there is. It's called "Mirra."
Mirra's product is called the Mirra Personal Server -- a play on the word "mirror" because you are, in effect, mirroring the data on your PC or small network. Calling it a "server" is something of a misnomer because it's not one in the traditional sense. It's basically a digital storage device that's capable of keeping multiple versions of files, backing up your system automatically and sharing specified content locally or over the Internet.
The Mirra unit is based on VIA's Mini-ITX platform. It's a compact unit that's not particularly powerful by today's desktop PC standards, but you don't need a lot of horsepower for storing and retrieving files in a home or small office network. All you need is a network connection.
Setting up the hardware is about as simple as setting up most home appliances: Just plug in the power cable and an Ethernet cable and power it up. You don't need to connect a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or other peripheral device. In this respect, Mirra is much like a NAS (network attached storage) device, but it's smarter and easier to use. |