About Unique Checksum.
A Tennessee-registered management consulting and solutions firm working with research-computing institutions on the storage, infrastructure, and operational decisions that determine whether multi-petabyte and exabyte-scale systems are sustainable. This page describes who we are, the work we are currently doing, and the heritage the firm draws on.
A specialist firm for research computing.
Unique Checksum LLC is a Tennessee-registered management consulting and solutions firm founded in 2024. The firm's principal is John Riley III, who brings more than twenty-five years of work in high-performance computing storage to the work, most of it spent inside the same field the firm now serves: research-computing institutions, HPC facilities, and the increasingly AI-adjacent infrastructure that supports them.
The firm's working principle is that the decisions which determine whether a multi-petabyte or exabyte-scale storage system is sustainable are not made by one specialist working on one part of the problem. They are made across three dimensions simultaneously — the data policy that determines how files are encoded, placed, and tracked; the physical infrastructure that hosts that data, including its delivery, power, and cooling; and the orchestration that matches workload to physical resources continuously over a system's life. Firms that treat these as separate concerns leave efficiency on the table at exactly the scales where efficiency matters most.
Unique Checksum works across all three. The data-policy dimension is where LStore enters the picture, and where most of the firm's currently-published technical material lives. Physical infrastructure delivery and resource orchestration are dimensions the firm advises on directly, drawing on relationships with established hardware partners and on the firm's own working knowledge of the operational realities of running storage at scale.
The firm operates with a small principal team and engages additional specialists project by project, an arrangement that keeps the engagement focused on the institution being served rather than on maintaining a billable headcount. Contact information for the firm is in the footer below; Unique Checksum is reachable by email through the addresses listed.
Commercializing LStore under contract to ACCRE.
LStore is a distributed file system developed at Vanderbilt University's Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE) over the course of more than two decades. It is a Vanderbilt and ACCRE research and engineering project, open source and developed in the open — ACCRE is the platform’s home and primary engineering center, and its public repository is open to contribution from other institutions, Unique Checksum among them. Unique Checksum, under contract to ACCRE, is operationalizing and commercializing LStore for institutions outside Vanderbilt that need what the platform offers.
The engagement is led by John Riley III on the Unique Checksum side. Unique Checksum reports to three ACCRE directors. Hunter Hagewood is ACCRE's Interim Executive Director and Director of Operations. Dr. Alan Tackett is ACCRE's Technical Director and the lead developer of LStore. Lindsey Fox is ACCRE's Director of Research Services, Facilitation and Outreach. The three directors together oversee the technical, operational, and research-services dimensions of LStore, and Unique Checksum's contracted scope spans all three.
The architectural authorship of LStore belongs to Vanderbilt, to Alan Tackett, and to Hunter Hagewood. Unique Checksum does not own LStore, does not speak as LStore, and does not direct the platform's technical evolution. The firm's authority on LStore is the authority of an authorized commercialization partner working in coordination with the platform's authors. The technical content published on this site reflects that relationship: Unique Checksum speaks for LStore with authorized comprehensiveness, but the architectural decisions the content describes are decisions made by the platform's authors, not by Unique Checksum.
The contracted scope covers the work that turns a sophisticated research-engineering project into a platform institutions outside Vanderbilt can adopt, deploy, and rely on. Unique Checksum produces the technical documentation that gives evaluators a complete public reference. It builds and operates the help desk and ticketing infrastructure that supports institutional users. It develops the marketing collateral that introduces LStore to organizations that have not previously been exposed to the platform. It coordinates stakeholder relationships, manufacturing and sales relationships, and the broader project management that keeps the commercialization effort coherent across the parties involved. The arrangement gives ACCRE a commercialization arm that operates with appropriate distance from Vanderbilt's research mission, while giving Unique Checksum access to a platform whose architectural depth is not otherwise available outside research-computing circles.
This site is the public reference Unique Checksum produces under that arrangement. The LStore section is the most thoroughly developed because that is where the firm's current contracted work is most concentrated. As the engagement matures, additional dimensions of the firm's work — physical infrastructure delivery and resource orchestration in particular — will be developed with similar depth on this site.
The path from Teradactyl.
Unique Checksum was founded in 2024 as the next chapter of work that began in 1999. John Riley III's prior company, Teradactyl, spent twenty-five years building enterprise-scale data integrity and backup technology for high-performance and research-computing environments — most notably the True incremental Backup System, TiBS, which protected production data for institutions including ACCRE itself.
ACCRE has been a Teradactyl client since approximately 2005, which is why the relationship that now produces this work is built on twenty years of shared operational history rather than on a new commercial introduction. The work Unique Checksum performs today — helping ACCRE operationalize and commercialize LStore — rests on a long understanding of what ACCRE's environment requires, what its operational priorities are, and how its decisions are made.
Teradactyl closed in 2024, and Unique Checksum was founded that same year to continue the work in a new form. The intellectual property foundation Teradactyl developed over its twenty-five-year run is carried forward today as Constancy — described in the next section — with the tape library management capability within that estate extended separately into LStore. Unique Checksum as a firm carries forward the operational philosophy that Teradactyl was built on: data integrity is a discipline, not a feature; the institutions that succeed at scale are the ones whose operational practices reflect that discipline; and the work of helping institutions reach that point is work worth doing well.
Operational at ACCRE.
Constancy is operational at ACCRE as the exclusive enterprise network backup system, protecting research computing in production. It is developed from the Teradactyl intellectual property — the patented TeraMerge® synthetic backup consolidation technology and the True incremental Backup System® that ran in production at research-computing institutions, including ACCRE, for more than two decades. The Teradactyl architecture established that data integrity at scale is produced through ongoing operational discipline — synthesis, reconsolidation, and file-level checksum verification — rather than through periodic audit. Constancy carries that engineering lineage forward, reshaped for the storage architectures research computing is deploying today.
Constancy and LStore are distinct Unique Checksum offerings with a shared deployment context at ACCRE: LStore as the research-computing storage platform, Constancy as the enterprise network backup system that protects it. Institutions interested in either capability, or in how the two work together at a site that runs both, are invited to engage Unique Checksum directly.
Tape library management, extended.
The Teradactyl intellectual property estate also includes extensive tape library management technology developed inside TiBS over more than two decades of production deployment in high-performance and research-computing environments. That capability is extended into LStore today, providing the platform's tape integration with engineering hardened against the operational realities of large-scale storage at sites that run tape libraries as a working tier rather than as cold archive alone. The tape stream and Constancy are distinct streams of the same intellectual property — different capabilities, different commercial dispositions — presented together here because they share a lineage and a single owner.