NUMB3RS Comes to ISPCON --- And Your Data Center

• By Tom Millitzer on May 14, 2008

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Possibly you have seen the TV drama NUMB3RS (CBS Friday) and met Charlie Eppes. He is that ex-child prodigy that riddles off obscure math theories and saves the day for the FBI and that guy from Northern Exposure.  There is always an algorithm in the mix, you know the stuff you and I write in the mist on the shower door.Enter stage left is Julie Bellancam a real life Charlie Epps, but in the guise of a mild mannered MIT grad. That Julie Bellanca the Product Design Director for Cleversafe. Julie Bellanca  the articulate, intriguing and driving force leading a Cleversafe team of almost 40 (probably also MIT grads) that have written some great algorithms that may have the chance to reinvent the data center industryShe actually used the word “slice and dice data”……when she told me “Our technology, called Information Dispersal, works similarly to TCP/IP packets--that is, we store information on data slices, storing these slices on a network of local or remote servers. So, information is, well, dispersed.” Words actually from the website but it sound just like Julie.So what is the big deal? This is how I understand the magic…Lets say you are a data storage firm and have three big data centers (you don’t have to be big but I like big number3s). These three data centers each have 33,334 servers. You own 100,002 servers. 50,001 of them are in some effect useless because they back up the data for the other 50k.One server goes down ----- ok a whole data center gets hit by a tsunami…global warming is everywhere.   Live is good, the server in Austin has the data lost in San Diego (sorry San Diego), yes the critical data for Abercrombie & Fitch is saved.Cleversafe has another approach --- and you only need 50,001 servers. You stuff the data in small slices in maybe 18 locations. When the tsunami hits San Diego,  Cleversafe’s equipment, software and knowledge can fill in the blanks…you lose nothing…you save 50,000 servers. Algorithms…magical recreation. Are these mathematicians or alchemists?Cleversafe released this product in Q1 2008. Neat stuff, new stuff, you want one.And now you know how they fill in those little data holes in the opening of NUMB3RS.

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