Likewise Blog

It’s been less than a year since we debuted Likewise CIFS – a Linux-based, high-performance, Windows-compatible file server. Ever since our  first Likewise CIFS licensing wins, HP and EMC/Data Domain, we’ve had a steady stream of requests to package Likewise CIFS in a way that could be easily provisioned for end-users. Frankly I’ve been stunned by the number of requests that we get regarding Likewise CIFS from a range of enterprise, mid-enterprise, and SMB customers.

Initially, our foray into CIFS was purely as a technical piece of our AD-bridge solution.  We were unsatisfied with other options and we wrote our own CIFS client module to solve file transfer issues for Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise.  Later we were prodded, pushed, and cajoled by several of licensees of our authentication technology, Likewise Identity Services, to provide our CIFS solution as a commercial offering.

Next week at VMworld we’re going to debut a technology preview of a Virtual CIFS Storage Appliance that will be shipping later this year.  The appliance allows customers to migrate physical legacy file servers, and achieve the cost and power savings of virtualization as well as significant performance advantages for SMB1 and SMB2 file shares on Likewise CIFS.

Likewise CIFS on top of VSphere/vCenter brings a new level of flexibility to file sharing. Our customers have told us that redundancy is king for their data, and they’ll be able to enjoy load balancing and automatic failover with the Likewise CIFS appliance on top of VMware solutions. They’ll also be able to ensure the continuity of business data with snapshotting, and simple backup and restore functionalty.

The VMware appliance is just part of the Likewise vision of bringing interoperability to mixed networks. Earlier this year we partnered with HP to bring Likewise CIFS and Likewise Identity Service to the StorageWorks platform and, as requested, we’re busy working with other Likewise partners to offer Likewise CIFS and Identity Services as part of other solutions.

Come by the Likewise booth (#1606) next week at VMworld and see why Likewise has the answer to file-sharing woes in large organizations.

Bring us your use cases, and let us know if you would like to participate in an upcoming beta!

Recently I joined the Likewise Software team as vice president of Business Development.  One of the key reasons I joined the company was the increasing role I see Likewise playing in platform interoperability.  Take for instance one project–initially introduced a little over a year ago and more recently updated:  Likewise-CIFS client-side and server-side SMB/CIFS support, which  provides Microsoft Windows clients access to folders and files on Linux, Unix, and Mac computers.

We are seeing a broad array of use cases for the Likewise-CIFS server.  These include a Likewise-CIFS server virtual appliance, Likewise-CIFS as a NAS “head” on top of existing SAN devices, Likewise-CIFS as a front-end for cloud- based services such as Amazon S3, as well as supporting vendors looking to license our CIFS server capabilities as an OEM for a variety of other use cases (including HP and Data Domain).

Here are more details on a couple of use cases we’ve seen to date:

• We’ve had several customers in the midst of replacing legacy Windows desktops with Linux desktops on a large scale (1,000++ Linux desktop deployments).  These customers are looking to use Likewise Enterprise to manage authentication and provisioning of users leveraging their existing investment in Active Directory (for most enterprises, AD works, it is typically tied to the HR systems, and administrators know how to use it effectively for supporting group policy, reporting, etc…).  In addition, they frequently ask if we know of a solution to support a common home directory across Linux, Windows, and Macs where they can point their users.  Supporting this with the Likewise-CIFS Server running on Linux married to Likewise Enterprise for ease of user administration makes sense.
• Several OEM partners have begun embedding Likewise-CIFS in their products – an example would be HP StorageWorks.  The scalability, faster time to market, modular and tightly integrated code – as well as the ability to license under commercial terms – makes for a compelling option.

Do you have other potential use cases to consider beyond what we’ve detailed here?  We’d love to hear from you.

Professionally speaking, the past sixteen months have been, for me, some of the most exciting at Likewise that I can remember.  Today was the culmination of the combined effort of our entire engineering team as we announced that Likewise-CIFS is the integrated SMB/CIFS solution for Windows client support on some Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks products.

