And the Cleversafe Top 10 Features are...drum roll please:

1. Reliable

Byte for byte, information dispersal storage systems are more reliable than traditional storage systems.  Systems with mean time before failure in the millions of years, and uptimes of 99.999999999999% are easily possible with information dispersal.

2. Survivable

Automatic rebuild systems allow the grid to self-heal, transparently and automatically, without any downtime, ensuring your data lives forever.  Cleversafe’s method sticks to the adage of not keeping all of ones bytes in one basket.

3. High Performance

With information dispersal, the only additional overhead is the level of redundancy you set in the dispersal algorithm.  This means no redundant copies need to be copied or uploaded, chewing up bandwidth, in the process of backing up your data.  Since multiple servers are always available, the client can optimize where it retrieves its slices from to achieve the maximum level of performance. 

4. Scalable

Since any number of Slicestors can be used in the creation of dsNets, they are highly scalable.  Where RAID scales by adding disks, making copies, and adding parity, dsNets scale by simply plugging in more Slicestors.

5. Unparalleled Security

In traditional storage systems, you have to trade reliability for security.  For each additional copy there is one additional attack vector where your data could be stolen, lost or otherwise compromised.  With information dispersal, the more slices you produce the more secure and reliable the system becomes; each slice ends up representing a smaller and smaller fraction of the original data.  In addition, since IDA’s require a threshold number of slices to be useful, a hacker has to compromise not one, but many independent servers to have a chance at getting useful data, assuming he or she can also break the AES encryption after recomposing the slices.

6. Configurable

Since dsNets are software based rather than hardware based, there are many aspects of a dsNet that can be configured on the fly.  It doesn’t matter if you have 2 Slicestors or 200, a dsNet can work with any setup you choose, and you have complete control over setting the threshold (the minimum number of slices needed to recover your data). 

7. Flexible

Additionally, you can easily enable or disable any of the various codecs we offer, including CRC-32, AES (encryption), DSA (digital signatures), Transposition, and soon to come compression.  All codecs are versioned so you don’t have to worry about updates to the dsNet software impacting the longevity of your data.  How you use secure connections to communicate to Slicestors is also as simple as changing a configuration option.

8. Pluggable Interfaces

dsNets can be accessed in numerous ways.  Today we offer iSCSI and a straight block interface, soon to come releases support FTP, NFS, CIFS (SMB) and webDAV, making your data universally accessible to any application you might conceive for it.  Our authentication systems are also pluggable through PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules).

9. Easy to Deploy

Our dsNet appliances are configured out of the box to be ready to run, all you need to do is change the IP address and root password, and we provide a web-based setup page to make it that much simpler.

10. Easy to Manage and Monitor

Through the dsNet manager, all statistics related to your dsNet are centralized in a single place where one can access real-time performance monitoring and fault management.  With traditional systems, you are lucky to have a way of knowing when a disk drive begins experiencing problems.