[UFO Chicago] Cleversafe seeking interaction with Chicago-area LUGs

[Matt England]

To Chicago-area Linux and free-operating-system user groups:

Fyi: As a representative of Cleversafe, I plan to sit in on the UFO's ( 
http://ufo.chicago.il.us/ ) meeting this Thursday at 8pm at the Golden 
Nugget at 4229 W. Irving Park to learn more about the UFO and possibly 
other similar communities in Chicago.  Cleversafe already works closely 
with John Quigley and the IIT LUG ( http://lug.iit.edu/ ).  John, also a 
Cleversafe employee, will be attending with me.

More info follows.  Anyone who is interested in learning more about 
Cleversafe is welcome to email me and/or attend the UFO meeting this 
Thursday at 8pm.

-Matt
mengland at cleversafe.com


Cleversafe Intro
----------------

My name is Matt England, and I'm a co-founder of a company based in Chicago 
named Cleversafe.  We believe we have developed the 
most-secure-and-reliable means to store data the world has ever seen, 
technology that no one else has (including some large players like Globus, 
OceanStore, SunGrid, EMC, eVault, LiveVault, Google, Veritas, etc). It's a 
software-based solution that implements a grid-like set of servers. This 
grid will operate almost exclusively on Linux and BSD machines.

Our motives/goals:

1) We are recruiting more development-and-test employees.
2) We are also looking for an environment to test and use more of our grid 
installations in a "stealth" mode (prior to a release of our software in 
the first half of 2006) with qualified Linux/BSD sysadmins, even if such 
people were not directly employed by Cleversafe.  For those invovled with 
the non-employee Beta-type testing, Cleversafe would be interested in 
negotiating offers for free use of massive amounts of their future storage 
service and the possibility of providing free grid software to said testers.

We think that Linux-user-group communities might be interested in this 
technology. Our initial interaction with the Illinois Institute of 
Technology's (IIT) LUG has proved to be quite positive, and we are looking 
to expand.

More Details
------------

At first glance, our claim to provide the most-secure-and-reliable storage 
technology in the world might seem like hyberbole.

However, our initially-filed patent, as well as more on the way, say 
otherwise. Further, we have met with many members of the investment 
community and found we had no trouble getting funding for our efforts (we 
eventually settled on an investment offer from a coalition of angel 
investors headed by the co-founder of AOL and founding members of US 
Robotics). Also, we have already lined up several large customers that wish 
to buy our software once it becomes available.

In short: we think we've hit on something big that absolutely no one else 
currently has.

However, we need more Linux-and-BSD qualified people to continue our 
large-scale development and testing efforts.  Hence our continued interest 
in the free-operating-system communities in Chicago.

For what it's worth, we build our software and systems almost exclusively 
on open-source software, including:

* Redhat (Fedora, RHEL/CentOS)
* Debian
* FreeBSD
* (Other Linux-and-BSD OSes to come)
* PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite
* ACE (Adaptive Communication Environment)
* OpenSSL
* Qt
* MinGW
* Bzip2
* Boost
* Xerces

Most of our grid-based software is developed in C++.

The following provides background on the principle Cleversafe co-founders:

Chris Gladwin:

Chris' most notable entrepreneurial achievements include founding Cruise 
Technologies and MusicNow.com.  Cruise dominated the wireless-thin-client 
market in the early '90s and was way ahead of it's time for mobile, 
Internet-based devices. MusicNow.com is a leading online-music service 
provider and was recently acquired by AOL. Chris is Clevesafe's 
president.  Chris holds a mechanical-engineering degree from MIT.

Matt England:

Matt has worked for several companies (including MTI, Chaparral/DotHill, 
and Xyratex) in the enterprise-storage industry developing, servicing, 
selling, and marketing software-driven, networked-storage solutions.  Matt 
is responsible for all Cleversafe software development.  Matt holds a 
computer-engineering degree from UIUC.