Names You Need To Know in Data Security: Cleversafe
http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkerschberg/2011/09/30/names-you-need-to-know-in-data-security-cleversafe/
This article is about a company called Cleversafe that has created a secure and redundant way to store enormous amounts of data. The article also explains why this technology is needed; RAID storage does not scale and is more prone to failure. Cleversafe’s storage method is know as “dispersed storage”.
Dispersed storage is a technology that uses erasure codes to split data into multiple slices, each of which is then stored to an independent storage appliance via TCP/IP. Due to properties of erasure codes, the dispersed storage system can tolerate multiple failures of individual storage appliances without losing the ability to recover data.
I had the chance to meeting the Creator of Cleversafe, Chris Gladwin, a few years ago during a job interview (I didn’t get the job, i kept calling the company “cleaver-safe” by mistake). I asked him how he got the idea for the company. His reply was that he was scanning old photos and organizing his personal digital memories for months, and when he finally created his final collection he wanted to back it up. The problem was that he could not determine a sufficient medium to do this that was completely fault tolerant (shelf life of CDs and DVDs did not cut it for him, nor the expensive RAID solutions). He decided at that time he needed to start a new company to solve this problem of his; Cleversafe was born.
It is amazing how the company has grown since I first interviewed there years ago. They now offer their own hardware and have seem to really good secure scalable storage solution.
Hats off to them!