Cleversafe announces Development of Izumo storage technology

Cleversafe says its distributed distribution solution can reduce data storage requirements while increasing usability. It says this new smart client can improve the speed and efficiency of storage, and can integrate disparate storage-network technologies into the cloud, which is good for content-delivery networks and theoretically enables content availability on a scale that is not currently achievable.

Chris Gladwin, chief executive of Cleversafe, said: "We have developed this distributed storage technology for 4.5 of the time, and the current situation is that the market is very interested in cloud computing, so the interest in cloud storage is very large." It has certain characteristics, great scalability, resource and address virtualization, and unlimited reliability. "

Cleversafe in October 2007 with its dispersed Storage receptacle (dsnet) technology in the market. DSNet technology can divide data into small chunks and then allocate to many network nodes. Users can specify the amount of data to block and the number of valid nodes that the downloader needs to retrieve the data.

Cleversafe said in a press release that new technologies will add a new smart client layer to the dsnet so that clients can decide where to extract the data to ensure the best download performance for the Downloader.

Gladwin said: "The unique performance of distributed technology can achieve content distribution reform." Instead of just storing a copy of the data, we are converting the data to a new number, actually storing a copy of the virtual data made up of many small blocks of data. "

The storage capacity required for small blocks of data is only part of the storage capacity required to host a large number of copies of the data under the traditional distribution system. Gladwin points out that the total storage capacity required for small blocks of data is typically 1.1 to 1.6 times times the amount of data that users initially create.

In addition to saving huge storage capacity, the availability of the system is greatly improved. For example, the user can be divided into 16 pieces of data, the reorganization of data only need 10 pieces of data. That means that even if six hard drives fail, the entire network can still provide the content normally. Gladwin says this approach means that more copies of the data are available, increasing the overall usability of the system.

"If I want to read data from a distributed network, there are a number of combinations," Gladwin explains. For example, in the previous example, 16 blocks of randomly 10 blocks of data, the total number of more than 8,000, so users will have a number of options, so that the data read performance. "

Gladwin says a dsnet solution requires 8,000 copies of data to achieve similar flexibility.

Gladwin said that with the introduction of smart Clients, Cleversafe technology will become more and more mature. He said that the enhanced dynamic analysis of dsnet can identify the best performance and optimize the implementation of distribution. As a result, dsnet can deliver data faster than any server.

For example, if 1 million customers want to read content through their current common content delivery network, they may reach a download site through a central DNS server. The read speed of the client is limited by the connection speed and quality of the download site during the download.

"If I have 1 million clients that use smart clients on dsnet, each client will dynamically evaluate how to get the data and they are independent of each other," Gladwin said. "

Cleversafe also sells hardware products (Accesser) that connect dsnet and tools to create data blocks (Slicestor). The core of these devices is the Open-source code of the DSNet technology itself. Gladwin said the Open-source code could also be extended to other vendors ' devices outside Cleversafe.

"You can build the DSNet client directly into a device, and we provide our customers with a suite of Java SDK tools that can help customers build their clients, so you can put the client inside the phone," he said. "

While Gladwin believes that smart client dsnet technology is valuable for content-delivery networks, he admits that no public content distribution network has been a customer of the technology so far.

However, he notes that the focus of Cleversafe is on the content storage cloud.

Gladwin said: "The technology we have in our smart clients now has a deep meaning, so we may soon be in the area of content delivery networks and working with other companies." We are taking this technology to market more based on open source considerations than purely commercial behavior. Since our technology core is open source, we initially introduced the technology, and then with customers and partners to negotiate. "