BE 15 - Data Recovery Service

Design

The Data Recovery Service (DRS) is a grid-based service that enables small-medium enterprises (SME) to store business-critical data on an off-site location. If needed during an incident or calamity the user can retrieve his stored data to continue business operations as soon as possible.

Client systems (PC’s) are provided with more and more disk capacity. 250GB of disk space is no exception any more. Much of this disk space is not used for business purposes. The disk space which is not used can be used to store data from servers. The idea is to backup (and restore) data from server or other clients (client peer) using the idle disk space on other clients (storage peers).

Rabobank as a Trusted Third Party (TTP) will provide a DRS service for the SME. The DRS will be part of an assurance which the Rabobank will offer to the SME.

The DRS consists of a peer-to-peer network which connects client peers to storage peers. The client peer sends its backup data directly to the ‘grid’ network.

By offering the DRS service SME can backup and restore there data and in some case of emergency all data can be recovered from the storage Grid.

The design of BE15 is based on an existing Open Source product: Cleversafe. This product offers almost all the functionality required by BE15. The differences lie in the manner the backup data is distributed and in the security. Both aspects are being addressed now by the BE15 design team, in dialogue with the Data Management and Security clusters of BEinGRID.

During backup, the BE15 system slices the source data into small packages and encrypts these. It then distributes the packages over the a random subset of other systems in the SME grid in such a manner that only around 60% of the distributed data needs to be physically retrieved to be able to reconstruct all of the source data. This “holographic slicing” is due to the Cleversafe algorithms. BE15 creates the facilities for the random distribution over “unreliable” SME systems, possibly with the help of the Data Management cluster of BEinGRID. BE15 also takes care of the problems arising from the fact that the SME systems must be left intact as much as possible and can certainly not be expected to install trust relations with a large number of peers. Here, the BEinGRID security cluster may play a role.