Cleversafe Enhanced Features to Manage Cloud Storage for Big Data

Cleversafe Inc. announced enhancements to the Cleversafe platform that improve scalability and reliability of cloud storage for companies managing Big Data, and provide companies, like Shutterfly, Inc., with a storage solution that scales to exabytes and beyond.

According to a recent McKinsey & Company report, Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity, nearly 80 percent of the world’s data is unstructured, including file formats like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and non-textual content like graphics, video and audio files, and data storage is growing 10 times every five years. At scale, this growth creates a lack of performance and security, putting organizations at risk for data loss.

Cleversafe’s patented dispersed storage network (dsNet) technology delivers a cost-effective storage system that scales to the exabyte level and beyond to capture, store and deliver unstructured data objects at high rates, enabling organizations to derive benefit and drive competitive advantage.

New features within the Cleversafe Cloud Storage platform
include the following:

• VMware Support: Leveraging vSphere, both the Accesser and the Slicestor software will be able to run within a VMware virtual machine environment delivered as a virtual appliance, reducing an end user’s hardware expense.
• 3TB Disk Drives: The Slicestor 2210 will support the next generation of enterprise SATA disk drives. By using the largest capacity enterprise disk drives, the end user is able to achieve the lowest cost per terabyte without sacrificing performance.
• Named Object/S3 Compliance: In addition to supporting Simple Object over HTTP (SOH), the dsNet will support the Amazon S3 interface internally via named object. This will facilitate integration with application providers supporting S3 interfaces in their product portfolios.
• Enhanced Disk Lifecycle Management: Within a Slicestor appliance, failing disk drives will have their data transferred or migrated to other healthy disk drives, and will perform diagnostics on a failed disk drive to determine if data can be recovered. This allows users to continue accessing Slicestor nodes even during a single or multiple failures, and minimizes end user involvement, resulting in improved storage utilization.
• Enhanced Manageability: The Manager application now includes interactive graphs which will enable the end user to receive information when hovering over a data point, as well as support for user-definable timelines, allowing the user to manage their dsNet system through improved diagnostics and analysis.

"We have been saying for a while now that Big Data needs big scale, and traditional systems won’t cut it nor will traditional IT structures," said Terri McClure, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "Cleversafe is clearly proving that they’re not a traditional technology provider and they understand the way that Big Data needs to be stored. What I’m most impressed with is their ability to think ahead and anticipate the need for cost-effective scalability."  

"Cleversafe is committed to delivering an innovative, enterprise cloud storage solution that easily helps organizations manage their Big Data storage needs," said Russ Kennedy, vice president of product strategy for Cleversafe. "The new features in the Cleversafe platform will help organizations deliver a highly secure, reliable and scalable storage solution to meet their most challenging storage requirements. It’s the reason why several of the world’s largest storage buyers, including Shutterfly, rely on Cleversafe to manage their repositories."

Most enhancements to the Cleversafe platform will be available on Sept. 30, 2011, with some delivered before the end of the year. The latest features can be accessed either through an internal private cloud deployment or through a managed services provider that delivers dispersed storage as a service.