Patent ID: 7574570

Claim:
An information dispersal system comprising: (a) a plurality of storage nodes operatively coupled to a network; (b) a server operatively coupled to said network; (c) a grid client operatively coupled to said network, said grid client communicating an account identifier and a value indicative of an amount of data to be stored to said server over said network, said grid client segmenting information to be stored into a plurality of data slices using an information dispersal algorithm so that the information to be stored may be restored by combining less than all of the plurality of data slices and communicating said plurality of data slices to said plurality of storage nodes over said network; and wherein said server receives an indication that said plurality of data slices have been successfully stored and increments a total storage value associated with said account identifier by said value indicative of an amount of data to be stored, and generates an invoice based on said total storage value for an entity associated with said account identifier.