What makes this announcement special to me personally is not the fact that a major vendor has chosen Likewise; we’ve already established ourselves in the AD authentication bridge space with companies such as Isilon, DataDomain/EMC, VMware, and Citrix.   What makes the HP announcement particularly meaningful to me is my personal involvement in the HP partnership.  Over the past several months I’ve gone through all the daily status meetings, bug triages, late night debugging sessions, and the general things that go with enterprise scale software development.  Having worked at HP prior to coming to Likewise in 2005, I’m glad to see company endeavors succeed, particularly now that I have new friends amongst HP engineers.

Milestones like this announcement are good times to review where we’ve been and where we plan to move towards in the future.  In January 2009, Likewise began an initiative that would become Likewise-CIFS, the SMB/CIFS file server component of the Likewise Open project.  Even though I’ve worked on another SMB server in the past, Likewise-CIFS was really a brand new start.  The server’s multi-threaded architecture and modular components allowed us to parallelize much of the initial work, which was extremely important because the entire file server was being written from scratch.

To fully appreciate the difference between where we started in January 2009 and where we are now in April 2010, it’s best to examine the heart of Likewise Open–the code itself.  A quick glance at the repository from git://git.likewiseopen.org/likewise-open shows around 6800 commits.   That means that over the 337 working days (discounting weekends but including holidays) in the last 16 months the project has averaged about 20 commits per day.   Of course commits in and of themselves do not necessarily equate with improvement.  How many of the 6.8K commits added new code and new value?   Looking strictly at new components, we can conservatively say that a minimum of over 360,000 lines of new, handwritten C code has been added.  That doesn’t even include the 130,000 lines of C# code included in the Likewise Management Console that was made available under the LGPL last year.

If you aren’t a programmer, these numbers probably contain little meaning.  In that case, let’s talk about features.  In the past year, the following is a list of some of the new things that have been added to Likewise-CIFS:

• A complete SMBv1 implementation compatible with Microsoft Windows 2000 and later clients as well as Apple’s OS X 10.5+ and Linux desktops
• SMBv2.0 when serving Windows Vista/7/2008 clients
• Zero Copy support in the SMB server for faster reads and writes
• Scalability up to 50,000 connections on modest commodity hardware
• A GSSAPI NTLM mechanism for application developers desiring to integrate in Windows authentication frameworks
• A user space file system driver implementing Windows compatible byte range locks, opportunistic locks, share modes, security descriptors, and change notification.
• Server-side support for named pipes (necessary for integration with Windows RPC services)
• Privileged user management via the Likewise Security Authority’s (lsassd) local provider
• Managing all Likewise services from a central service control interface
• Central configuration management using the Likewise Registry

All this describes the road we have traveled thus far.  What about our future plans?  Will the next twelve months be as exciting as the past sixteen?  I believe so and here’s why.  There’s several what I call “point” features still remaining for the file server.  Things like Distributed File System (DFS) support and consolidation roots, Access Based Enumeration (ABE), Shadow Copies, and Alternative Data Streams (ADS) are isolated, individual features with a high degree of end user visibility.

But these are really just enhancements.  What broad initiatives do we have in play for the coming year that would match the scale of writing a new SMB file server from scratch?  We have several ideas already in discussion which I hope to be able to share in the coming months.  But sufficient to say that our path forward is to continue to build upon the Likewise Open platform base that we’ve put into play.  The way forward is up–to build upon the foundation already laid.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote a recent blog post on the Computerworld site entitled “SMB Blues.” In this item, he takes us to task about several things. Although I generally subscribe to the adage that “any news is good news (as long as they spell my name right)”, I thought I’d respond to his major points:

With respect to our contribution agreement, we use the same policy used by the Apache Foundation (http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt). Note too, that no one is obliged to assign copyright to us. Copyright assignment is only required if you wish to submit changes back to Likewise for inclusion in the official source tree. You can, of course, maintain your own version without assigning copyright.

Owning our copyrights means we can re-license our code and, in fact, we do. If you are an appliance vendor and want a proprietary license to our code, we can grant you one. This means more license flexibility, not less. Note, too, that in many cases, the proprietary license does not mean that the open source community does not benefit. Frequently, vendors with commercial licenses nevertheless contribute bug fixes and enhancements back to us for inclusion in the official source code. We maintain only one version of the source code for both open source and commercial use.

