Likewise Blog

Join Likewise at the 10th annual USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies this week in San Jose, CA. FAST ’12 brings together storage system researchers and practitioners to explore new directions in the design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of storage systems. Make sure to stop by the Likewise table to pick-up a T-Shirt. We look forward to seeing you at the conference!

Where to start? First of all it has been seriously storming in Seattle (where I live) and Bellevue (where Likewise is headquartered). The big punch is supposed to hit tomorrow with up to another 12 inches or more of forecasted snow for the urban areas and up to an additional 4 to 5 feet of snow in the mountains. Seattle is a hilly city and the temperatures could flirt in and out of freezing which could lead to wet, then very frozen roads. The last time we saw this setup there were many epic YouTube videos of buses spinning out of control down crowded city hills. The Likewise office is buzzing with all sorts of winter wildness even including talk of getting snowed in at the office. Is it just coincidence that the big whiteout is hitting the same day of the threatened Wiki web blackout?

In case you didn’t see this: IBM created a simple cluster of just 12 antiferromagnetic atoms (you can look up antiferromagnetic on Wikipedia, but not after midnight tonight). John Markoff at the New York Times did a nice write up on IBM’s work. IBM’s work is impressive and could eventually be the foundation of a set of radical new storage products in the future that can hold massive amounts of data with amazing breakthroughs in both speed and power requirements.

As promising as this is, we’re already seeing an explosion in storage technology based upon incremental but substantive progress in processors, drives, files systems, and a variety of software components. In the near future (if not already) even a modest organization will be able to cobble together robust and relatively inexpensive storage systems with 16, 32, 64, or even 128 terabytes without breaking a sweat. Ok, I admit I’ve been in the industry long enough that I still get a bit lightheaded that my iPhone has a 64GB flash drive and that even a small workgroup has terabytes of storage on hand. Creating value in the storage industry will become less about capacity and much more how to coherently deal with dozens of terabytes and even petabytes of data, the bulk of which will be unstructured. If the unstructured data mess is bad today, just hang on. It is going to get much worse before it gets better.

As impressive as the advances in hardware have been and promise to be, it is our firm belief that value creation in storage is going to be dominated by advances in software breakthroughs over the coming years. This will partly come through new generations of applications in the field of metadata, search, analytics, and management. But there will also be significant gains from the “under-the-covers” software. Components like scale-out file systems and advanced protocols will make big advancements in the coming years. Just look at the work being done on SMB 2.2 or NFS 4.1 to get a sense of the significant work being done at this level. I think the winning companies of the future will be those that marry together these software elements with next generation applications in disruptive ways.

Speaking of disruptive, wish us luck with the Seattle weather tomorrow. I’m personally hoping we get pounded, I love winter and all that it entails.

And lastly, while Likewise won’t be taking an official position on SOPA and PIPA, I will post a link if you’d like to make a donation to Wikipedia. I did.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=WMFJA085/en/US&utm_source=donate.

Barry

InfoStor writer Kenneth Corbin focuses on Likewise this week in an article where we are noted as a “vendor to watch”.  The InfoStor article highlights key problems companies face managing storage due to the rapid proliferation of unstructured data. Despite the fact that storage costs are decreasing, it is still common for businesses to spend half of their IT budget on storage.  Increasing budget allocation for storage is the most common, knee jerk reaction that most companies have as it becomes more difficult to accommodate the growing volume of data. In some cases, unstructured data growth has been as much as 400 percent to 800 percent annually. As Ken Cheney, our VP of Sales and Marketing, notes, “we all have to get much smarter about the data we have. Just throwing more disks at the problem won’t solve it.” The article talks about the impact we’re making with our storage platform, Likewise Storage Services, which is now used by an ever-growing list of OEM storage vendors including HP, EMC, and others. In addition, the article highlights Likewise Data Analytics and Governance, now available for early adopters, for the game-changing capabilities it brings organizations seeking smarter storage and data management. Check out the InfoStor article – it’s worth a read!

One of the challenges facing enterprise data managers is understanding the usage patterns of files residing on unstructured storage.

Software for storage management should quickly bring to the attention of data managers those events and patterns of events that suggest problems and opportunities.

Here are some examples of file usage that may be of interest to data managers:

1. If a user attempts to read a file containing sensitive salary data, is the access attempt indicative of a worrisome security violation?

2. Suppose spreadsheet files with financial information reside unprotected in a directory. Should the data manager consider changing the access rights for the directory?

3. If a directory containing a large amount of data has had few accesses over the past month, should the data manager consider moving those files to offline storage?

4. Given a high level of usage of files residing on a CIFS server, should the data manager consider, for performance reasons, redistributing the files across other servers?

5. If a user often writes large files to disk, is this suggestive of inappropriate behavior — such as misuse of company resources for a personal business? (Note that information about the content of the files would be useful in evaluating the inappropriateness of the behavior.)

6. If a user reads a large number of files at an unusual time (e.g., in the middle of the night, or just before leaving the company), is this suggestive of undesired behavior?

How can data management software help data managers zero in on such usage patterns of interest?

