Every now and then, I actually read some of the ‘spam’ which gets sent to me; this one had a link to a company called Cleversafe; I thought it sounded interesting, so I thought I’d click and have a look.
What does it do? as far as I can tell, it takes your data and slices it up; uses an information dispersal algorithm to distribute these slices either locally or to another remote site.
The theory is that you can define the number of slices and how many slices you would need to reconstitute the data. So I could distribute my data across a number of data-centres but only need a sub-set of those data centres to access my data.
I could have a number of data centres distributed in seperate countries, none of which hold enough slices to reconstitute useful data. This would protect me against a government seizing my data centres and getting any useful data.
Yet again, I think we have a solution looking for a problem and some of the stuff on the website is just bizarre. It compares itself to RAID-3? Who the hell uses RAID-3? I know it actually looks very similar to RAID-4 but by comparing to RAID-3 you kind of have a bit of credibility issue and it makes me feel very edgey about dealing with you.
And I am intrigued with their claim that with enough low-latency bandwidth that their storage can be as fast as local storage. Obviously this is entirely possible but surely you have to be within the normal synchronous limits for this to be true and this kind of obviates some of their claims to protect against corrupt governments breaking into your data centre and getting access to your data.
I am interested in dispersed/distributed data storage as at the moment, I am wondering how to store multiple petabytes of digital data and how to protect it; this looks interesting but I do wonder about the company!
Chuck, does MAUI do something similar? I missed the presentation EMC did for us last year and I’ve not got round to arranging another. Anyone else reading got anything worth looking at?
Hi Martin
Lots of interesting use cases for dispersed storage if you think about it, especially as one thinks about global delivery of large files such as video et. al.
Not the thing I’d want for my boot drive, though:-)
I think we’re going to see some sort of announcement here from EMC before too long, and then we all should be able to provide more granular detail …
— Chuck
Martin,
If you are so inclined, you may want to download cleversafe’s product from their open source site (www.cleversafe.org) and give it at try.
Chuck, good to hear that there should be an announcement soon. And yes, I agree that there are a lot of uses for dispersed data storage but I don’t see it replacing local storage. Although I can see some of the algorithms potentially having use in localised storage.
Thanks Russ, don’t suppose you’ve given any thought about distributing it in a vmplayer VM?
There are limited hours in the day and I really don’t want to have to build another Linux server to get it up and working. I know I’m lazy….
A note to all vendors, Virtual Storage Appliances are a good thing for the inverterate tinkerers who don’t have as much time as they would like.
Hi Martin,
ParaScale is built to address requirement to store multiple petabytes of digital data and we have a VM based demo. Please contact me offline if you would like more information.
Mike