This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project proposes to solve a critical problem in the world of mission critical computing: the problem of data storage. The goal of this project is to design a fundamentally new distributed data storage system that improves the reliability and scalability, while driving down the cost, of mission critical systems. This project will design an interlocking data storage mesh that is self-organizing, self-healing, and self-managing. This project will build on research into the design of distributed systems that led to the development of a fundamentally new, mission critical computing technology called Hive Computing. The prices of commodity computers have fallen to such a degree that in many cases it makes the most sense to regard them as disposable, not precious. The problem is that, while this trend is beginning to drive down the cost of compute power, it has not yet affected the world of data storage. As a result, only a relatively small number of businesses and other organizations can afford the high costs of reliability and scalability. The development of the Hive data storage system will solve this problem and produce a number of significant benefits, one of them being that now more businesses would be able to afford the cost of reliability, leading to dramatic reductions in downtime and significant productivity improvements. More scientists would be able to scale their systems, increasing the number and types of questions they could ask and the problems they could solve
