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.

We are certainly happy to report that the 2008 winner of The Wall Street Journal Innovation award for software is Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage software.   This award was a bit of a pleasant surprise to us since the other nominees included both large and small companies all over the world. 

We see this award as further validation of the power of the ideas behind Dispersed Storage as well as a further validation of using open source as the platform on which to develop this new technology.

Of course, we still have a lot of work to do to fully realize the potential of Dispersed Storage, but this is a great step in the right direction.

Chris

The 1.1 open source open source release occurred today.  This release includes significant performance improvement on geographically dispersed networks as well as a number of fixes and enhancements which are detailed in the Release News.  We're happy to get this release completed and look forward to your comments and feedback.

Also, I should mention that this release does not include the encryption codec nor the rebuilder.  (But the devs promise me that there are coming soon, so stay tuned...)

Chris

With the completion of the 1.0.1 release, we have pretty good code foundation on which to add additional features.  We also have a 1.1.0 open source release coming up which will address a number of issues – particularly performance on globally dispersed (i.e. high latency) networks.

As we continue add new features, I wanted to open up the conversation for suggestions.  So, let us know if you have any ideas or suggestions for new capabilities to add to the Dispersed Storage software.  We’re currently in the midst of a lot of future release planning, so the timing is good for input.

Chris

You may have noticed that the open source release we posted last month was a complete re-write of the code based we published last year.  Not a single line of code was unchanged.  This change wasn’t just due to the change from C++ to Java, but was a result of a decision to completely re-architect, re-design and re-write the Dispersed Storage software. 

I’ve spoken a few times with Joe Jablonski of Acumence and others about the merits of re-writing software vs. enhancing an existing code base and Joe and I agree that software development organizations too often make the mistake of continuing to enhance weakening code base vs. re-writing from scratch.

I think this misjudgment comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of modern software development.  Modern software development tools in the hands of capable developers can quickly produce complex software.  (We are using SCRUM as our development methodology, by the way, and have been quite pleased with the results.)  But software development does not just mean the act of writing software.  And the time required to write complex software is not just the time required to type the code.  Completing a complex software development project requires dynamic coordination of requirements definition, architecture, design, development, testing, validation, tuning, and enhancement.  If done correctly, the act of writing code is only a portion of the time and effort required for software development, especially for complex software and especially for a new type of complex software.

Our goal in the initial production release of Dispersed Storage software is to create an outstanding software foundation on which we and others can build Dispersed Storage solutions.  The work we did in 2005 and 2006 provided many insights in how to build a Dispersed Storage system and that know-how enabled us around the beginning of this year to know that we needed to re-write our software.  That know-how also included knowing how to proceed toward an outstanding initial production release.

Whether we realize that goal will ultimately be determined by market acceptance of our software and specifically whether it provides the reliability, security, performance, scalability, longevity and cost-effectiveness benefits we envision.  But the preliminary results we are seeing now from our re-write over the past year so far exceed last year’s results that we know that re-writing was a necessary step.

Chris