SBIR Phase I: FileSafe: Policy-Driven Storage Virtualization for Online Data Backup and Recovery

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to provide a tapeless and low-overhead online data storage backup and recovery solution to small businesses by utilizing available disk capacities on their machines. Small or mid-sized businesses (SMBs) have unmet needs in the storage backup and virtualization area because they can not afford to dedicate IT staff, often do not have in-house IT expertise, and cannot afford to purchase expensive systems, such as storage area networks that are used by large enterprises. Collaboration with researchers at the University of Michigan from the Pastiche project, a peer-to-peer backup approach, and Ismene project, a policy management system, provides the company a unique opportunity to provide a powerful and inexpensive data backup solution to SMBs. Research challenges include: (1) Provide manageability: P2P backup architectures pose manageability challenges because of different types of machines in the organization in terms of connectivity, expected reliability, and available capacity. (2) Provide online availability: A tapeless solution should allow users to know if their data is backed up and have access to their backed up data without administrative support. (3) Allow security-availability tradeoffs, depending on sensitivity of content in files. (4) Backup virtualization as storage requirements change. Upon commercialization, the research will help provide a low-cost, richly featured, and easily manageable distributed backup system to small and medium businesses. The goal is to mitigate risks by providing more manageability for P2P technology in the context of distributed backups, providing more functionality by providing online access to backuped data, and to address a market segment (SMBs) that is not yet penetrated by large storage companies and typically does not have IT staff to do manual backups or complex system management.