Resilient Storage Architecture

Innovative Architecture Ensures Reliability, Security, and Global Scalability

Symform’s innovative and patented Resilient Storage Architecture powers the Symform process of encrypting, shredding, and geographically dispersing each piece of data redundantly to thousands of locations around the world. This architecture ensures the security, reliability, and scalability of the network.

“When you do the analysis, the decentralized Symform solution provides a very secure and durable architecture.”

- Ginny Roth, Lab Engineer and Analyst, ESG

Key Elements of the Resilient Storage Architecture Include:

• Data Encryption:  Symform automatically encrypts each folder using a federally certified AES-256 encryption algorithm (federal minimum is 128 bit encryption – 256 bit encryption is exponentially stronger). Symform’s security procedure goes the extra mile by encrypting your data before it is uploaded to the Symform network, and keeping it encrypted at all times, both in motion and rest.
• Key Management:  Many cloud storage vendors offer the ability to encrypt data before storing it. However, encryption is only as good as the strength of the key used. Human-generated keys are easy to break and hard to manage. Symform creates and manages a unique key for each folder. Symform’s protection ensures that even in situations where customer keys are compromised, the data will still be secure.
• RAID 96 Redundancy: RAID is a storage technology that provides increased reliability and functions through redundancy. It’s common to hear of RAID 5 or 6, but Symform utilizes RAID 96. This innovative approach subdivides each encrypted block into 96 redundant fragments, and any 64 of those fragments are sufficient to restore the encrypted block.
• Geographic Distribution: 96 data fragments are stored on 96 unique devices in different locations around the globe. The data fragments are distributed over parallel Internet connections, resulting in faster transfer speed.

Symform Harnesses Unused Local Drive Space to Power the Cloud

A Gartner study revealed that the capacity of most datacenters and storage devices is, on average, only 15 percent utilized. Symform realized that most of the servers and PCs that businesses use end up getting recycled with 50 percent of their disk space unused. This means that there’s a lot of data storage capacity going to waste. Symform’s Resilient Storage Architecture harnesses this existing unused capacity inside businesses and turns it into valuable cloud storage. You join the Symform network by contributing some of your unused, already-paid-for local drive space, and in return you receive highly secure cloud storage. Symform’s distributed architecture maintains a public storage pool over the internet, so businesses of all sizes can realize the advantages of the cloud and receive free or very low cost data backup.