Tag Archives: file-systems

Interview with Vaultize: Pune based Enterprise File Sharing and Sync Service

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PuneTech has just learnt that Pune-based Enterprise file sharing and sync (EFSS) startup Vaultize has just received funding from Tata Capital Innovations Fund.

Vaultize builds cloud-based solutions for enterprise endpoint (i.e. laptop/desktop/mobile devices) sync, backup, encryption, security, and anytime/anywhere access to corporate file servers – all of this in a way that is visible to, and under the control of administrators in the company.

Through Vaultize’s endpoint encryption, sensitive corporate information remains encrypted on endpoints ensuring protection against unauthorized access and potential data leakage from lost or stolen device. In addition to on-disk protection, Vaultize’s patent pending encryption technology used in file sharing and backup ensures that the data is encrypted or decrypted only on endpoints – guaranteeing end-to-end protection

Vaultize, which so far has a presence only in India (with some sales outside via channel partners) will use the funding to scale up its expansion across the world, with immediate plans to establish operations in the US and Europe in conjunction with channel partners. The company will also use the funds towards building up its sales, marketing and engineering teams, and to enhance its global partner program.

PuneTech spoke with CEO and co-founder Anand Kekre. Here are some excerpts from the conversation:

Question: Another Pune startup in the storage and backup space, Druva.com, has been in the limelight in the last few years. How is Vaultize different?

Actually, we are not in the same market as Druva. Druva is more of a backup solution. Also, while they do have cloud-based backup, their focus traditionally has been on on-premise backup.

By contrast we are in what Gartner calls the EFSS (Enterprise File Sync and Share) space. We are more concerned with providing access to enterprise data from any device, from any where, without compromising on security. We ensure the enterprise data can be accessed from any device – including personal mobile devices – while at all times ensuring that the data is encrypted at all times, whether it is being sent over the network, or when it is stored on the disk in the device.

There are two major things we do that are unique to our solution. First, all the data that is being shared, synced, or in general being moved around via Vaultize is encrypted at source. This ensures that the data is never at risk once it leaves the device. Specifically, any data going over the network, or stored on Vaultize servers is always encrypted and the encryption key is only available at the endpoints (i.e. devices). Second, we do data de-duplication at source. That is, if the speed/latency and network bandwidth consumption is greatly improved by detecting whether the Vaultize servers already have a copy of the data that needs to be sent/synced (for example, same attachment being shared by various people), and only sending across the unique content. And this is achieved without losing the benefits of encryption-at-source, using patent-pending technology.

Question: So, your software can ensure that use of mobile devices with enterprise data is secure?

Across the world, there has been a proliferation of consumer file sharing and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trends, and this has resulted in an increase in data loss, security and compliance risks.

There are two different aspects to ensuring security for BYOD devices. First, the enterprise needs to ensure that it is safe to allow a mobile device to connect to the enterprise network – i.e. it is an authorized device, and it only has authorized applications, and more specifically, does not have viruses and malware. This area is called Mobile Device Management (MDM). Vaultize does not deal with this issue.

Once a device has been allowed to connect to the network, Vaultize ensures that the data on the device is safe and secure by encrypting all the sensitive data on the disk, by being able to sync data across various devices, and geographies, and by providing secure (via encryption) access to the data from anywhere, in a way that compiles with all the enterprise security policies.

And it does all of this in a way that can be easily managed and controlled by the enterprise IT administrators.

Question: What is your team size currently, and how are you planning on expand
ing it?

Currently, we are about 15 people, all in India. Over the next year, we hope to expand our team to about 30-35 people. We will be looking to expand not only in the area of sales and marketing, but also engineering, QA, and support.

For more information about Vaultize, see http://www.vaultize.com

Pune’s KQInfoTech announces beta availability of ZFS file-system for Linux

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About an year ago, we had reported that Pune based KQInfoTech is working on porting Sun’s ZFS file system to linux. They have now announced that a “Technology Preview” of the port is now complete, and the ported ZFS for Linux is now available in beta. They are looking for interested folks to try out the beta and help them with finding bugs and other issues.

But first some background, taken from previous PuneTech articles about KQInfoTech.

What is KQInfotech?

