New Version of Cleversafe Cloud Storage Platform

Cleversafe, Inc. announced the latest version of the Cleversafe cloud storage platform, which focuses on increased storage efficiency and enhanced security capabilities. For customers who are leveraging cloud storage, new thin provisioning with its object store, disk balancing and secure network connections between the Accesser and Slicestor nodes enables storage administrators to adjust capacity as needed, ensure better utilization, and eliminate malicious security attacks.

"Adding and enhancing functionality to the Cleversafe cloud storage platform has been a major focus for us in 2010," said Chris Gladwin, president and CEO, Cleversafe. "With this release, we continue to address the needs of our customers as well as market demand, by optimizing our platform for efficiency and security, and to enable storage administrators to ensure their data centers are more agile and responsive."

New features within the Cleversafe Dispersed Storage Network platform add to previous enhancements and include the following:

• Built-in Thin Provisioning: Storage administrators can now set soft quotas which provide alerting capabilities to automate the management of the storage system for storage administrators, and hard quotas which proactively restrict data writes. This enables just-in-time scaling of the storage pool, and enables customers to better manage and utilize capacity.
• Disk balancing: Also enabling better storage efficiency, disk balancing equalizes capacity across the storage drives within a storage appliance for better capacity utilization. This functionality detects imbalances of storage pools and shifts objects across disks within a single appliance once capacity is past 50 percent used.
• Secure network connections to the slice servers: Secure TLS/SSL network connections between the Accesser and each Slicestor node are available for situations in which users don’t trust the network between the Accesser or software SDK being used and the Slicestor nodes, addressing malicious sniffing of the network. If network traffic is tapped or routed through an attacker, the attacker learns nothing of the content of the transmission, and any alterations will be detected and discarded. Conversely, in a trusted network environment, network security can be disabled to increase performance, while credentials such as passwords, will still be encrypted.

"Security will always be a major factor for organizations evaluating cloud storage solutions, given the data stored is typically highly sensitive and any data breach would be catastrophic," said John Webster, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group. "Cleversafe continues to deliver the resilience, efficiency, and scalability that customers demand, as this release demonstrates."

The Cleversafe platform is for storing mission critical data by addressing the core principles of information security – confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) – within its information dispersal architecture. This approach solves the security problems associated with Cloud Storage since Cleversafe secures the confidentiality of data by transforming, virtualizing and encrypting it to be secure.

Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage technology, which has been in the commercial market for more than two years, transforms data into secure slices, and then disperses these slices to multiple storage nodes typically across three or four data centers. Each individual slice is unrecognizable as data and therefore inherently secure, because only a predefined threshold of slices are required to bit-perfectly recreate the original data. This storage efficient approach has thin provisioning built in and eliminates the need for traditional replication, thereby reducing storage requirements by 50 to 70 percent when compared to traditional RAID with replication and yet has even higher availability than four replicated copies.