The control plane unifies access and orchestrates movement across infrastructure silos to simplify data management and optimize hybrid cloud storage costs.
Data management complexity continues to grow as organizations adopt hybrid cloud strategies, manage greater data volumes, and implement emerging technologies like AI and machine learning. This places significant burdens on developers, engineers, and architects who get bogged down with tedious, manual data management tasks.
Hammerspace aims to alleviate these challenges with its innovative data management platform. During the 53rd IT Press Tour, I spoke with David Flynn, Founder and CEO of Hammerspace, to understand how the platform simplifies data management for technical professionals. Here are the key takeaways that developers, engineers, and architects should know.
Unified Data Environment
Hammerspace provides a unified hybrid cloud data management platform to discover, access, and share data assets across diverse infrastructures. According to David Flynn:
"Hammerspace elevates the file system above the infrastructure layer, bringing it into the orchestration plane. We assimilate just the metadata from existing storage systems without moving any data. So users get a single global namespace to access their files across all storage types and locations."
This unified environment eliminates data silos and fragmentation pain points for developers, engineers, and architects. They can now seamlessly access and work with data spread across storage tiers, clouds, and on-premise infrastructure.
Automated Data Management
Hammerspace automates tedious data management tasks for technical professionals using AI and machine learning algorithms. These capabilities handle various processes like:
Automatic data discovery and classification
Continuous data optimization across hot, warm, and cold storage
Predictive data caching based on access patterns
Data lifecycle management from production to archival storage
According to Flynn, Hammerspace orchestrates the movement of data in the background without dependencies on applications or infrastructure. This automation enables developers, engineers, and architects to focus on core responsibilities instead of allocating valuable time to managing data.
Advanced Analytics and Insights
Hammerspace provides intuitive dashboards and detailed analytics into data usage across the hybrid environment. Technical teams can leverage these rich insights to:
Understand data usage patterns
Identify redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data
Analyze storage utilization and identify optimization opportunities
Proactively plan infrastructure needs based on data growth
Monitor data workflows across infrastructure
These data analytics simplify infrastructure planning and help optimize hybrid cloud costs.
Compliance and Security
Hammerspace offers extensive security and compliance capabilities to safeguard data. The platform enables granular role-based access control, encryption, and data masking to protect sensitive information.
Moreover, Hammerspace helps maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA when handling private customer data. Technical teams can define policies to restrict data movement for compliance. Customizable metadata tags also allow teams to classify sensitive data for appropriate handling per regulatory needs.
Easy Infrastructure Integration
According to Flynn, Hammerspace seamlessly integrates with existing tools and infrastructure like GitHub, Jenkins, and cloud platforms. This means developers don’t need to migrate applications or data to leverage Hammerspace's orchestration capabilities.
The platform ingests metadata and serves as a control plane to direct data traffic appropriately between storage systems. All infrastructure remains untouched, apart from minor networking adjustments to route traffic through Hammerspace.
Hammerspace also supports standard data interfaces like NFS, SMB, and S3. This integration flexibility makes Hammerspace easily adaptable across toolchains.
Cost Optimization
Hammerspace optimizes infrastructure spending in several ways. The software automatically tiers data across storage types ranging from high-performance primary storage to low-cost cloud object storage. Hot data requiring low latency stays on flash, while inactive cold data gets moved to cheaper archival storage. Built-in deduplication and compression further reduce the consumption of expensive storage.
Additionally, Hammerspace provides detailed analytics into consumption costs across on-premise and cloud environments. Teams can identify waste from inefficient use, as well as opportunities to better align storage provisioning. Archival policies also automate the transition of aged data to inexpensive long-term object storage. The combined impact of these intelligent capabilities helps balance infrastructure expenses alongside performance and availability needs. By optimizing storage utilization, Hammerspace customers achieve up to 40% TCO savings.
Optimized for AI/ML Workloads
Modern applications like AI/ML workloads demand the ability to efficiently access large datasets during model development cycles. Hammerspace is purpose-built to address these emerging challenges with data orchestration targeted for AI/ML pipelines.
Key highlights powering simplified AI/ML workflows include:
Unified data lake supporting clean separation of raw data from feature stores
Dynamic data caching predictive of the model needs, based on training cycles
Automated data versioning, facilitating rapid iteration of models
Continuous data optimization across high-performance and cost-effective storage
Single namespace and orchestration from edge to core to cloud
This AI/ML-focused data orchestration dramatically accelerates model development while optimizing infrastructure.
Redefining Data Management
Hammerspace redefines data management for hybrid cloud environments. By decoupling storage from infrastructure, the company helps unify data access while coordinating movement behind the scenes. David Flynn summarized the vision:
"We believe data infrastructure should revolve around efficiently moving data based on how it needs to be consumed. Hammerspace makes this possible by becoming the orchestration control plane for a software-defined data environment across clouds."
By simplifying data management with intelligent orchestration, Hammerspace allows technical teams to work more efficiently. The platform overcomes key challenges around hybrid cloud adoption, infrastructure sprawl, and emerging workloads like AI/ML.
Organizations no longer have to settle for disjointed data silos and fragmented user experiences. Hammerspace delivers a unified and automated approach to help developers, engineers, and architects optimize the data layer.