KQ InfoTech Logo
KQInfoTech is a Pune company that's trying to combine mentorship programmes for technology students, along with technology services to the industry and open source projects. Click on the logo to see other PuneTech articles on KQInfoTech's various initiatives.

Pune-based KQInfoTech is an organization started by Anurag Agarwal and Anand Mitra, both of whom chucked high-paying jobs in the industry because they felt that there was a desperate need to work on the quality of students that is being churned out by our colleges. For the 2 years or so, they have been trying various experiements in education, at the engineering college level. All their experiments are based on one basic premise: students’ ability to pay should not be a deterrent – in other words, the offerings should be free for the students; KQInfoTech focuses on finding alternative ways to pay for the costs of running the course. As a part of this initiative, they provide services to industry, and take on open source projects, and the students in their mentorship program actually do the work under their guidance.

What is ZFS?

ZFS – the Zettabyte File System – is an enormous advance in capability on existing file systems. It provides greater space for files, hugely improved administration and greatly improved data security. Wikipedia has this to say:

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs.

Why ZFS on Linux by KQInfotech?

ZFS is arguably one of the best file-systems available today, and Linux is one of the most widely used operating systems for servers by new startups. So, having ZFS available on Linux would be great. And, With many years of experience in Veritas building VxFS, another one of best file-systems in the world, the founders of KQInfoTech do have the technical background to be able to do a good job of this.

At this point, ZFS is not available on Linux. See the Linux section of ZFS entry on Wikipedia for more details.

So what does this port contain?

This port of ZFS is an extension to the port of DMU layer by Brian Behlendorf. We have added the missing ZPL layer to Brian’s port. With this addition it becomes possible to mount the zfs filesystem on linux and leverage ZFS’s features on linux.

What next?

If you’re interested in participating in the beta and helping out, or you’re one of the people whose business would really be helped by having ZFS available on Linux, apply for the beta, or get in touch with KQInfoTech: zfs-query@kqinfotech.com.

Also, check out the FAQ.

Pune’s KQInfoTech is porting Sun’s ZFS File-System to Linux

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Pune-based KQInfoTech is working on porting Sun‘s ZFS file-system to the Linux Platform. ZFS is arguably one of the best file-systems available today, and Linux is one of the most widely used operating systems for servers by new startups. So, having ZFS available on Linux would be great. And, With many years of experience in Veritas building VxFS, another one of best file-systems in the world, the founders of KQInfoTech do have the technical background to be able to do a good job of this. Check out the full announcement on their blog:

We have a ZFS building as a module and the following primitive operations are possible.

  • Creating a pool over a file (devices not supported yet)
  • Zpool list, remove
  • Creating filesystems and mounting them

But we are still not at a stage, where we can create files and read and write to them

See the full article, for more details and some interesting issues related to the license compatibility between ZFS and Linux.

About KQInfoTech

Pune-based KQInfoTech is an organization started by Anurag Agarwal and Anand Mitra, both of whom chucked high-paying jobs in the industry because they felt that there was a desperate need to work on the quality of students that is being churned out by our colleges. For the 2 years or so, they have been trying various experiements in education, at the engineering college level. All their experiments are based on one basic premise: students’ ability to pay should not be a deterrent – in other words, the offerings should be free for the students; KQInfoTech focuses on finding alternative ways to pay for the costs of running the course. See all PuneTech articles related to KQInfoTech for more details.

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Seminar: Introduction to ZFS (Sun/Solaris filesystem) and its features – 7 May

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Sun Microsystems
Image via Wikipedia

What: Introduction to ZFS and its features
When: 6pm 7th May 2009
Where: Auditorium, Building C, Pune IT Park, Bhau Patil Road, Aundh Road
Fees and Registration: This event is free for all. Please register here if you plan to attend this talk.

The engineers at Sun and members of the open source community have drawn from some of the best practices currently on the market, and contributed their own ideas and expertise to develop a new streamlined, cohesive approach to file system design.  ZFS has made such an impact that other UNIX vendors and open source enthusiasts have already intimated their plans to port it to their own operating systems. With ZFS, Sun addresses the important issues of integrity and security, scalability, and difficulty of administration that often plague other UNIX file systems.

