Cleversafe Upgrades Storage Network

CHICAGO -- Cleversafe Inc., the leading provider of Dispersed Storage technology, announced today new data storage appliance and software upgrades for the company's core Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet) technology – providing the enterprise with the most economical and efficient way to store exabytes of unstructured data (including audio and video files).

A 2007 study by the Taneja group showed that unstructured, file-based data within the enterprise, such as rich media, is growing at an unparalleled rate. 73% of users surveyed indicated that 60% or more of their data is unstructured, and that data pool is growing a rate of up to 75% per year. IDC estimated that the amount of digital content and replicated data exceeded 281 Exabytes in 2007 and is expected to grow to 10X that before 2011. This rapid data growth means major budget, management and data storage headaches for larger enterprises. The more content there is, the more important cost-effective and efficient storage becomes.

The traditional approach to data storage - based on RAID and replication - is not ideally suited for large scale unstructured data repositories because of the overhead associated with duplicate files. To achieve true reliability at the exabyte level using this method requires significant capacity at multiple sites – resulting in a major strain on corporate budgets and increased management challenges. Cleversafe’s technology avoids the inefficiency and cost of replication by dividing data into “slices” using Information Dispersal Algorithms and dispersing those slices to multiple storage nodes on a Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet); the sum capacity of all the slices is significantly less than maintaining multiple copies of the original data. For businesses that are seeking a way to manage their expanding pool of unstructured data at a reasonable price, Cleversafe offers a more reliable, secure and economical approach than legacy storage technologies.

"Enterprises are challenged to deliver cost effective solutions that provide suitable levels of security, availability and performance for ever-growing volumes of unstructured data," said Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Cleversafe leverages innovative technology to disperse exabytes of digital content across multiple data center locations, reducing the dependency on expensive enterprise arrays and data replication software. Additionally, dsNet is capable of providing higher levels of availability and recoverability (self healing) than point to point replication environments."

Cleversafe Inc.