New O pen Source Community Managers and Enhanced Development Tools Facilitate Open Source Community Participation
CHICAGO, (RUSHPRNEWS) 09/16/2008- – Cleversafe Inc., the leading provider of Dispersed StorageTM technology, announced it has released the next generation of its software into open source on its site. The company is challenging software developers to build their own Dispersed Storage Networks (dsNets)-from open source code available at the company’s community project and contribute to new projects that are being defined to enable additional methods for utilizing Dispersed Storage.
The dsNet technology divides digital content into “slices” using Information Dispersal Algorithms (IDAs) and disperses the slices, via secure network connections, to multiple storage nodes on a dispersed storage network. Each individual slice contains too little information to be useful, but any threshold of the slices can be used to perfectly recreate the original data. A dsNet can tolerate multiple simultaneous failures of hardware, administrators or storage locations, while keeping data secure and easily accessible. The Dispersed Storage software can deliver limitless scalability, security, reliability, longevity, all in an extremely cost-effective manner compared to traditional storage architectures.
“We are developing a fundamentally better way to store digital content on a global scale and believe open source development is the ideal model for achieving this goal,” said John Quigley, one of two new Cleversafe.org community managers the company has named. “There are a number of exciting new development projects that we are launching to challenge open source developers to further enhance the technology. “
Dispersed Storage technology is the ideal way to store massive amounts of growing, unstructured digital assets. Cleversafe’s technology enables organizations and individuals to build dsNets of any size that store slices of their data rather than copies. With these fault-tolerant dsNets, only a subset of the slices are necessary to perfectly retrieve the data resulting in seamless data access without disruption, even when sites or systems are down. Since data is not copied, there are fewer bits stored on a dsNet than with copy-based architectures, dramatically reducing costs in hardware, bandwidth, management, power and space.
“This latest release gives the open source community the tools to develop Dispersed Storage Networks with heretofore unheard of flexibility, scalability and reliability, and we look forward to interaction with the developer community to further this exciting technology,” said Wesley Leggette, a second Cleversafe.org community manager named by the company.
“We are enhancing our open source community site with a new infrastructure, communication tools and documentation to enable software developers to more easily contribute to new projects.”
Cleversafe’s dsNet offering incorporates an iSCSI interface, which was developed in conjunction with the jSCSI open source project sponsored by the Universität Konstanz, Germany. Using the iSCSI implementation, users of a dsNet can view it as a mounted storage drive, putting a simple interface on the groundbreaking data dispersal and storage process occurring behind-the scenes, and making the dsNet easy and accessable even to novice users. Future open source development projects will focus on enabling other file/object oriented interfaces to access digital content that is stored on a dsNet.
Cleversafe’s open source code is freely available for download today at www.cleversafe.org, which also contains helpful Community forums, documentation and tools.
About Cleversafe
Cleversafe is the leader in dispersed storage technology, the ideal way to store large, growing amounts of digital assets cost effectively. Founded in 2004, the company is backed by world-class investors including NEA, OCA Ventures, Harrison Street Capital and Alsop-Louie Partners. Cleversafe is also the sponsor of an open source community movement to help standardize Dispersed StorageTM technology through its cleversafe.org project. For more information, please visit www.cleversafe.com or www.cleversafe.org.
Bryan Schell
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