First, the software should display current and historical data in tabular or graphical reports, with results ordered by likely significance. Second, the software should implement alerts that notify data managers, by email or by graphical display elements, of situations of particular interest. Third, the software should let data managers explore the data along different dimensions and with various restrictions. Finally, the software should allow data managers to customize reports and alerts to omit useless information and focus on interesting patterns.

These requirements can place a significant burden on data managers, both for customizing reports and alerts and for examining the data. As much as possible, the software should help data managers by automatically predicting which events are of interest. Furthermore, the software should allow data managers to provide feedback that the software can use to customize reports and alerts.

In other words, storage management software needs to perform predictive analytics.

Some examples of predictive analytics in other domains are:

1. Given query terms, predict which documents will be of interest (search engine querying).

2. Given a customer, their history of purchases, and the purchase histories of other customers, predict which products the customer might be interested in buying  (recommendation engine, collaborative filtering).

3. Given a loan application, predict whether the applicant is a worthy credit risk (credit evaluation).

4. Given the submission of a product order on a web store, predict whether the order is fraudulent (fraud detection).

5. Given data about corporations, along with historical stock market performance data, predict the price of a stock at some time in the future (time series analysis, regression).

6. Given an email message, along with a history of messages, predict whether the email message is spam (spam filtering).

Predictive analytics software typically builds a statistical model of the domain and applies machine-learning techniques to categorize or cluster items into interesting classes. Such techniques are broadly categorized into two types: supervised learning and unsupervised clustering algorithms.

With supervised learning, the software categorizes data into two or more classes (e.g., “spam” and “not spam”), based on a training set of labeled historical data. For example, given a large number of emails labeled as “spam” and a large number of emails labeled as “not spam,” spam filtering software categorizes a newly arrived email by comparing it to the two sets of training examples and deciding, based on statistical or geometrical measures, which class (“spam” or “not spam”) is the likely correct label.

With unsupervised algorithms, on the other hand, the aim is to automatically organize items into similar sets by discovering patterns in the data. Unsupervised clustering is often useful as a preliminary step for exploring data and for optimizing supervised learning.

In the context of data management software, the feedback from data managers provides the training data with which the supervised algorithms can learn to improve their predictions. Unsupervised learning is useful for modeling typical usage patterns of files by users.

The key to successful predictions is threefold: (1) identify the correct predictive attributes; (2) model the data using an appropriate formalism (e.g., Bayesian networks, nearest neighbor search, or logistic regression); and (3) settle on a mechanism for feedback so that the software can learn over time.

2011 marks a year of record financial results for Likewise! Like other American tech companies, we are now sitting on a record amount of cash (for us the highest cash position in the companies history).  In fact, we’re not sitting on it at all, but working hard to put that capital to work – the bulk of which will go towards hiring.  If we meet our hiring goals, we’ll have doubled the company by mid-2012 compared with late summer of this year.  And our business has continued to be robust.  We’ll announce additional groundbreaking partnerships in 2012 as we continue to build on the momentum of Likewise CIFS and Likewise Storage Services.  We’re also very encouraged by the early traction we are seeing with Likewise Data Analytics and Governance.

The surge of unstructured data is unprecedented and dealing with this challenge requires innovative technologies to revolutionize the way companies think about, and use their data to enhance their business.  Right now, we are the only provider offering storage products that approach the big data problem from an integrated perspective, and we will continue to invest in developing technology that breaks down data silos and further unifies identity, security, and storage. It’s been a busy and exciting time for Likewise.  Thank you all for your support of Likewise!  I, and the entire team at Likewise, would like to wish you and your loved ones the very best over the Holidays!

Best wishes,

Barry

Enjoyed my second Gartner event of the year last week – Gartner’s Data Center Conference. A different crowd and energy level then the Gartner Symposium, but extremely focused and productive.

I think what struck me first and foremost was the number of people – from very large companies – who told me what a problem unstructured data was becoming. Now, we’ve been talking about this problem for quite some time, but to hear it from these high level executives really confirmed our concerns.

So, how big a problem? Here are some real numbers I heard. These IT executives told me that their data was growing on average between 400 to 800% per year – and the growth was expected in many cases to be exponential for the foreseeable future. The cause of the growth is due in part to Cloud and virtualization technologies as well as the proliferation, perhaps surprising, of new ways of working (like the usage of social media in the enterprise) and new access devices. This proliferation is causing significant redundancy of the data (not to mention potential security issues). Big data is another cause of growth as enterprises number crunch large data sets resulting in numerous large files. Also add to it the fears of throwing away data and the continuing digitization of the workplace.

The other number that stood out to me was the estimate that more than 50% of IT spending is going to storage. Think aboutthat. Even as storage hardware plummets in cost, and tools like compression, deduplication and data-tiering become more advanced, storage costs are still consuming a disproportional amount of an organizations IT budget.

The fact is, we all have to get much smarter about the data we have – just throwing more disks at the problem won’t solve it. We have to get smarter about the data itself – truly understand its value and risks. Currently, we use fairly rudimentary methods for understanding our data – frequency of access, application type and document type – but until businesses look at their data from the top down – AND bottom up and understand everything about it – they will just continue to throw disks into the wind.

