Cleversafe, a storage management provider, announced enhancements to its flagship platform intended to improve the scalability and reliability of cloud storage for companies managing big data.
The new release of Cleversafe 2.5 includes enhancements to disk lifecycle management. Within Cleversafe's Slicestor storage 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 enables users to continue accessing Slicestor nodes even during a single or multiple failures, and minimizes end user involvement, resulting in improved storage utilization.
"The area that we are focusing on is big data storage challenges. There are customers that have hundreds of terabytes to petabytes - and even growing larger to exabyte levels of storage - and need things that Cleversafe delivers in terms of managing those large data repositories," Russ Kennedy, vice president of product strategy and marketing for Cleversafe, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
A number of the enhancements in the 2.5 release were driven by Cleversafe's customer, Shutterfly, an internet-based social expression and personal publishing service. The company was growing rapidly and suggested improvements that would help make the product more usable, notes Kennedy. Many of the new features are actually running in the Shutterfly environment already, he says. "We packaged them up and released them as our 2.5 release."
Additional enhancements include the ability to completely name an object that is stored in the data repository. Now, 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. "We are doing the 100% compatibility with S3 in this announcement," says Kennedy.
With this release, the Slicestor 2210 will support the next generation of enterprise SATA disk drives. By using the largest capacity enterprise disk drives, 3 terabytes, the end user is able to achieve the lowest cost per terabyte without sacrificing performance.
There is also support for the Accesser and the Slicestor software running as virtual appliances, so uses can now deploy Cleversafe technology in a purely virtual environment if they choose, reducing hardware expense.
And finally, says Kennedy, "We have added quite a bit to our Manager interface." 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, enabling the user to manage their dsNet system through improved diagnostics and analysis.
Most enhancements to the Cleversafe platform will be generally 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. For more information on Cleversafe, visit www.cleversafe.com/products.