As to the comment that our code “… could be seen as a fork of Samba…”, this is not the case even for the most severely sight challenged. The Likewise-CIFS code is a complete, ground up, implementation of the SMB stack with a completely different design, layering and coding conventions.

While an early draft of our press release did claim that Likewise-CIFS is the only commercially-supported stack, this was corrected in the final release. Moreover, Barry Crist’s blog entry–cited in Computerworld blog–notes that Samba is supported by the good folks at Sernet (www.sernet.de). Additionally, the CIFS stack in Windows is, of course, also supported by Microsoft.

Finally, the Computerworld blog concludes, “I really can’t see the point of making a new, clean-room SMB server. I hate re-inventing the wheel, which is one reason why I’ve always liked open-source software.” How about the value of competition? Should Postfix never have been implemented since we already had Sendmail? Was Eclipse a mistake given that we already had Emacs? The open source world has plenty of examples of new projects arising to address the deficiencies of older ones. Incidentally, since the quote acknowledges that we have a “new, clean-room, SMB server”, how does that jibe with the earlier “fork of Samba” comment?

Ultimately, the market will decide whether our decision to implement Likewise-CIFS stack was a good or bad idea. Based on my experience at the SNIA Storage Developers Conference last week, I’m feeling pretty good about it.

Likewise-CIFS is a Linux (or Unix) based Windows-compatible high-performance file server targeted primarily to storage solutions providers, but which has also drawn interest from large organizations.

I’m getting many questions about Samba. Here is the complete history.

Originally, Likewise incorporated Samba, particularly Samba’s WInbind code, as part of our solution. Over a three-year period we were a frequent and active contributor to Samba. We employed two members of the Samba team and had 3-4 other developers that were making contributions to the Samba project. We were a sponsor and participant at Samba XP.

However, we had challenges with Samba primarily around Winbind. Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise are used by some of the largest organizations in the world to integrate Linux, Unix, and Mac systems into Microsoft’s Active Directory. One of our largest challenges with the Samba code was that it is very difficult for an administrator to troubleshoot issues and determine the cause of authentication issues. There are perhaps a half dozen (or less) people on the planet that can read and meaningfully interpret Samba/Winbind debug logs. Two of these worked for Likewise. Additionally two of our largest opportunities at the time were unwilling to accept a GPL v3 license. One of these was Citrix who now licenses Likewise Open to enable Xen’s AD authentication. Based on our experiences with large enterprises and on our customers’ requirements, we began to explore our options.

Initially, we explored a major overhaul to Samba and made a number of suggestions and recommendations to the Samba team. Most of these suggestions were not embraced. Additional challenges existed around licensing: Samba moved to GPL v3 and later when they signed Microsoft’s MCPP license.

After considerable internal debate among the management team at Likewise, we decided to move away from Samba. This was not an easy decision for us. We were concerned about our existing Samba team members, as well as the investment that would be required to write a new clean room implementation. We knew the value of developing a modern, modular architecture but knew that work was non-trivial and represented a significant bet for Likewise. Given the strength of our development team with a deep background in Windows-systems, DCE-RPC, SMB/CIFS, Kerberos, Linux, as well as Samba we were confident in our ability to execute. A little over two years ago we made the difficult decision to move away from Samba. Likewise Identity Services (LWIS), our own authentication code, shipped with both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise just over a year ago.

Likewise Open is a complete, clean room, ground-up, Windows-compatible implementation based on a modern architecture. We provide a modular, programmatic, solution that pays particular attention to clarity, extensibility and usability. This allows ISVs to easily incorporate our solution. The market reception to Likewise Open with LWIS has been overwhelmingly positive. Likewise Open is available under a GPL/LGPL v2 license or with a commercial license.

I’d like to be clear on my own perspective on the Samba project. They have accomplished much and should be applauded. They are a diverse group with strong opinions and they are not shy about stating them. Users that are happy with Samba should continue to use it. Happy Samba users are not our target market. Incidentally, if you are a happy Samba customer that requires support I’d recommend our partner, SerNet (www.sernet.de).

