Last week, Cleversafe introduced a major update to its open source software. Cleversafe is a company with a big, hairy, audacious goal: transform the infrastructure for storing data. All data. Enterprise data. Consumer data. Internet data. Transform the storage of data by radically simplifying the underlying method of storing it and meanwhile making it much more secure and reliable, not to mention cheaper.

Like many startups, Cleversafe has gone through significant transformations itself as it has figured out how to navigate toward this goal. A key decision the company made early on was to put its core software into the open source domain. But it realized earlier this year that it had to rebuild that core software to handle much greater diversity in its prospective customer set. The result: Software that allows the customer to decide for themselves how reliable and secure they want their storage versus how inexpensive. As always, technology requires you to choose between cost and benefit; in Cleversafe’s case, it’s a relative decision because even the most reliable and secure application of the technology is still considerably less expensive than existing, mainstream choices.

Cleversafe’s basic proposition is that you can obviate the need for expensive, high-performance storage by using the Internet itself instead of your own disk farms. It proposes that you carve your data into N numbers of “slices” and then store those slices in discreet locations on the Internet, instead of storing all of your data in one location and then protecting that data by backing it up and archiving it. Cleversafe’s software manages those slices of your data in a way that means you can always get all of your data back even if some percentage of the discreet locations fail. The result, mathematically speaking, means storage is more reliable and more secure by spreading it around the open Internet than it can ever be by trying to maintain close control in your own infrastructure.

That’s an amazing idea; a big, hairy idea. It’s an idea that will take customers some time to absorb and adjust to. Cleversafe is right now identifying which customers will appreciate that idea the most quickly and be willing to pay the most for it as it plans to deliver a product to customers early next year.

Cleversafe holds a dear place in our greedy, venture capital hearts because the terms we offered for investment in Cleversafe were the first terms we offered to any company. We offered those terms before we had raised our fund. We were able to do that because the investment involves old friends on both sides of the investment: Chris Gladwin, the founder and now chairman and CTO of the company, was also the founder of a company where Stewart lead an investment in 1998, MusicNow. And the investor in that case, New Enterprise Associates, is also our co-investor in Cleversafe. Both Chris and NEA agreed to support our investment in Cleversafe before we got our first commitment to fund Alsop Louie Partners. Since we did get funded, NEA and Alsop Louie Partners along with the angel investors in the original funding of the company provided a Series B financing for Cleversafe in November, 2006.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 6:39 am and is filed under Portfolio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.