Storage Engineer
Hammerspace, a fast-growing software company founded in 2018 has revolutionized unstructured data and AI workloads. With its mission of making data a global resource, unincumbered by data silos, this San Mateo, CA-based company provides for unified unstructured data across datacenter sites and clouds and solves many of today’s modern hybrid work complexities.
The Unstructured Data Management Challenge
Enterprises have struggled to properly manage unstructured data even after several great technology innovation cycles that brought forth beneficial offerings. Some examples include the early ’90’s “sneaker net” where most files were transported on floppy disks from PC to PC. The next file system evolution came from NetApp who revolutionized the file system and brought scale-up NAS appliances. The next turn of the evolution crank brought about Isilon as they mastered file system scale-out appliances (acquired by EMC and eventually renamed Dell PowerScale) to tackle file system scalability issues. Other competitors delivered Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions that lacked a full feature and function stack(s) but solved very niche problems. All these solutions solved individual problems, however, none of them addressed the storage silo sprawl issue plaguing enterprises of all sizes.
Hammerspace revolutionized the unstructured data arena and solves many unintended consequences of scale-up and scale-out technologies currently in-use by enterprises of all sizes. Hammerspace took the time to properly build a powerful light weight global file system ( F/S) which is data centric and overcomes all the old F/S solution traps.
Here are three examples of what the Hammerspace solution addresses, which other manufacturers have not been able to solve:
- Metadata
- Free space
- File Management
Hammerspace also solves many of today’s modern hybrid work complexities such as on-prem, hybrid-cloud, and cloud offerings while improving file access performance.
Global Data Platform (GDP)
Hammerspace’ s Global Data Platform (GDP) elevates the file system above the infrastructure layer placing it close to the user and their applications. This construct is known as a data fabric, which helps organizations utilize their data in ways that were previously cumbersome or impossible. Additionally, the data fabric unlocks one of the world’s most important commodities, data. This is done by allowing applications, users and cloud instances to all interact with the same datasets, thus eliminating all the cross-platform data service restrictions, all while exploiting the disparate storage silos. The global F/S comes with a native orchestration engine empowering IT Operations (ITOps) through global data policies to apply to all data regardless of storage it resides upon. All these benefits come without having to replicate the data as Hammerspace makes the metadata available everywhere. Another benefit is the users and their applications remain intact without needing to migrate to new protocols or applications unless the business decides that is an imperative too.
Let’s Talk About Hammerspace’s Technology
Hammerspace approached the problem of the archaic file system structure via a multi-layered architecture. Covering the layers from the bottom/up they are Data Storage Services, Data Orchestration Services, Parallel Global File System and Data Access layer (Image 1 below for a visual). Collectively, these features form the basis for the Hammerspace Data Orchestration System (DOS) which overcomes inherent data gravity issues present in modern IT architectures. Hammerspace enables true data mobility by seamlessly breaking down storage silos, providing high-performance local access to your data—all through a single tool. It drives exceptional performance at scale, ensuring your data is always accessible, efficient, and optimized for demanding workloads. Enterprise data is moved into the namespace through a process Hammerspace calls assimilation. Their assimilation process is seamless to end users.
Drilling Deeper into the Hammerspace Architecture and Tech Stack
The tech stack provided by Hammerspace is robust and supports all major unstructured data protocols, including CIFS/SMB V2 & V3, NFS V3, parallel NFS V4.2, and S3, ensuring seamless integration with diverse storage environments. It offers file-granular replication through both an advanced policy engine and an on-demand approach, allowing flexible and efficient data management. Additional features like snapshots and clones, combined with comprehensive file versioning capabilities, enable users to maintain and manage data integrity while simplifying recovery processes. This makes Hammerspace ideal for organizations looking to optimize their unstructured storage systems and file systems. Image 2 below visually walks you through the architecture.
Alerting
Enterprises are increasingly focused on and deploying full-stack observability toolsets, and Hammerspace offers several robust mechanisms to meet their alerting requirements. Hammerspace enables users to monitor events via several different mechanisms. The alerting mechanisms include SMTP for email alerts, SNMP for network device monitoring, and syslog for logging and tracking system activities. This ensures that organizations can maintain visibility across their infrastructure, ensuring prompt issue identification and resolution.
Hammerspace offers a wide range of use cases including the following:
- For private cloud environments it provides seamless data management, while in multi-cloud setups its automated data tiering ensures efficient data flow across different cloud platforms.
- Storage platform migrations can be cumbersome and impact business operations, Hammerspace makes storage migrations between heterogeneous arrays so you can perform when and where you desire.
- In AI and AI pipeline applications, Hammerspace helps eliminate data silos, enhancing collaboration and scalability while keeping your GPU resources at full utilization.
- Additionally, for media and entertainment industries, Hammerspace simplifies management of massive media catalogs, offering a scalable solution to handle complex data workflows without having to always move datasets to gain access to needed content.
Let’s talk about Return on Investment (ROI)
Hammerspace offers several unique benefits that significantly enhance ROI. Unlike cloud and hyperscaler solutions, Hammerspace provides native compression and deduplication , delivering added value beyond typical cloud scale offerings. Intelligent data tiering brings another level of cost savings by moving unused data off expensive primary storage and moving it to less expensive archive offerings. Add in ITOps simplification – which frees up man hours to address other critical initiatives-Hammerspace empowers enterprises to do more with less.
Enterprise Storage and Data Solutions from Mainline
Hammerspace is a software-defined orchestration and storage solution that unifies your enterprise’s unstructured data—no matter where it resides, or which storage vendor is used—unlocking the full potential to become a truly data-driven organization. By reducing the number of operational silos, Hammerspace simplifies IT operations, enhances collaboration, and ensures a seamless, local data experience for your users, all while optimizing the utilization of existing data assets.
More Information
Mainline offers cyber storage solutions for today’s data intensive enterprises. Working with all the major data storage technology vendors, and having deep knowledge across the entire spectrum of enterprise storage solutions, we help our clients select and acquire the best offerings to suit their business needs and budget. Our experts can assist you from the initial assessment through post-implementation support to include services that can help you maximize and sustain business efficiencies. Contact your Mainline Account Representative directly or reach out to us here with any questions.