I’d like to congratulate Cleversafe for being the first vendor in months not to mention the word “cloud” in a press release, even though their products are becoming more-and-more cloud-ready. Today’s press release announced that their storage systems can now be accessed through an HTTP/REST API and a Java SDK.
It’s been a while since I last heard any news about Cleversafe; their products can spread data across multiple servers in multiple locations, enabling configurations where even the loss of an entire data center can be tolerated without losing data. By spreading the data around the globe, this technology can also be used as the basis for a content delivery platform; in fact, that appears to be the function of the new Smart Client released in April:
With the new release, Cleversafe has unveiled Smart Client, the foundation for next-generation Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Current CDNs lack the ability to dynamically switch servers or networks if they slow down during delivery, meaning the potential for end-user performance snags is high. With Cleversafe, after every 4k downloaded, each client (computer, phone, etc.) independently reassesses its access choice hundreds of times per second for delivery efficiencies and speed, all in real time.
The latest addition, an object-based storage system, provides an additional interface to their storage servers. Up until now, only iSCSI and NFS have been offered; but if your application is already built on the concept of data objects instead of filesystem storage, the new protocols will provide a welcome addition. They provide more technical details on their blog:
What are the interfaces and use cases?
The dsNet Object Store has several interfaces and access protocols. The underlying dsNet storage pool can be shared and jointly accessible by multiple access protocols, giving additional flexibility.For use cases where an application is housing metadata, and only object storage is required, the Simple Object interface can be accessed with either a Java SDK, or an HTTP/REST API. In this use case, simple PUT, GET, DELETE commands are used to access Objects, and the resulting Object ID can be stored directly within the application.
The concept of storing objects via an HTTP interface was made popular by Amazon’s S3 storage service; if your application can work with that, I figure it won’t be too much work to have it talk to a Cleversafe system instead. That would make it a lot easier to build your own private cloud, and with the added benefit of being able to easily spread that cloud across multiple data centers for better reliability. I can’t wait to find out how their customers will actually use these new features!
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