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back to article Recovering Quantum buys Dropbox-alike cloudy biz Symform

Quantum has bought cloudy firm Symform, a file sync 'n' share company where the users themselves are the cloud. Instead of being stored in a data centre in the public of Symform’s own cloud, users’ data is stored as redundant and protected blocks distributed across the Symform customers’ own storage devices. The users' own …

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  1. MyffyW Silver badge

    Intriguing

    So if I understand correctly for any block of data it will be stored on at least two separate hosts. The hosts have to be "always-on and connected with a business-class Internet account". So in essence you are using another 2 companies datacentres to store your block of data. So far, so resilient. But suppose these two companies are actually using the same physical data centre (not impossible in our ever-consolidating world), then you potentially have a single point of failure. Or am I being a Monday morning grump?

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    1. madecto
      Reply Icon

      Re: Intriguing

      Each data block gets actually split in 64 chunks with an added 32 chunks of parity. This adds up to 96 total slices of which are sent over to 96 different accounts. Space-wise this is equivalent to a 3 disk RAID5, but it also means your data can survive 32 different global failures before becoming useless and, according to the tech brief Symform publishes on it's site, every time a "datacenter" becomes unavailable, your client rebuilds the missing data on a new datacenter in order not to loose redundancy.

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  2. MathiasW
    Devil

    And now it's toast...

    Having bought Symform, Quantum have today announced that it's going to be shuttered and all data removed in a month.

    https://community.symform.com/entries/99963588-Symform-service-to-be-discontinued-on-July-31-2016

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