Cleversafe - Where's my home solution? SOHO storage for the everyday man on the cloud and your desktop.

Hey you Cleversafe folks, in good humor, but all seriousness, where's my desktop device? Why can't I go to Fry's and buy something for my house with Cleversafe on it yet?

For the rest of the world, Cleversafe has long had an exceedingly cool architecture. Cleversafe:

1. Is basically a gateway for dispersing your storage across the internet
2. Works on multiple storage systems scattered across providers
3. While making it totally secure
4. And while making it accessible despite any single points of failure

The way it works is the cool part, although I'll qualify that I'm doing this from really long term memory. Basically by chunking and encrypting your data, and then spreading multiple copies in a tuneable pattern across different storage patterns. With Cleversafe, you can have a group of different storage locations X and you can configure that you only need X-Y storage locations to retrieve your data, thereby controlling your overhead. You might select 12 locations (X), and then build that configuration so that you only need 8 locations (Y) to have complete data access. 4 potential providers could be inaccessible. Moreover, Cleversafe doesn't delay writes during location failure either, as there is a background data scrubbing process for when things come back online. The fastest 8 locations will determine your performance.

So here's the deal. I don't usually do my advising in a blog, but this is just something screaming for broad attention, so I'll do it here this time. Even though Cleversafe is available and selling in a good form today, in my opinion, there should be more to this story. I have always seen cleversafe as scale-out storage for the SOHO, even the little tiny SOHO, like my personal home office. Imagine setting Y to 1/2 of your total storage locations (X/2). Supply half of your storage locations in 802.11g or n attached SATA drive enclosures in your house (X/2). Sign up with a service provider over the internet to store your other data locations (X/2). Now under normal operations, all of your data is accessed at wire speed in the house. In the event of a failure, part of your data is accessed over the cloud. But your primary data is always backed up over the cloud, and at the SOHO level, isn't that most of what we want? The cool thing is, doesn't it seem like it should be pretty easy to expand this pool? Add another WLAN attached SATA drive, redistribute the data, and grow the Internet pool of storage. Bam! - Scalable storage for the SOHO. And wouldn't this make cloud protection relatively seamless for the SOHO? I can use time machine or something else local for incremental and any other potential services I need.

Now I understand there's a lot of data scrubbing, queuing, file system growth processes etc. to work out in the background. But I'm waiting. And I've figured out right where it should sit at my local Fry's.

Now it's Friday, and I'm being irreverent, so back to serious business for a moment - the rest of the industry should be paying attention to Cleversafe. In my opinion, Cleversafe has been one of the thought leaders around emerging cloud storage architectures, and their approach to distributing data is an interesting take on how to approach the problem of solving availability and security, while delivering true location abstraction within the cloud, and enabling self service management - characteristics I've so far touched on briefly here.

The Cleversafe guys are moving in good directions (file systems, software, and tigers oh my!) and I'm sure there's more to come. I'm sure they'll call me just as soon as they're ready to put a solution like this on hold for me. Maybe they'll accept PayPal.

If you're looking for just such a solution too, drop a comment. Or drop me an email at Taneja Group. I'll forward it to the Cleversafe folks ;-)