Techspeak
dataSentinel is a distributed storage technology where files are stored as
anonymous compressed, encrpyted blocks scattered across many different servers positioned all over the continent.
All of the blocks are exactly same size and contain no identifying marker to associate them with the
file to which they belong making it impossible to recreate the file without knowing where all its
blocks reside.
At the point of writing a file, information about the file and
encrpytion parameters unique to the owner are used to create a schedule that chooses
the server for each block, and where in a 64 bit number space on that server they should be placed.
That schedule is used to transport the blocks from the client to the servers and is then discarded.
When it is time to read the file, the same parameters are used to recreate the schedule. The blocks
are requested from the servers and decrypted, decompressed and resequenced on the client to reproduce the file.
Each unique encrpytion parameter effectively defines an independent virtual drive. The number of possible
independent drives is very large and therefore the provisioning process of assigning these parameters
for different users is trivial.
File integrity is preserved by a managed redundancy of three
copies of each. Each block is originally positioned on three different servers. Should a server fail catastrophically and need to be replaced,
directories exist on the remaining servers to replace all the blocks the original server would have contained. By keeping three
copies of each block, the dataSentinel system can survive two simultaneous major server failures without placing user data at risk |
