Travel Technology - Anyone familiar with Mirra?

I just came back from visiting a friend who was showing off his new Mirra. Mirra is a Linux-based system which connects to your home network and conducts automated backups of files on any/all PCs on the networks. It also let's your remotely access the data.
Their site is at http://www.mirra.com/ .


The system looks interesting, but it's pricey.
Do you think it is really much different from a combination of an external hard drive and VPN network for outside access?

Saw a review on TechTV, they were pretty harsh... It's useless.

You can only access your data THROUGH the Mirra servers (they were DOWN during the review!!!), you can't stream, it's slow, cumbersome etc...

Best solution for this would be any simple Linux server with Samba on it and possibly DynDNS to keep track of your own IP.

It doesn't even have any other features like a firewall, mail server etc...

All in all it seemed like a total waste of money.