Nowadays it's critical to keep information in a safe place whatever the contingency that may happen. However physical storage do fail and all its data can be lost. There exists multiple alternatives to mitigate this problem, like RAID1, RAID5 and some others. These were designed for local physical disks but the theory behind them can be exported to other scenarios.
GlusterFS has a built-in translator, called AFR or replicate, that implements the concept of a RAID1 but with a configurable number of replicas. Our disperse translator integrates the RAID5 concept into the GlusterFS stack, allowing a configurable level of reliability, i.e. support for a configurable number of failed nodes without loss of service. It's aimed to provide equivalent reliability to GlusterFS as AFR but using a fraction of the network bandwith and the storage capacity, using an optimized version of an IDA (Information Dispersal Algorithm).
