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Now that Shadow has two distinct products, it is a legitimate tech business. The business is also releasing Shadow Drive, a cloud storage service built on Nextcloud, in addition to its cloud computing offering, which is excellent for games.
At a news conference in Paris, co-founder and deputy CEO Stéphane Héliot said, “It’s been a year and a half since Octave Klaba acquired Blade with a vision: knock down technological boundaries and deliver cloud computing capability to everyone.”
In order to keep Shadow (formerly known as Blade) from going bankrupt, OVHcloud’s founder, Octave Klaba, purchased it. OVHcloud has been a crucial ally for Shadow ever since. To OVHcloud’s data centers, all Shadow servers have been relocated.
The business released its long-term roadmap in May 2022. It consists of three main pillars: the consumer cloud computing service that has served as Shadow’s flagship product since day one; a fresh cloud storage service; and a specially designed offering for companies.
The cloud storage service Shadow Drive is now live after a few weeks of testing. If you have been following Octave Klaba’s initiatives, you might recall his prior try in the field with hubiC. It was created to compete with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive, but it never really caught on.
Using Shadow Drive, Shadow is resetting the system. The business is basing itself this time on Nextcloud. If you’re not familiar with Nextcloud, it’s a well-known open-source online storage tool that you can set up and run on your own server.
Shadow Drive is a hosted service, so you don’t need to operate your own server or handle anything, just like WordPress.com can manage your WordPress website for you. Customers can choose to pay $8.99 or €8.99 per month for 2TB of storage or receive an account with 20GB of storage for free. After that, they can save, share, and sync files so that they are available through a web browser, a desktop app, or a mobile app.
“Shadow Drive is centered around two offers, a free and a premium offering—simple,” Shadow CEO Éric Sèle remarked. The personal information of our users will never, ever be commercially exploited, and our website does not run advertisements.
Due to Shadow Drive’s ongoing development, this launch is merely the initial phase. A good example is the iOS app, which is still in beta. In addition, the business intends to offer WebDAV functionality so that you can add your cloud storage account as a network drive in Windows’ File Explorer or Mac’s Finder. Nextcloud modules will increase in number in the future.
Cloud computing service for businesses and gamers
Regarding Shadow’s primary offering, its cloud computing service, the business only recently launched its premium plan. There are now two arrangements.
For $29.99 per month, or €29.99 in Europe, subscribers automatically receive the equivalent of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. You can install anything you want, including Steam, 3D editing software, and more because it is a Windows instance.
Users can add the ‘Power Upgrade’ option for an additional $14.99 per month (or €14.99) to their base subscription. This time, you get an Nvidia RTX A4500 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD EPYC 7543P CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads.
When I used Shadow’s Power Upgrade, everything went very smoothly. This new configuration is already being used by 8,000 customers of Shadow, and the business is actively adding more slots.
Currently, eight data centers offer Shadow. Due to the importance of latency for a cloud computing service, the company is only taking on clients that live close to data centers. United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark all offer the service. Shadow is included Spain on that list as of December 7th.
From a PC, phone, tablet, Android- or Apple TV-powered smart TV, users can access their Shadow instance. The idea is that even the most basic computer should be able to connect to your sophisticated Shadow computer.
For this reason, Shadow is also today releasing the initial iteration of its Raspberry Pi app. You can access your Shadow instance once you’ve connected a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and (optionally) a gamepad.
The business has recently worked with corporate clients who wish to manage many Shadow instances. For the Elden Ring press campaign, Bandai Namco Europe employed the service. However, architects, animation studios, and a variety of other workers that want a powerful PC but do not necessarily want to purchase tower computers could also use Shadow.
Shadow Business Solutions is a formalization of that offering from Shadow. There are three distinct arrangements:
NVidia 1080/P5000 GPU; Intel Xeon 2.5 GHz to 3.1 GHz CPU; 8 vCores; 256 GB SSD; 12 GB RAM; Spark
Aurora (Intel Xeon 3.3 GHz up to 4.5 GHz CPU, 8 vCores, 256 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 5000 with 12GB VRAM GPU) (Intel Xeon 3.3 GHz up to 4.5 GHz CPU, 8 vCores, 256 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 5000 with 12GB VRAM GPU)
Lightning (Intel Xeon 3.3 GHz up to 4.5GHz CPU, 12 vCores, 512 GB SSD, 32 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 6000 with 24GB VRAM GPU) (Intel Xeon 3.3 GHz up to 4.5GHz CPU, 12 vCores, 512 GB SSD, 32 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 6000 with 24GB VRAM GPU)
These setups have monthly instance costs of €59, €89, and €139, respectively. Bring your own Windows license, or for an extra €30 per month, purchase a Windows Server 2019 license.
Beginning on December 5th, the organization will begin supplying a management tool that will enable enterprise clients to construct, alter, and suppress Shadow PCs through a unique admin interface.
Once more, this is only the first step in the company’s goal to add functionality like rights management, configuration duplication, group administration, and backup management that will be crucial for business customers.
Last but not least, Shadow is considering using spot computing instances as a new source of income. To train AI models and perform other GPU-demanding operations in that scenario, Shadow would provide on-demand GPU instances. As you can see, Shadow continues to make general investments in order to offer new goods, new nations, and new clients. It’s still a small business, and the cloud computing sector is a young one.
It will be interesting to see if Sony and Microsoft succeed in conquering the cloud gaming business as well as whether major cloud hosting providers begin making significant investments in cloud computing. Shadow appears to be back on the right track for the time being.
