This post is part of a series of 10 vendors that have presented their technology to the TechFieldDay attendees, gathered for this edition of Storage Field Day 4. You can find all background about the project here: http://techfieldday.com/event/sfd4/ – This series of blogposts were live notes, published at the end of the presentation but reviewed afterwards. Disclaimer: the attendees are not personally compensated other than our transport and lodging, nor are we obliged to write anything at all.

Company

• Founded: 2004
• Founders: Chris Gladwin (Vice Chairman)
• Financial Status: D-round
• CEO: John Morris

Technology

Large Scale Object Storage solution. By using Erasure Coding you can get up to very high 9’s without a very big footprint. I explained the basics of sliding/shards/… of Erasure Coding last year when writing about Amplidata. Cleversafe has 2 different deployment models when it comes to hardware: appliances & software only (note: well done Cleversafe!)

Global Filsystem solution; all members will do a request for all slides available, wherever they may be. If you need for example 11 out of 19 slides minimum it doesn’t really matter from what datacenter it comes. In the frontend it supports RESTful/S3/Openstack Swift. 

There are 2 types of objects; a simple object or a named object. A simple object will just return a value and the protection and so is handled by the upper layer. A Named object will keep track of the metadata database. 

Now next to Erasure Coding they also have a Cache Vault for smaller cloud object that are written in multi-copies of the objects instead of slices of erasure coded. note: I wish we had some graphics on that …

My Take

I like these guys. There are not that much notes in the liveblog but that has two reasons; the presentation was mostly focussed on use cases and I am more interested in raw technology and secondly does the technology as such resemble towards Amplidata. What I do know is that everything I heard reminded me of what I know from Amplidata but then on steroids. Every single features resembles to a feature I saw at Amplidata but then with 2 or 3 options on top of that. That makes this a very good solution if one would be looking for Petabyte size object storage.

Links

• website – http://www.cleversafe.com/
• twitter – @Cleversafe
• Partnership wth Panzura as distributed NAS: LINK

Video

Review here the 6 videos from Storage Field Day 4: 

• Introduction
• Global File System
• Internal IT Services
• dsNet DEMO
• Cloud Storage Service
• Broadcast video archive