Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 19.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Komprise recently presented at Storage Field Day 19. You can see videos of the presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.

What Do You Need From A Data Management Solution?

Komprise took us through the 6 tenets used to develop the solution:

• Insight into our data
• Make the insight actionable
• Don’t get in front of hot data
• Show us a path to the cloud
• Scale to manage massive quantities of data
• Transparent data movement

3 Architectural pillars

• Dynamic Data Analytics – analyses data so you can make the right decision before buying more storage or backup
• Transparent Move Technology – moves data with zero interference to apps, users, or hot data
• Direct Data Access – puts you in control of your data – not your vendor

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• No disruption
  • Transparency
  • No interference with hot data
• Save money
• Without lock-in
• Extract value

Architecture

So what does the Komprise architecture look like? There are a couple of components.

• The Director is a VM that can be hosted on-premises or in a cloud. This hosts the console, exposes the API, and stores configuration information.
• The Observer runs on-premises and can run on ESXi, or can be hosted on Linux bare metal. It’s used to discover the storage (and should be hosted in the same DC as said storage).
• Deep Analytics indexes the files, and the Director can run queries against it. It can also be used to tag the data. Deep Analytics supports multiple Observers (across multiple DCs), giving you a “global metadata lake” and can also deliver automatic performance throttling for scans.

One neat feature is that you can choose to put a second copy somewhere when you’re archiving data. Komprise said that the typical customer starting size is 1PB or more.

Thoughts and Further Reading

I’ve previously written enthusiastically about what I’ve seen from Komprise. Data management is a difficult thing to get right at the best of times. I believe the growth in primary, unstructured storage has meant that the average punter / enterprise can’t really rely on file systems and directories to store data in a sensible location. There’s just so much stuff that gets generated daily. And a lot of it is important (well, at least a fair chunk of it is). One of the keys to getting value from the data you generate, though, is the ability to quickly access that data after it’s been generated. Going back to a file in 6 months time to refer to something can be immensely useful. But it’s a hard thing to do if you’ve forgotten about the file, or what was in it. So it’s a nice thing to have a tool that can track this stuff for you in a relatively sane fashion.

Komprise can also guide you down the path when it comes to intelligently accessing and storing your unstructured data. It can help with reducing your primary storage footprint, reducing your infrastructure spend and, hopefully, your operational costs. What’s more exciting, though, is the fact that all of this can be done in a transparent fashion to the end user. Betty in the finance department can keep generating documents that have ridiculous file names, and storing them forever, and Komprise will help you move those spreadsheets to where they’re of most use.

Storage is cheaper than it once was, but we’re also storing insanely big amounts of data. And for much longer than we have previously. Even if my effective $/GB stored is low compared to what it was in the year 2000, my number of GB stored is exponentially higher. Anything I can do to reduce that spend is going to be something that my enterprise is interested in. It seems like Komprise is well-positioned to help me do that. It’s biggest customer has close to 100PB of data being looked after by Komprise.

You can download a whitepaper overview of the Komprise architecture here (registration required). For a different perspective on Komprise, check out Becky’s article here. Chin-Fah also shared his thoughts here.