| Type | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Dispersed Data Storage |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, USA |
| Products | Cleversafe Accesser Cleversafe Manager Cleversafe Slicestor |
| Revenue | Not reported |
| Employees | 40[1] |
| Website | www.cleversafe.com |
Cleversafe, Inc. is a privately held company based in the United States which is pioneering Dispersed Storage technology and software[2]. Dispersed storage is a technology that uses erasure codes to split data into multiple slices, each of which is then stored to an independent storage appliance via TCP/IP. Due to properties of erasure codes, the dispersed storage system can tolerate multiple failures of individual storage appliances without losing the ability to recover data.
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The company was founded in Chicago, Illinois in 2004 by S. Christopher Gladwin, the President and CEO of Cleversafe. Cleversafe received funding from venture capital firms including NEA, OCA Ventures, Harrison Street Capital, and Alsop-Louie Partners. Since the founding of Cleversafe in 2004 it has launched its Open Source project, expanded its partner program, and released several versions of its products.
Cleversafe's current software release uses Cauchy-Reed-Solomon as its Information Dispersal Algorithm (IDA) for encoding data into slices. Data may also be optionally processed by any number of provided codecs which can perform operations such as encryption, compression, or adding message authentication. Once the data is fully processed, the slices are distributed via a Cleversafe designed protocol to multiple storage locations; this TCP/IP based protocol may optionally be secured using TLS.
Each storage location (site) typically will house a number of individual storage appliances known as Slicestors. The collection of appliances involved in processing, storing, or managing data is referred to as a dispersed storage network or dsNet in the Cleversafe nomenclature. Data stored in the dsNet is logically isolated into discrete containers called Vaults. Each Vault may have its own separate access controls, quota and data transformation and storage strategy. This technology is an alternative to traditional RAID and replication based storage systems.
Cleversafe has been the recipient of several awards, including:
Cleversafe has been a sponsor of an open source community. Cleversafe decided that by open sourcing their software, it would enable others to develop all kinds of applications and environments related to dispersed storage[8]. Cleversafe's open source software is released under the GNU General Public License. As of 2010-09-29 the source code and related forums have been removed from the web site.