Imagine a world in which there are no storage vendors -- at least
not vendors as we know them today. Imagine a world in which
storage, like bandwidth, water or electricity, is a utilitarian
resource; a world in which storage and the Internet work the same
way and can even be one and the same thing.
No, it's not a song John Lennon wrote -- it's the vision of
Chris Gladwin, CEO of Cleversafe, an organization working on
developing an information-dispersal algorithm (IDA) that he claims
could change how we think of both storage and computing.
The Cleversafe concept has been around since the 1970s in one
form or another, Gladwin said, but the model is only becoming
practical to implement now that high-speed Internet has become
ubiquitous.
IDA makes "slices" of data that contain added code that "scrambles"
the data for encryption, as well as corresponding to a kind of
parity slice called the Coded Slice, which allows the data to be
rebuilt even if some nodes are lost. In other words, according to
Gladwin, it's like geographically dispersed RAID, with encryption
built in, that works over a commodity Internet connection.
Gladwin said it's the parity that makes it different from
standard grid computing. "Any majority of nodes can put the data
back together -- in the case of an 11-node system, six nodes can
recover all the data because of the algorithm," he said. "Both
conventional RAID systems and conventional grid systems can't
withstand losing five of 11 nodes or disks."
In fact, he said, if an 11-node grid was built using commodity
servers with 99.9% availability, it would have 12 "9s" of
reliability for the entire system -- "an outage of one hour in a
million years," Gladwin said. "I thought that had a certain ring to
it."
Right now, the Cleversafe Research Storage Grid consists of 11
nodes -- the maximum number of nodes that the current IDA allows.
Theoretically, the algorithm can be expanded infinitely, Gladwin
said, but right now that expansion is the challenge Cleversafe was
founded to address. "We're working on prototypes of 30-, 40- and
50-node systems," he said.
Imagine all the people, sharing all the world
Currently, the organization working to advance the concept has
two sides: Cleversafe.org, an open source project that's developing
the code, as well as the bigger prototype systems and Cleversafe
LLC, which aims to commercialize the concept once it's ready for
prime time.
Ultimately, according to Gladwin, the vision of Cleversafe's 20
open source developers is a worldwide storage grid, which would be
run and controlled by Internet service providers (ISP). "A megabit
of bandwidth and a terabyte of storage could be the same thing,"
Gladwin said.
It may seem far-fetched, and Gladwin admits the storage Internet
won't exactly be coming next year. "The limiting factor is time,"
he said. "There's other behind-the-scenes stuff, like LDAP
(lightweight directory access protocol) for the IDA so it could
work over the conventional Internet, that have to be developed, and
the self-healing capabilities that could come with the algorithm
are also being worked on now. "
But Gladwin, it turns out, has already had a hand in several
computing trends that seemed harebrained at first and have since
become ubiquitous. The most recent item on his resume prior to this
project is MusicNow, which provided digital music services marketed
by Best Buy, Clear Channel Communications, Microsoft, SBC Internet
Services, Charter Communications and EarthLink Inc. MusicNow grew
to 100,000 customers before being bought by Circuit City Stores
Inc. for an undisclosed sum in early 2004. Circuit City then sold
MusicNow to America Online LLC (AOL) in November 2005. AOL
currently uses MusicNow as its music-sharing service for
subscribers.
Before MusicNow, Gladwin was the primary inventor on the
original patent for the wireless thin client. He served as the
founding chairman, president and CEO of Cruise Technologies, which
provided wireless thin clients that were marketed by distribution
partners, such as Motorola Inc., IBM, Wyse Technology Inc., Telos
Corp. and Zenith Data Systems.
Could it be he's on to yet another something?
He could be, according to Arun Taneja, founder and analyst with
the Taneja Group. Though Taneja said he's seen companies with
similar ideas fail because they could not get funding for such
radical concepts, the previous prototypes he's seen came along
several years ago, and times may have changed in Cleversafe's
favor, he said.
"What's interesting here is the connection with the Internet. I
think they could build up a customer base from consumers and small
enterprises first that way," he said.
In terms of the enterprise, Taneja said, there are a few factors
in Cleversafe's favor over previous distributed-computing
prototypes. One is that the algorithm allows for security, by
encrypting the slices of data in flight and providing for a "key"
system so that only the owner of the data could put the slices back
together again. Another is that applying it to the Internet would
take advantage of existing storage and networking resources, not
totally unlike previous prototypes, but on a much broader scale,
Taneja said,.
As such, this kind of revolutionary concept might not take over
in the next year or even the next five years, but sometime within
the next decade. It could very well become the next storage
standard, Taneja said.
"It may take some time to get people to trust the idea of
breaking up the data into these small chunks," Taneja said. "But in
reality, it's more secure than having data on tapes falling off of
trucks, and, if they can truly prove the concept, would probably
improve storage utilization rates as well."