Q&A with Chris Gladwin of Cleversafe - Page 2

VSM: Late last year, you announced a significant round of funding, what does this mean for the company?

CG: Our funding will help us continue to grow and expand the adoption of cloud computing as a normal course of business. We’ve had great initial success with customer deployments and with the continued commitment from investors, we can now expand into the areas that most require a secure and massively scalable cloud storage platform.

VSM: Prior to the New Year, you announced a key partnership with In-Q-Tel. Why do you think Cleversafe’s solution/ approach is so important to the federal space?

CG: Federal agencies need a way to store their ever-growing data with the knowledge that it will be inherently secure. Our technology addresses their need for extremely secure data storage offering sliced data that, on its own, does not contain enough information to reconstruct files.

VSM: What are some of the roadblocks facing enterprises with traditional storage solutions?

CG: Data reliability is a major concern when storing large amounts of sensitive information in the cloud. Traditional approaches for data protection, like RAID, that rely on two dimensional parity doesn’t scale to petabytes of data. Using RAID in this scale will result in data loss. Current storage systems based on RAID arrays are designed for storing smaller amounts of data, as data set sizes increase data protection degrades; resulting in digital assets lost forever.

VSM: With data growth rates approaching the Exabyte range, what do enterprises need to think about in order to sustain a workable storage system for their information? Can systems expand to address these unparalleled levels?

CG: As organizations look to store, secure and distribute more data, it’s of primary importance to ensure that there’s a peace of mind knowing that digital content is protected at the highest levels, but still provides the flexibility to support and help companies grow in other ways.

Traditional storage systems, which typically store content on an array of mechanical disk drives with multiple copies for increased data protection, are extremely expensive in particular to store multimedia content. Organizations need technology solutions that defy conventional storage pitfalls without sacrificing performance and flexibility.