As part of Likewise Enterprise, we had written a CIFS/SMB client in order to implement our Group Policy features as well as our RPC subsystem. SMB is the protocol used for Windows clients to talk to servers. Right after we released LWIS as part of Likewise Open, a number of our technology licensees started strongly pushing us to release a CIFS server. Having seen the quality of our authentication engine (LWIS), they encouraged us to do similar work around a CIFS server. This was consistent with the original vision of the company and something we had looked at several times in the past especially given our deep development expertise around SMB/CIFS. The culmination of this discussion and subsequent development work is the release of Likewise-CIFS today.

It has been a very busy couple of weeks for the company.  Last week, we exhibited at both VMworld and Red Hat Summit (we were a show sponsor) and had a chance to talk with a large number of prospects, customers, and partners.

Two things struck me at these events:

“Likewise Open just rocks!” was something I heard over and over. Likewise Open has a loyal and fast growing fan base.  While I, of course, enjoyed the discussions and feedback in our booth, I was struck by the fact that I was stopped a number of times on the show floor simply from my badge (”Barry Crist, Likewise”) by Likewise Open users that wanted to pass on their gratitude and encouragement of the project.  One of my favorite comments was, “Now that is how open source is supposed to work.”  Last year, we won a Red Hat innovation award and we continue to get very strong support from the Red Hat customer base.

The second observation was that VMworld was dominated by storage vendors, several of whom have licensed Likewise-CIFS as the building block of their storage solutions. Virtualization is driving significant changes in the storage arena. There is a strong tie between what is going on in virtualization and what is happening in storage. Industry analyst John Webster wrote about this in this CNET article.

Likewise-CIFS is a our Linux/Unix based high-performance, Windows-compatible file server. We’re uniquely positioned in the intersection of virtualization and storage. We’ve licensed Likewise Identity Services (LWIS) to several of the large virtualization companies (we’ve announced Citrix… stand by for more announcements) and we’ve licensed both LWIS and Likewise-CIFS to a variety of the storage players (we’ve announced Data Domain and Isilon).   Stay tuned… more interesting things to come from Likewise in this area.

What and why
Likewise-CIFS is a Linux and Unix-based file server that seamlessly integrates with Windows clients (as well as Mac and Linux clients). CIFS stands for “Common Internet File System”; often this functionality is also referred to as an SMB server because it utilizes the Server Message Block network protocol. We initially developed a CIFS client as part of our Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise development effort. Other existing approaches had limitations particularly in scalability, platform support, and diagnostics. After we previewed our CIFS client work to several of our large Likewise licensees, they strongly encouraged us to expand the scope of our effort to include a CIFS/SMB server.  Hence Likewise-CIFS was born.

Who
Our clear target for Likewise-CIFS is large, high-end technology companies that build solutions on top of Linux or Unix servers but require interoperability with Windows. Likewise-CIFS offers these companies the best fully-interoperable server platform in the industry in terms of scale and performance. In our lab, we currently are able to demonstrate over 10,000 concurrent sessions (meaning 10,000 users connected to a single server). This an order of magnitude greater than other approaches and one of the primary reasons we’re getting so much interest in Likewise-CIFS. We view our primary consumers of this technology to be other technology providers but we have also seen interest in Likewise-CIFS by other organizations that have very high-end performance requirements.

Dual License.
Likewise-CIFS (currently in early beta) has been and will be released under the GPL v2 license. We also can license it under a commercial license to organizations that require a commercial license. Here’s a link to the code: www.likewiseopen.org or directly at git://git.likewiseopen.org

Progress and Community
Even though our formal Likewise-CIFS release is still several months away (Sept. 2009 target) we have already signed several significant deals with large, household name IT providers. (We’ve not announced these deals publicly yet). In addition to revenue, these deals have provided us a terrific opportunity to exercise our code in some of the most demanding computing environments that exist. And, we’re now getting code contributions from others providing us with a growing community of developers committed to the success of this Likewise initiative.

Focusing on Broad Interoperability Problems
This is one of several moves that you will see from us as we build on the great success of Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise. Likewise exists to solve problems that exist between Windows systems and non-Windows (Linux, Unix, and Mac) systems. While there is much talk in the industry, at times there is a shortage of the real foundational pieces that are required to make it all work. Likewise-CIFS is one of these important foundational technologies for broad interoperability between mixed platforms.