The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Technology: Dispersed Storage
Data growth is huge, and that growth is driving a previously boring industry to reinvent itself.
Hardly a week goes by without some announcement about changes being pioneered in the area storage technology.
Traditional storage today guards against data loss by relying on backups, multiple copies, replication and synchronization. The storage overhead to the approach can be expensive. The storage overhead of redundancy can mean that as much as four times the size of the original file might be stored to achieve security in data availability and recovery. There are of course costs associated with bulking up around more storage: infrastructure around equipment/hardware, power, floor space and management.
A new storage technology called Dispersed Storge adopts an idea from music file sharing services. The goal is to create a system that is scalable and reliable, and provides security for company digital assets. S. Christopher Gladwin of CleverSafe describes Dispersed Storage as follows:
“Dispersed storage 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. These locations can be situated in the same city, the same region, the same country or around the world. Each individual slice contains too little information to be useful, but any threshold of the slices can be used to perfectly recreate all the original data. Just as importantly, the individual data slices do not carry enough information for an unauthorized party to determine the original content.”
It’s not clear how much of this is revolutionary and how much is hype. Gladwin argues that their system is not “copy based” and therefore superior to traditional storage. No matter what though, bits need to move, and in my mind moving bits represent a copy of an artifact.
It will be interesting to see where ideas like this go.
