I am thrilled to have been a part of this year’s Storage Field Day 23 event, held by Gestalt IT during the first week of March. This event is a series of vendor-led technical presentations where technologists like myself can ask hard questions so that we can better understand groundbreaking technologies.
The third presenter in this year’s event is Hammerspace. While their solution does not directly relate to the database space that I work in every day, I still find this offering really compelling for many organizations globally. Essentially, an organization’s data is everywhere. Businesses need a single data management platform that can help everybody in the organization access the data that they need, whenever they need it, no matter where the data is located at.
Check out their sessions here.
Different types of data have different needs. Database systems must have very low latency and very high throughput platforms. Archival systems must have very high capacity, but usually don’t have very demanding performance requirements. Virtual platforms must be able to handle lots of concurrent workloads at the same time. Backup data is burstable in nature but very seldomly read from. File servers and block data are very hit and miss. Cloud access could be all over the place as well. Their goal is to handle metadata management for all of these data platforms, and provide a single pane of glass. The goal is also to provide the same data experience no matter where the user or request is coming from.
They also make a great point, and I can certainly back this up in my world. Organizations never want to delete data. Ever. Join this to the fact that enterprise storage that holds this data in a business usually has a finite life span and must be replaced periodically. Or, more commonly, the volume of data just grows and grows and grows, and exceeds the space in a given enterprise storage device. How do you move the data to new devices, or expand the capacity of existing devices, in a way that is not disruptive and seamless to the organization?
They focus on managing the metadata to allow data to move where it needs to reside while allowing the end-user experience to remain constant and steady. They call it the Global Data Environment.
For larger organizations with distributed workforces, this solution is fantastic. Allow the data to be better managed with a centralized platform, move the data where it needs to be at each phase of the data lifecycle, and provide a constantly flexible platform. It’s fantastic!
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