Simply put, information dispersal is a much better option than doing things the old way. Here’s why:

Think mirroring is a good bet? Under the replication scheme of making exact duplicates of a file, you’re at 200% storage overhead on a single duplication. That’s more money, more complexity and more risk. Because if there’s a catastrophic event and your server and mirrored storage goes down, you’ve lost assets. Forever.

So then there’s employing offsite servers with a RAID scheme, copying data in segments on servers in different locations. After all is said and done, you may be at 300% storage overhead--and you’ll exceed 200% of bandwidth overhead in data transfer. And if one server goes down, you still may be able to retrieve data. But if two go down? You’re out of luck.

But now consider a more clever way of data storage. Using information dispersal --slicing the data and spreading it out among servers, only to be reassembled when you need it--that very same file has a 60% storage overhead in a standard configuration. That’s it. It doesn’t increase. And, if a number of servers where slices are dispersed happen to fail, you can get your entire, uncorrupted and undamaged file back, as long as you have access to a minimum threshold for retrieval. That means, for example, if six of 16 slices are down, you can still get the entire file back. The entire file. At a lower cost. With less complexity. Without replication. Information dispersal does it without the stress, risk, hardware and bandwidth associated with the old way.