OceanStore, a "Global-Scale Persistent Data" storage system, will not generate the power necessary to forestall future blackouts; however, it should have the ability to ensure that individual, corporate and government data will not be eviscerated when the utilities pull the plug.

OceanStore's Web site describes the new model as "a federation of utility providers who cooperate to synthesize a seamless, consistent, highly-available, mobile data platform [where] nomadic data is free to migrate and be replicated anywhere in the world."

OceanStore's inventor, UC Berkeley computer science professor John Kubiatowicz, stated: "The goal is to make data storage not only secure and available, but downright impervious to disaster."

According to the statement, technology giants EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the government-backed National Science Foundation are among the many companies and agencies backing Kubiatowicz's project.

Ocean-Vision

Fans of the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory might remember "Wonkavision," in which psychedelic lasers zap a large Wonka bar "into millions of tiny particles" overhead. Seconds later, a Wonka bar shows up inside a TV box a fraction of its original size while keeping the "scrumdiddlelumptious" taste of the original.

OceanStore apparently works in much the same fashion. According to UC Berkeley, Kubiatowicz's invention chops data into encrypted bits and shelves them on computers connected globally on the Internet. In order to track a given piece of data, OceanStore generates a globally unique identification tag (GUID) before the data is encoded and fragmented.

On the assumption that no server or network is foolproof, OceanStore makes redundant copies of these data scraps throughout the various servers, all with the same identifying GUID, so that each piece of data can be tracked. Moreover, if a server or several servers go down -- such as during a power outage -- OceanStore can recreate the data using only a quarter of the original fragments.

"The storage mechanism is very much like a hologram, where you only need a certain subset of the data to recreate the entire image," Kubiatowicz said.

Anticipating Blackouts

William Hurley, a program manager with the Yankee Group, told NewsFactor Network that OceanStore is one of the many system architectures being developed that uses the Internet to store, protect and maintain data. (continued...)

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