Here at Cleversafe we use the open source development model. However, we still have to make money. In that vein, we felt it’s time to put out an update to last March’s post regarding the difference between our open source and commercial offerings.

If you visit www.cleversafe.com you can see our current lineup of dsNet (Dispersed Storage Network) solutions. In short, we offer an easy-to-use hardware solution which provides massive scalability, data longevity, security, and reliability. We provide three main components: The Accesser, which acts as a sort of “dispersed storage router” by exposing our dispersal through standard data protocols, the Slicestor, which holds the actual sliced data, and the dsNet Manager, which allows management and monitoring of the dsNet.

So the most important question to you: what am I not getting if I just use the open source software? To answer that, let’s talk about our goals with the open source release.

The open source release:

• Provides complete capabilities for a usable dsNet, and
• Will eventually include tools to make the dsNet client code embeddable, and
• Is aimed at providing adequate performance for casual use.

On the other hand, the commercial release:

• Provides a complete solution for a usable, manageable, and scalable dsNet, and
• Includes a slice server implementation (the Slicestor) that is highly optimized for our specific hardware platform to provide the greatest possible performance.
  

In the future we are aiming to provide a full Dispersed Storage Platform SDK. But the first step is to provide an easy-to-use solution that you can download, install, and start using in under 10 minutes.