Microsoft is getting into storage virtualization with P2P technology. A research project called BitVault will be expanded for a commercial enterprise offering.

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Microsoft Research consists of over 700 people in five separate labs all over the world, from Redmond to Bangladore. The team has come up with some interesting technologies over the years, although some of them wound up being more fanciful than practical. Recently, the team in Beijing has come up with an interesting project called BitVault: a "content-addressable retention platform for large volumes of data."

BitVault is a distributed application that runs on multiple PCs, called "bricks." Each brick is a bare-bones PC with a large hard drive, and hundreds or even thousands of bricks can be connected together to run the application. BitVault then allows users to search for information that is stored anywhere on the brick network, and guarantees that the data will be valid even if it has been modified or deleted on some of the bricks.