Where things stand?

With all the hard work being done the site is out of date.
I have a few questions:

Where is the wiki?
Can we bring it back or start a new one?
Can we clear out or update the out of date docs?
When will the replication system be made available?
When will the encryption system be made available?
What is the plan for expanding in use vaults sizes?
What is the plan for expanding in use dsNet widths?
What is the plan for making the accessor redundant?
What is the plan for making the accessor redundant?
Can we update the footer "© 2007 Cleversafe, Inc. All Rights Reserved" before 2009?

> With all the hard work being done the site is out of date.

> I have a few questions:

Where is the wiki?

Can we bring it back or start a new one?


Can we clear out or update the out of date docs?


We found wiki hard to maintain for documentation. So we decided to abandon wiki for external communication. Forum and blog would be used to keep discussions alive and opinion voiced; documentation would be added to the website and yes, you are right we are behind in this respect and will try to improve.

When will the replication system be made available?

I am not sure what do you mean. We don't plan to provide any replication capabilities as our product one of the main goals to replace replication with much more powerful and flexible mechanism.

When will the encryption system be made available?

Next release, I can't give a specific date but it should be soon

What is the plan for expanding in use vaults sizes?

Yes, but it will not be available for the next release, but definitely one of the main goals for release after that.

What is the plan for expanding in use dsNet widths?

First of all a small clarification. There is no such thing as dsNet width. You could have as many SliceStors as you'd like. What you define is a vault width which doesn't have to coincide with number of SliceStors. In the future we plan to have dsNets with thousands of SliceStores, making dsNet of very large capacity. dsNets definitely will grow in size.

It is much harder proposition to change a vault width on the fly; in order to do so you have to essentially recalculate all data slices. Our system has many points of configuration - width/threshold is one of them, but not on an existing vault. We plan to introduce ability to change other existing vault parameters in the future but I am afraid width is not one of them.

The desired effect could be achieved by creating another vault with desired characteristics and copying the old vault into new. Of course you have to have extra space to do so.

What is the plan for making the accessor redundant? 

If you mean failover, yes.  If you mean multiple access points, also yes but that may not be available for a while. If anything else, please explain.

Can we update the footer "© 2007 Cleversafe, Inc. All Rights Reserved" before 2009?

This would be tough but we'll try. Thanks for paying attention, hopefully we'll learn to be more proactive.

And again thank you for interest, participation, thoughtful remarks and engaging questions.

Ilya

Thanks ivolvovski that does help me and hopefully others understand what the plan is.

For my question:
"When will the replication system be made available?"
I meant when will the slice-server rebuild function be added?

On the topic of failover: How can failover occur when only one accessor has the vault information? Is failover an option right now?

Again thank you for your attentive answers!

Dylan,

Rebuilder functionality is coming very soon. The build having it is currently being tested.

In regards to failover, you can use this functionality if you have 2 Accessers. This process will be documented in the coming release usage guide.

Thanks,

Sarah.

Ok. I must be confused.

I see that I can setup failover iSCSI targets on Windows iSCSI initiator.
But what good would it be if the accessor I failover too doesn't have the vault info.

Just a follow up to what others have already mentioned:

We are in the process of actively refreshing the .org site as we speak. Unfortunately we don't currently have plans to bring back the community wiki at this point. We would be open to this if there is much demand, but for now we would like to focus on generally refreshing documentation (and keeping it up to date).

We will also be introducing a mailing list.

 

Regarding encryption, encryption is implemented in the next release, but will not be supported. It may be removed in the release after that pending a rewrite, but I can't say for sure at this point.

Also, a "software client" implementation (which will make the accesser redundant) is implemented but will not be supported in the next release. By "not supported" I basically mean that we won't focus on documenting it and some features may be less streamlined than we'd like for a real release.

@wleggette

Thanks for the info.

Maybe I'm still missing something.

Can 2 accessors connect to 1 vault (now or in the future)?
If so when does accessor 2 receive accessor 1's slice storage information?
If the 2 assessors are not 100% synchronized will there be data loss?

As for encryption:
If this component is added then removed later will that leave encrypted vault data unreadable?

Cant a standard off the self encryption algorithm be plugged in as the default?

Thank again for your time and patience?