Hammerspace the “missing link” for a cloud that is still missing

Hammerspace is the “missing link” that allows customers to access file data worldwide without the inherent costs and difficulties that come with trying to use only the cloud for such functionality.

This is the opinion of Hammerspace’s senior vice president of marketing Molly Presley, who said Hammerspace offers detailed access to data files from anywhere, which would be impractical and expensive when using existing public cloud services. This, she said, is because public cloud services cannot offer access to data from distributed global locations without increasing migration and overhead management costs.

“The precondition for the cloud has not yet been reached. Data gravity it’s very real, “Presley said, given the tendency for data to weigh heavily in certain places, with migration being a potentially time-consuming, costly and complex task.

“Hammerspace has the ability to aggregate data between them cloud regions. We present metadata that the customer can view without moving the data, unless necessary. ”

This is the core of what Hammerspace provides – namely the ability to view and manage organization data from one place, no matter what local or cloud storage is stored. As Presley described, this data is not fully relocated unless it is needed or as indicated by policy-based tools.

But what is the use of just seeing metadata?

“A lot of work involves just knowing what data there is,” Presley said. “You don’t know what you don’t know until you see it and then decide what work to do with it. We can then move data to a granular file base, using, for example, a location in the S3 local region, and we can predict the need for migration in advance.

According to the director of technical products of Hammerspace Johan Balinno other provider can convert metadata into action data through policy settings in the same way.

“With Hammerspace, you can create workflows that tag data and describe it and implement policies,” Balin said. “For example, once the data has been collected, you can specify that it is moved after a certain period of time and is ready for processing by a specific application.”

Presley added: “There are no bunch of IT tickets that require data relocation. Everything happens in the background according to customer policy. ”

Presley quotes the British video production company Jellyfish Pictures, in which the stages of the work process are marked for processing in Autodesk ShotGrid.

Balin contrasts favorably with Hammerspace IBM GPFS file systemcalled the Spectrum Scale from 2015

“Hammerspace is much simpler and more forgiving in terms of how it is designed,” Balin said. “The real difference is that we don’t replicate data unless asked to do so.”

Presley added: “GPFS is more traditional HSM [hierarchical storage management system]so it requires data to be rehydrated by slower storage. Hammerspace always has visibility on this first layer – metadata – which is always included in high-performance storage, so we are all for overcoming the inherited architecture. ”

Hammerspace is among the group of products that aim to provide global file access and collaboration with access to the latest version of files from anywhere. Competitors include Ctera, Nasuni, Panzura and Peer Software.