The redoubtable Ben Rockwood pointed to a YAOSS I hadn’t heard of: Cleversafe.

Their Big Idea: take data and split it across many data centers with:

  • Disaster tolerance – like losing 5 out of 11 data centers – and still accessing the total data set
  • Security – data is both sliced up into mathematically meaningless pieces and encrypted
  • Grid infrastructure for scalability and bragging rights
  • Open source and commercial licenses for folks who like to roll their own and those who want warranty, support and indemnification

Grid-based storage solutions have to manage a difficult set of tradeoffs. Making fast, scalable, cost-effective and secure storage isn’t easy, partly because network bandwidth – which was supposed to be free about now if you read George Gilder – remains costly in both dollars and latency. Cleversafe is using an information dispersal algothrithm (IDA) which provides most of the security while presumably also cutting network bandwidth needs.

They are still in development, so nothing to buy yet. I’ll keep you abreast of their development.