Cleversafe, Inc. announced the latest version of their dsNet system, which provides an object store accessible through an HTTP/REST API, and a Java SDK.

Cleversafe's dsNet Object Store provides limitless scalability, along with the cost, reliability, security and energy benefits of information dispersal. Enterprise storage administrators no longer have to pre-configure LUNs for storage whose upper size limit is capped by file system constraints. dsNet Object Store allows for a single storage container that can grow as needed by easily scaling capacity, allowing for virtualization of the usable storage from the underlying hardware and infrastructure.

Because it eliminates tiers of storage infrastructure by allowing for direct application integration, object based storage is ideal for digital content as it tightly couples applications and storage. Traditional file systems are no longer relevant for searching and sorting unstructured data like video, images, and audio files. The metadata to understand and manipulate these types of digital assets is now handled by applications versus the file system.

"Companies with large data pools, especially those with large media-based data pools, are looking for capacity efficient solutions that work in both local and geo-dispersed environments," said Noemi Greyzdorf, Research Manager at IDC. "As requirements have become more consistently focused on cost and operational efficiencies, Cleversafe is in a strong position to commercialize an object-based solution that meets the broader market requirements for storing ever-expanding data pools over a long period of time."

"You only need to look as far as photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking sites to realize that objects are the future of large-scale storage," said Chris Gladwin, said Chris Gladwin, Cleversafe CEO.  "Cleversafe's unique combination of object storage and dispersal allows for both unlimited scale, which is crucial as unstructured content continues to expand, and guaranteed data protection and privacy. It's a viable method for building large scale systems in the petabyte to exabyte range."

Cleversafe's technology avoids the cost and inefficiency of traditional storage systems based on replication by dividing data into 'slices' and dispersing them, via secure network connections, to multiple storage nodes on a dsNet system. Each individual slice contains too little information to be useful, but any threshold of the slices can be used to perfectly recreate the original data.