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About Cleversafe.org
Mar 03, 2008
Cleversafe Open Source vs. Commercial
Now that Cleversafe has announced its upcoming commercial products, we can talk more clearly about the relationship between the Dispersed Storage open source project (here at www.cleversafe.org) and Cleversafe’s commercial products.
As we are doing with our technical approach, we are utilizing the outstanding and proven approach taken by the Internet for our business ecosystem model.
The key protocols that power the Internet: TCP, IP, UDP, LDAP, DNS, etc are genuinely open protocols in that they are in the public domain and available as open source. As a result, the Internet really is an interoperable internetwork. Way back in the 80’s, I was in the IT department of a large aerospace company responsible for setting networking standards and I remember when other networking protocols – such as IBM’s SNA, DECNET and Novell’s SPX/IPX – were more popular than TCP/IP. Each of these proprietary protocols were driven by well-funded and capable R&D organizations; whereas, the R&D behind TCP/IP was not fueled by a large, well-funded technology company. However 20 years later, TCP/IP has pretty much completely taken over as the networking and internetworking protocol of choice and the Internet absolutely dominates any networks still using these previously popular proprietary protocols (P4’s).
Yes, TCP/IP is a great protocol, but the P4’s protocols were pretty great, too. I believe part of the reason that TCP/IP and the Internet emerged as the world’s network is based on human nature. Simply put, most people didn’t want the world’s network to be owned or controlled by one company, so as the world built its internetwork, a genuinely open protocol had an inherent advantage and was ultimately propelled to become the protocol behind the Internet, the world’s network.
When we began to develop Dispersed Storage, we realized the technology had significant potential, namely to store the world’s data. We also realized, based on the lesson of the Internet, that the protocols of a Storage Internet ultimately must also be open source, so we created the Dispersed Storage project in order to develop and publish the Dispersed Storage protocol as open source. In order to do this, we also created a lot of new open source code and incorporated a lot of open source code from other projects.
Even though the Dispersed Storage protocol stack and core features are available as open source, plenty of great opportunities exist for creating commercial products and services. To use the Internet analogy again, network equipment companies, like Cisco and Juniper create commercial products (switches, routers, gateways, etc.) by taking the open TCP/IP protocol, adding proprietary features like management systems, integrating onto optimized hardware with an optimized OS and then selling those products through a trained channel that provides services like support and installation. Cleversafe is using that same approach for its commercial products, so once again we are standing on the shoulders of the giants who build the technology and the business models for the Internet.
Chris
Oct 15, 2007
The Cleversafe Idea
“How did you get the initial idea for Cleversafe?” is a question I am asked fairly often possibly since I don’t have a long career background in data storage systems or in coding algorithms. What lead me to that idea of building a geographically distributed Dispersed Storage grids was that I was looking for a way to store my personal data and I had been reading a lot about the history of cryptography.
Prior to Cleversafe, I started a company called MusicNow which was a leading business-to-business provider of (legal) digital music services. We built and operated download stores, music subscription services and Internet radio services which were sold by companies including, Best Buy, Microsoft and Earthlink. In April, 2004 we sold MusicNow to Circuit City (who since sold it to AOL who then sold most of it to Napster). After the Circuit City acquisition, I took the summer and fall of 2004 off which was the first time in my adult life that I hadn’t worked. One of my projects was to organize all my stuff, so I digitized and organized all my financial records, pictures, correspondence, etc. which took several weeks.
I ended up with 30 GB of data which I needed to store for the rest of my life since I knew that I would never again want to spend so much time going through that organization process. At MusicNow, we had built a system to store all the music in the world, so I was quite familiar with the state of the art in digital storage. I needed a cost-effective system that could store my data for the next 50 years and knew that existing storage methods could not meet those requirements.
In 2004, I was also reading a lot about the history or cryptography. In particular, I was reading a lot about Operation Fortitude: how the Allies in WWII we able to have the Nazis initially believe that the landings at Normany were just a diversion. It was the most ingenious setup I’ve ever heard of – and it worked! (For those interested in a fascinating and very detailed read in this area, I highly recommend Fortitude: The D-Day Deception Campaign by Roger Hesketh.)
Inspired by the historical richness of cryptography, I moved on to directly explore cryptographic techniques and code breaking methods which lead me to read Code Breaking: A History and Explanation by Rudolph Kippenhahn. As I was reading Code Breaking, I took the time to “do the homework exercises” which meant that when the book covered how to break a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, I took the time to break a couple monoalphabetic substitutions as well as many other forms of ciphers. In doing these exercises, I learned a lot about how to use pieces of coded information to derive original data.
Reading about counter-intelligence and code breaking was not a part of a master plan to start a new business; I was just following my personal interests. But when I later started to think about how to build a system to store my personal data for 50 years, I had a good foundation in the mathematical techniques for coding and decoding information. With that foundation, I immediately had the strong intuition that you could create a system with the characteristics now found in Dispersed Storage. And so following that intuition, I wrote a very early prototype which was the first step in creating Cleversafe.
Chris
