Open Source Moving in on the Data Storage World

pararox writes "The data storage and backup world is one of stagnant technologies and cronyism. A neat little open source project, called Cleversafe, is trying to dispell of that notion. Using the information dispersal algorithm originally conceived of by Michael Rabin (of RSA fame), the software splits every file you backup into small slices, any majority of which can be used to perfectly recreate all the original data. The software is also very scalable, allowing you to run your own backup grid on a single desktop or across thousands of machines."

stagnant??

[Phredward]

Companies are crying out for new storage solutions all the time. If the answer is slow in coming it is not due to "cronyism" and "stangnation". Rather the causes include the facts that distributed storage is hard, and people don't like loosing their data.

Link to pay-for-view contents

[andrew cooke]

The most interesting link here is behind a pay-wall. Do the editors bother to follow the link in articles? Do they just assume we all have ACM access? Come on, this place used to be a bit better than this, didn;t it?

Re:redundancy = your secret is safe (with us)

[Ruff_ilb]

Not necessarily; if the copies you have are broken apart and split up, that doesn't mean you have a security breach.

For example, if I tell you my 8 character password has a "q" in it, you've only lowered the number of possible passwords from 2821109907456 to 78364164096. Not exactly useful, either way.

And of course, what good is keeping the data out of the wrong hands if the RIGHT HANDS can never get to it?

Storage should be Boring!

[stereoroid]

One point that's been brought home to me in a very real way, in my position in senior support for one of the major storage system vendors: the hard disks themselves really do make a difference. SCSI disks are much more expensive because of their construction, the duty cycles they can perform to over long periods. You can NOT hammer a SATA disk at 90% of the time, 24/7, and expect it to last the way an enterprise-class SCSI disk does. My company sells low-cost SATA disk systems too, and some customers find that the lower price is a false economy for what they need the system to do.

I'm kinda missing the point of the "editorializing" in this article: when a storage system is doing its job, it IS boring. You put bytes in, assured they will be stored, and you get them out on demand. You want nothing "interesting" to happen to the data that your business is built on! Sure, the technology is stagnant, if that means customers can get access to the data, reliably, year after year. We Slashdotters are prepared to take "bleeding edge" risks that enterprise customers are not.

Re:I think this is wrong again

[Paul Crowley]

RSA get the credit because they brought the concept to science. Similarly, Biham and Shamir get the credit for differential cryptanalysis. If you invent it and keep it secret you don't get the credit; that's the cost of the Faustian bargain you made with the security services.