The current strategy for highly durable object stores is [largely] to have 3+ replicas of the data. If you utilized erasure coding [Cleversafe does this, others

The current strategy for highly durable object stores is [largely] to have 3+ replicas of the data. If you utilized erasure coding [Cleversafe does this, others are working on it], you can achieve very high durability by spreading data over multiple disks or even datacenters such that if a few of them fail, you still can recover all of the information. But, like with RAID, there are many tradeoffs in how you configure such a system. Erasure coding makes sense for rarely-accessed data since IO is considerably more expensive in a networked setting.