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BU start-up to streamline electronic data storage
By David J. Craig
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Entrepreneur Will Oliver (standing) and CAS Computer Science Assistant Professor Gene Itkis recently formed a company they believe will transform the way small- to medium-size businesses store electronic data. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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The proliferation of electronic business transactions
in recent years has caused an explosion in the data storage industry.
Many companies and public institutions struggle constantly to increase
their capacity to store data, resulting in a whopping 12 percent annual
revenue growth in the storage industry worldwide, according to one recent
study.
However, CAS Computer Science Assistant Professor Gene Itkis has
designed software that he says will dramatically increase the amount
of information
that can be stored with existing hardware, as well as slash labor costs
associated with storage and help protect data centers against hackers.
Itkis hopes soon to license the technology through UbqC, a start-up company
he founded last year with financial and strategic support from BU’s
Community Technology Fund. Currently, UbqC (pronounced u·biq·ui·cy)
is seeking venture capital: the company hopes to raise $10 million within
the next 12 months, which will allow it to launch its product 6 months
after that, according to CEO Will Oliver.
“
There is a voracious appetite for storage right now, particularly in
the commercial, government, and education sectors,” says Oliver,
who is former vice president of the venture capital firm 3i. He predicts
that UbqC will achieve profitability within a year of its product launch. “What
I’ve found from talking to data center managers is that they can
barely buy storage capacity fast enough. At the same time, they’re
faced with labor costs that are exploding and performance that is degrading.
Achieving the best performance possible is important because we’re
talking about places that may process credit card information or keep
scientific data or heath-care records.
“
There are very high-priced solutions out there, but they’re way
beyond the means of a lot of companies that really need them,” Oliver
continues. “And we’re offering a reasonably priced device
that solves all the major storage problems. First of all, it allows a
company to optimize its existing storage system — studies have
shown that because of the cumbersome way most storage systems are designed,
only about 30 percent of available storage space typically is utilized.”
The
key innovation of Itkis’ technology is bypassing the conventional
storage strategy of having some computer hard disks act exclusively as
backups to others. Instead, the UbqC software, after splitting electronic
files into packets of information, duplicates and distributes them over
several disks on a storage system, each of which can be accessed regularly
for data while simultaneously serving as backup for all the others.
The
software stores each packet in most of the system’s disks,
but not in every one. This allows the packets to be distributed according
to a complex algorithm that ensures that any particular packet will always
be available, while using a limited amount of total storage space. As
a result, Oliver says, the UbqC software outperforms the storage industry’s
popular RAID (redundant arrays of independent disks) technology handily.
A RAID system increases the total space its data consumes by 120 percent
after duplicating it for backup, whereas the UbqC technology can achieve
four times as much protection against temporary or permanent loss of
data while increasing the storage space its data consumes through duplication
by just 80 percent.
A data center that costs about $10 million annually
to operate could save about $1.5 million a year in hardware upgrades
by using the new
technology, Oliver says. “With this software and a few new Dell
storage disks, a center could increase its capacity the same amount as
by purchasing much more expensive network solutions,” he says. “And
the difference in cost is 10 to one.
“
There’s also a dramatic benefit in terms of labor costs, because
our technology automatically does what storage network engineers do:
it manages where data is placed and moves data around to optimize performance,” Oliver
continues. “We predict that our technology could save a $10 million
annual storage operation about $2 million to $2.5 million per year in
labor costs.”
The design also has dramatic implications for the
speed at which data can be retrieved, because all the stored packets
are potentially accessible
at any given time. “If one of my devices is working slowly for
some reason, I won’t even notice it because my computer will retrieve
the data from the first storage device that makes it available,” says
Itkis, UbqC’s chief scientific officer. “In this way, our
technology utilizes the full capability of my bandwidth.”
In addition,
Itkis says, the technology will improve the security of stored data by
using an innovative encoding technology that protects
all data from theft while encrypting only 5 percent of it.
UbqC, whose
management team also includes as vice president of product development
Joseph Boykin, former vice president of the BU high-tech
start-up Infolibria, currently is perfecting a prototype of the software.
Oliver says he hopes UbqC will enter business partnerships with established
companies to embed its technology in a broader storage solution.
“
The technology will be attractive to channel partners such as hardware
vendors, storage network vendors, or storage management software vendors,” he
says. “These partners could embed our software into a broader storage
solution, making it faster and more reliable and improving its capacity
and security.”
Created in 1974, BU’s Community Technology Fund helps University researchers identify valuable intellectual property, links them with investors and management professionals, and receives equity in the resulting spin-off companies. To learn more about CTF, visit www.bu.edu/ctf. For more information about UbqC, contact Will Oliver at 781-862-2130.
4
April 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations