Cleversafe's Dispersed Storage

Cleversafe Dispersed Storage Unique algorithms disperse data over the Internet to servers on a grid.

After selling his music services company MusicNow to Circuit City Stores Inc. in 2004, Chris Gladwin took a break to organize his own music and photos. It was then that Gladwin realized the usual method - storing multiple copies of data - was complicated and expensive.

A longtime inventor with an interest in cryptography, Gladwin developed algorithms to securely split and save data among multiple nodes and reassemble it when needed. That November, he founded Cleversafe Inc. to commercialize his work. Now a 29-person company, with Gladwin serving as president and CEO, Cleversafe is funded by more than US$5 million from Gladwin and other early employees as well as "angel" and venture investors.

Cleversafe's Dispersed Storage software splits data into 11 "slices" of bytes, each of which is encrypted and stored on a different server across the Internet or within a single data center. This approach provides security, says Gladwin, because no one slice contains enough information to reconstitute any usable data. The self-healing grid provides up to 99.9999999999% reliability because data can be reconstituted using slices from any six nodes. Scalability is ensured, Gladwin says, because adding more storage requires merely adding servers to the grid or storage to the existing servers.

Among the biggest cost savers, says Gladwin, was the reduction in total storage needs achieved by eliminating the need for separate copies for backups, archives or disaster recovery. Compared with ratios of 5-to-1 or 6-to-1 of "extra" vs. original data in copy-based storage environments, Cleversafe requires ratios of 1.3-to-1 or less. While Gladwin has no specifics on how his software will be priced, he says customers should see savings "at least proportional" to the reduction in total stored data.

Originally, the team thought in terms of gigabytes of data to be stored. "Now," says Gladwin, "we think in terabytes and even occasionally petabytes." He says the first target will be secondary storage, where Dispersed Storage could replace tape and optical drives for backup and archiving.

This approach could "completely change the way storage administrators conduct their daily operations," says John Webster, an analyst at Illuminata.

Robert L. Scheier is a freelance writer. Contact him at rscheier@charter.net.