The USENIX LISA conference wrapped up last week and, although I was not able to stay as long as I wished nor attend as many sessions as I had hoped, my time at the conference well worth the travel.

To begin with, I spent time talking to – but especially listening to — several devops people about cloud deployments.  The conversations were insightful because these are the very practitioners who were trying to implement a cloud solution rather than just discuss cloud strategy. The conversations covered private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions offered from vendors and from service providers alike. The takeaway for me was that while cloud strategy seems to be maturing as people are thinking more and more about utility computing, the private cloud deployments are still struggling with the interfaces, the infrastructure, and how to support their internal customers.

The one statement that stuck with me during my introductory tutorial on cloud storage was, “We’re being asked to provide departments with a private cloud. This in itself is nothing new, we’ve been providing IT resources on demand for years, but the new requirement is for defined interfaces on how to access the resources.”  Enabling end-users to take control of their IT destiny is the definition of cloud (based on today’s terms) – Utility computing on demand for end-users.

A second takeaway found mostly in conversations during the “Hallway track” was how several researchers that I have high respect for, were moving from their traditional system view of computing to big data problems such as environmental sciences, chemistry, and inter-mural medical diagnostics. The focus on developing new models for managing, processing, and making sense of petabytes of unstructured data is just a sign that our work here at Likewise is on the right path: to help researchers and administrators understand their respective worlds in ways that were not possible until recently.

LISA had enough content, ideas, and conversations to keep me running hard until the next chance I have to take a pulse of our industry.

Breaking news here at Likewise! We are very excited to announce that the Likewise Data Analytics and Governance application is available through a customer beta program. Check out what Ken Cheney, VP of Sales and Marketing, has to say about the news, here! Likewise Data Analytics and Governance is designed to help enterprises secure, manage, and analyze unstructured data. The application works by tying identity and other metadata to data, for a global hierarchical view of an organization’s unstructured data that can identify and remediate root causes of security, performance and access issues. With the application, organizations can reduce risks, management costs and resources required to manage and maintain compliance for unstructured data. Check out the complete announcement on our site.

We’ve been saying for a while that unstructured data challenges require innovative technologies to address how data is secured, stored, and managed in order for organizations to drive value from their unstructured data in an expedient way. The Likewise Data Analytics and Governance application provides a consolidated, scalable infrastructure that expedites data analysis for improved business intelligence that in turn, feeds data driven decision making. Ultimately, unlocking the hidden value of information contained within unstructured data can fuel the creation of new data applications, resulting in improved competitive advantage. Read the datasheet for in-depth technical information.

The customer beta program offers exceptional value to enterprise organizations, including:

• Significant cost savings
• Access to the application now
• Ability to become a strategic design partner
• Receive the production version of the application at no additional charge upon full product release
• Included deployment services and support

To learn more about the beta program and begin improving management of your unstructured data visit http://likewise.com/products/beta.

This week Storage Strategies NOW, an independent analyst firm covering storage companies and their technologies, featured Likewise in their Snapshot Reports and Storage Bytes newsletter. The report highlights key areas where Likewise is uniquely suited to help OEM NAS developers as their converged storage requirements increase with the growing number of workloads that require unstructured data. The analysts noted that “appliance developers will find it convenient to work through Likewise to access Microsoft’s current and future products.” and our solutions provide OEM vendors the “opportunity to differentiate in areas outside of their typical focus but critical to the success of their customers as enterprises seek to better manage the unbridled growth of their unstructured data.” This most recent analyst review reaffirms that our cross-platform approach to storage fits with the current pains of the market, and offers a significant value in the form of accelerated product development for our OEM partners.

Read the entire write up here: www.ssg-now.com/likewise-storage-services-provides-oem-nas-developers-with-file-services-and-security

New research released by Hitachi Data Systems reveals that  unstructured data and data capacity are the primary concerns facing IT managers. It doesn’t surprise us that out of their survey of 151 interviewees, 57% of respondents  claimed that unstructured data is the biggest headache for their organizations. IT efficiency, legacy technology, data loss, data security, capacity, and system down time were other major concerns listed, and Hitachi notes that concern surrounding these areas has increased since last year’s survey. As organizations begin to understand the value contained within unstructured data, and start relating it to the demands of their business, IT departments fall under increasing pressure to harness and control unstructured data.  As Stephen Ball, HDS’ head of UK, Ireland and South Africa noted, “IT managers need to refresh data management using a virtualized, automated, cloud-ready approach that allows data to become independent of the application where it is created. Only then can enterprises, search, analyze and understand data so that it becomes a valuable information asset that can be utilized across the organization.” It is this paradigm shift that accounts for much of the headaches raised in the HDS survey, and it’s what keeps us up at night here at Likewise. We believe that the unstructured data challenge by nature, requires scalable infrastructure that consolidates data silos for reduced security risks and operational costs. Furthermore, enterprises need to look for new data management and analytics solutions to help them drive better value from their data. Read more on the HDS Survey here: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/21914/unstructured-data-and-data-capacity-are-twin-worries-for-it-managers/