News

posted on 20 February 2008 09:20

The first dispersed storage network products have been announced by Cleversafe. They divide information into slices with each slice stored on a Internet-connected storage node.

The information on any one node is too small to be useful, hence there is intrinsic data security and the data is stored in a 'clever safe' not by being confined in a one strongroom but by being dispersed all over the place, in the Internet cloud if you will. It's almost as if a document was shredded with the individual shreds being stored separately and capable of being re-combined back into the original document.

Cleversafe describes its technology thus: A Cleversafe dsNet divides digital content into “slices” using Information Dispersal Algorithms (IDAs) and disperses the slices, via secure network connections, to multiple storage nodes on a dispersed storage network. Each individual slice contains too little information to be useful, but any threshold of the slices can be used to perfectly recreate the original data. The dsNet can tolerate multiple simultaneous failures of hardware, administrators or storage locations, while keeping data secure and easily accessible.

With these fault-tolerant dsNets, only a subset of the slices are necessary to perfectly retrieve the data resulting in seamless data access without disruption, even when sites or systems are down. Since data is not copied, there are fewer bits stored on a dsNet than with copy-based architectures, dramatically reducing costs in hardware, bandwidth, management, power and space.

The company says dsNet can deliver limitless scalability, security, reliability, and longevity; all in an extremely cost-effective manner compared to traditional storage architectures.

A Dispersed Storage Network is built by deploying and inter-connecting three appliance-based components from Cleversafe:

- Accesser — Dispersed Storage router that slices, disperses and retrieves data throughout the network. One or more Accessers can be deployed in a single dsNet
- Slicestor — Dispersed Storage servers that store the slices. Multiple Slicestors can be deployed in a single rack in a datacenter or be distributed around the globe
- Manager — Dispersed Storage network manager that monitors the components of a dsNet out-of-band to gather information, create alerts and produce administrative reports

John Webster, a principal IT advisor at Illuminata, Inc., suggested that: “Cleversafe’s dispersed storage networks may well prove to be the most disruptive storage technology since the emergence of RAID.”

This could be a stretch. There is a likely restriction on file retrieval time due to unpredictable individual Internet bandwidth availability. Cleversafe says its technology is: "the ideal way to store massive amounts of growing, unstructured digital assets."

Cleversafe’s dsNet offering incorporates both iSCSI and block device interfaces, which allow any dsNet to appear, logically, as a network device on the desktop, enabling users to transparently store and retrieve files as if they were using a local hard drive. The dsNet also easily integrates with many existing backup and archiving applications.

Pricing and Availability
Cleversafe dsNet components can be used by companies to build and host a dsNet for their internal use, and by hosting companies and ISPs that plan to build and operate dsNets for their customers. The dsNet components will be available for select customers from Cleversafe or certified partners on March 31, 2008. List prices for the dsNet components are as follows:

- Slicestor - $11,300
- Accesser - $12,300
- Manager - $12,300

A typical configuration of 8 Slicestors, 2 Accessers and 1 Manager delivers 24TB of raw capacity--which can be configured with up to 13-nines (!) of calculated reliability--lists at $127,000. For more information, please visit www.cleversafe.com, or call 312-423-6640 to speak to a Cleversafe representative.

Cleversafe was founded in 2004 and is venture capitalist-backed. It is also the sponsor of an open source community movement to help standardize Dispersed Storage technology through its cleversafe.org project.