Ten Exabyte Storage System Configuration From Cleversafe

Cleversafe Inc. announced availability of the first 10 exabyte storage system to meet the growing need to store massive amounts of data being collected by companies across the globe.

In order to capitalize on the intelligence gained through Big Data analytics, companies must first find effective options for storing immense volumes of unstructured data.

"Internet traffic volumes are increasing at a rate of 32% globally each year. It’s not unrealistic to think companies looking to mine that data would need to effectively analyze 80 exabytes of data per month by 2015," said Russ Kennedy, vice president of Product Strategy, Marketing and Customer Solutions for Cleversafe "To any company, data is a priceless component. However, it’s only valuable if a company can effectively look across that data over time for trends or to analyze behavior and to do it cost effectively," said Kennedy. "In its true sense, Cleversafe’s limitless data storage solution is a critical foundational enabler to Big Data analytics."

Forward-looking organizations are realizing the need for storage at the Exabyte level as part of their Big Data strategy and are already asking for systems of this scale. Practical applications with such requirements include analyzing IP traffic patterns for fraudulent activity. Online retailers are looking for purchasing patterns to maximize the movement of their merchandise and to target their best customers when launching a new service or product. Online gaming and entertainment have undergone a tremendous transformation and are much more collaborative in nature; allowing content companies to explore entirely new revenue streams. In this election year, political prowess will be captured and analyzed by each candidate in order to understand the effectiveness and appeal of a message and to more directly target potential voters.

The 10 exabyte data storage system configuration, which uses the same innovative object-based dispersed storage technology originally developed by the company, has been expanded to allow for an independent scaling of storage capacity and performance through a Portable Datacenter (PD), a collection of storage and network racks that can be easily deployed or moved. Each PD contains 21 racks with 189 Storage Nodes per PD and 45 3TB drives per storage node. This geographically distributed PD model allows for rapid scale and mobility and is further optimized for site failure tolerance and high availability. The company’s current configuration includes 16 sites across the U.S. with 35 PDs per site and hundreds of simultaneous readers/writers to deliver instantaneous access to billions of objects.

"The exponential growth of unstructured data has brought the storage industry to a turning point," said David Reinsel, IDC group vice president of Storage, Semiconductor, Pricing and GRC Infrastructure Group. "In order for companies to continue to protect their data assets and to extract value from their vast vaults of stored data, they must begin looking at technology alternatives beyond RAID in order to scale without limits. Cleversafe’s ability to deliver a system capable of storing exabyte levels of data today is a good example of the undertaking required to move forward and to solve the growing global issue of unstructured data," said Reinsel.

Cleversafe’s scale storage system is designed to store data more efficiently. Unlike other traditional storage systems that need to maintain multiple copies of the same data Cleversafe’s information dispersal architecture uses a single instance of data with a minimal expansion of the data in order to maintain the integrity and availability. Allowing companies to save up to 90% of their storage costs without the overhead of replication.

Using an object-based approach, Cleversafe’s customers can scale their storage requirements from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes to exabytes. For unstructured data such as video, audio, images, and applications that are streaming data in from mobile devices and tablets, an object-based approach allows the information to be segmented in a single name space that exposes the data through standard HTTP based protocols. This approach allows data intensive applications being used for analytics to take advantage of Cleversafe’s security, reliability, availability and efficiency properties for Big Data.

To date, Cleversafe has been issued nine patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its dispersed storage technology.