Cleversafe Inc. has announced that it has been issued five patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, helping the company build its portfolio around information dispersal. In addition, the company has two allowed patent applications, and, as of April 11, 2011, 65 published pending U.S. patent applications. The company also has more than one dozen foreign pending patent applications, and continues to file more U.S. and foreign patent applications.
The capabilities that these patents represent are the foundation techniques that are required to build and deploy large scale storage systems, Chris Gladwin, president and CEO of Cleversafe, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Cleversafe uses algorithms to divide data into "slices" and disperses them, via secure network connections, to one or more multiple storage nodes on a dsNet system. "Today's massive storage system is tomorrow's normal storage system. It's the inexorable march of data growth," Gladwin observes.
But, when building large-scale storage systems, he notes, customers are not only looking for scale, but they are looking for security, manageability, the ability to provision, reliability, integrity, so making large-scale systems perform with those attributes is a non-trivial matter. "Techniques that had worked in gigabyte or megabyte or terabyte scale don't necessarily work in petabyte-scale," he explains. "Usually you have to add new things, so that is what these patents are - the techniques that are required to build these kinds of large-scale systems to bring those properties like security and manageability that people expect."
Gladwin adds that the new capabilities Cleversafe is developing provide "ways to make large-scale systems that are manageable, that are secure and that present high levels of data integrity and high availability, and do that in a way that meets business requirements, whether they are power efficiency, cost efficiency, or space efficiency. It is doable and those are the kinds of capabilities we have created."
More details are available from Cleversafe Inc.