KQInfotech presents a series of talks on the ZFS. We start with introducing the audience to ZFS and its compelling feature set and progressively dive deeper into its actual implementation and internal details over the series. The first talk in the series which will be held on 7th May 2009 will cover the various features of ZFS and will demo a large number of them. The subsequent ones will dive into the internal details of ZFS and its features.

This event is free for all to attend. Please register here if you plan to attend

Previous PuneTech articles about KQ InfoTech

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Should you use a file-system or a database

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Whether to use a file-system or a database to store the data of your application has been a contentious issue since the 80s. It was something we worried about even when I was doing my Ph.D. in Databases in the 90s. Now Jaspreet Singh, of Pune-based startup Druvaa has weighed in on this issue on Druvaa’s blog. His post is republished here with permission.

This topic has been on my plate for some time now. It’s interesting to see how databases have come a long way and have clearly out-shadowed file-systems for storing structured or unstructured information.

Technically, both of them support the basic features necessary for data access. For example both of them ensure  –

  • Data is managed to ensure its integrity and quality
  • Allow shared access by a community of users
  • Use of well defined schema for data-access
  • Support a query language

But, file-systems seriously lack some of the critical features necessary for managing data. Lets take a look at some of these feature.

Transaction support
Atomic transactions guarantee complete failure or success of an operation. This is especially needed when there is concurrent access to same data-set. This is one of the basic features provided by all databases.

But, most file-systems don’t have this features. Only the lesser known file-systems – Transactional NTFS(TxF), Sun ZFS, Veritas VxFS support this feature. Most of the popular opensource file-systems (including ext3, xfs, reiserfs) are not even POSIX compliant.

Fast Indexing
Databases allow indexing based on any attribute or data-property (i.e. SQL columns). This helps fast retrieval of data, based on the indexed attribute. This functionality is not offered by most file-systems i.e. you can’t quickly access “all files created after 2PM today”.

The desktop search tools like Google desktop or MAC spotlight offer this functionality. But for this, they have to scan and index the complete file-system and store the information in a internal relational-database.

Snapshots
Snapshot is a point-in-time copy/view of the data. Snapshots are needed for backup applications, which need consistent point-in-time copies of data.

The transactional and journaling capabilities enable most of the databases to offer snapshots without shopping access to the data. Most file-systems however, don’t provide this feature (ZFS and VxFS being only exceptions). The backup softwares have to either depend on running application or underlying storage for snapshots.

Clustering
Advanced databases like Oracle (and now MySQL) also offer clustering capabilities. The “g” in “Oracle 11g” actually stands for “grid” or clustering capability. MySQL offers shared-nothing clusters using synchronous replication. This helps the databases scale up and support larger & more-fault tolerant production environments.

File systems still don’t support this option 🙁  The only exceptions are Veritas CFS and GFS (Open Source).

Replication
Replication is commodity with databases and form the basis for disaster-recovery plans. File-systems still have to evolve to handle it.

Relational View of Data
File systems store files and other objects only as a stream of bytes, and have little or no information about the data stored in the files. Such file systems also provide only a single way of organizing the files, namely via directories and file names. The associated attributes are also limited in number e.g. – type, size, author, creation time etc. This does not help in managing related data, as disparate items do not have any relationships defined.

Databases on the other hand offer easy means to relate stored data. It also offers a flexible query language (SQL) to retrieve the data. For example, it is possible to query a database for “contacts of all persons who live in Acapulco and sent emails yesterday”, but impossible in case of a file system.

File-systems need to evolve and provide capabilities to relate different data-sets. This will help the application writers to make use of native file-system capabilities to relate data. A good effort in this direction was Microsoft WinFS.

Conclusion

The only disadvantage with using the databases as primary storage option, seems to be the additional cost associated. But, I see no reason why file-systems in future will borrow features from databases.

Disclosure

Druvaa inSync uses a proprietary file-system to store and index the backed up data. The meta-data for the file-system is stored in an embedded PostgreSQL database. The database driven model was chosen to store additional identifiers withe each block – size, hash and time. This helps the filesystem to –

  1. Divide files into variable sized blocks
  2. Data deduplication – Store single copy of duplicate blocks
  3. Temporal File-system – Store time information with each block. This enables faster time-based restores.
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