Cleversafe, a start-up with a new way to protect data by dispersing it across many storage devices, is making the move from prototype to product.
The company's basic idea is to break up data into little bits that are stored on multiple devices, overlapping the bits so it doesn't matter if some devices fail. The approach, which is embodied in open-source software anyone can try, can be used to spread data across multiple storage devices in a rack or multiple data centers across the globe.
And now potential customers can start pricing out equipment to see if it's worth buying, doing on their own, or skipping over. A typical configuration of equipment that includes 24 terabytes of raw storage capacity will cost $127,000 when it goes on sale on March 31.
And that's before Cleversafe heads to the cloud. Later this year, the company hopes to have partnerships with service providers who can offer customers the technology as a dedicated offering, said Chief Executive Chris Gladwin. And in 2009, service providers might well link up their storage pools in "peering" relationships, he added.
The information dispersal technique could be a major new force to be reckoned with in the data-storage business, said Illuminata analyst John Webster. He called it "the most disruptive technology since the emergence of RAID," or redundant array of inexpensive disks, which can save data on multiple disks to guard against failure.
However, Webster added, EMC and other storage heavyweights are working on the technology, too. And of course, open-source software famously lowers barrier to entry.
Gladwin believes there are advantages to buying technology from Cleversafe, though. For one thing, it handles the engineering work, including a customized version of Linux. It also provides support and uses proprietary software to manage its storage note pools.
How much do you get for your $127,000?
The amount of usable capacity you get from that eight-slice setup depends on how redundantly you store the data across the collection of slices.
In one common configuration Cleversafe often describes, 24 terabytes of raw capacity becomes 15 terabytes of usable capacity. In other words, if you need a certain amount of capacity, multiply that by 1.6 to find out how much raw capacity to buy.
The $127,000 price includes all three components Cleversafe sells: eight $11,300 CS Slicestors with 3TB of capacity used to save the data; two $12,300 CS Accessers used to encode the data, disperse it across slices, and retrieve the data; and two CS Managers to monitor the other components' performance.
In the old days, you'd buy a RAID adapter card to let your computer attach to multiple hard drives that provided data capacity and protection. Nowadays, with flash memory, the storage fits right on the card.
Addonics' RAID adapter fits four Compact Flash cards.
(Credit: Addonics)Addonics Technologies announced a $50 PCI card Tuesday that's got four CompactFlash card slots. The cards can be configured as four individual drives, a single large volume, or set up with RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) 0, 1 or 10 to stripe data across multiple cards or mirror data from one onto another.
Note that there's no support for RAID 5 and that cards can't be hot-swapped, so no adding capacity nondisruptively by plugging in newer, bigger flash cards, according to President Bill Kwong.
The company is considering a similar card with smaller SD cards, but doing so would require more electronics because Secure Digital, unlike CompactFlash, doesn't include built-in support to behave like a hard drive with an IDE interface.
The adapter here is the cheap part. If you want a solid amount of flash storage, the costs quickly go up. For example, an 8GB Lexar 300x UDMA card costs about $170. Multiply by four and you're looking at $680 for 32GB raw capacity, and less if you configure the RAID to protect your data.
Compare that with a 500GB Maxtor hard drive that costs less than $100, and you might turn a little pale. But bear in mind that flash cards can offer some faster performance, are silent, and are less power-hungry and bulky than hard drives.
"We have tested a Transcend 250X industrial CompactFlash card and were getting close to 40 MB/sec sustained data transfer. When we striped two of these (in a RAID configuration), we achieved read/write speed close to 80 MB/sec," Kwong said.
Perhaps the more relevant comparison is with solid-state disks, which pack flash memory in a device that looks and behaves like a regular hard drive with spinning platters. So far, these are also expensive when priced per gigabyte, but Kwong believes the PCI card approach could be more economical.
"I think all the solid-state disk suppliers price their product higher to make more profit," he said. "Our approach is to combine low-capacity, mature CompactFlash media to achieve large capacity. You can be the judge as to which approach will have a better price performance advantage in the next few years."
Addonics is aiming for some niche markets, including kiosks, arcade games, low-power PCs and shock-resistant computing equipment, Kwong said.
- prev
- 1
- next
