Hammerspace, the provider of the Global Data Environment for on-premises data centers and public cloud infrastructures, is debuting their latest ameliorations to the Hammerspace Global Environment, enriching data value and collaboration with the Hammerspace Metadata Plugin, User Initiated File Protection, Automated File Reservation, and Global Audit functionality, each integrated with the Hammerspace Metadata Control Plane. This announcement also highlights Hammerspace’s integration with the Elasticsearch solution by Alchemi Data for accelerated parallel global file system search.
The reality is users, applications, data centers, etc., are distributed; they’re of various types and sources, and Hammerspace unifies them under a single global file system. Global access to files is a reality within the Hammerspace Global Environment, compatible with any vendor system stored with your data. Data is directly actionable; Hammerspace’s newest capabilities allow global data policies to be set to all data, anywhere. With seamless integration into existing workflows and applications, native integration to workflow management, and an additional function to create and act on custom metadata, these features further enhance, automate, and streamline the Global Data Environment.
“From a user's perspective, they’re just seeing their desktop. They don’t know if their file is one place or another, and it’s all a normal view,” said Floyd Christofferson, VP of product marketing at Hammerspace. “From an administrator’s view, they can manage where that data is, everywhere. That means they can look across, manage, move, or place all of it as needed. And also bring in the telemetry on that data from any storage and be able to make business decisions and rules on how that’s done.”
The Hammerspace Metadata Plugin employs existing Windows desktops to add and manage custom metadata tags and metadata-driven workloads, extracted by script and can be accessed and manipulated by customer or third-party tools. Customized metadata enriches files to trigger downstream workflows and data protection actions, equipping the files with the means to mobilize. Automation plays a key role in the plugin’s operation, automating data movement throughout silos or locations, transparent workflows to users, and data policies for bolstered collaboration and compliance.
User-Initiated File Protection and Recovery integrates the user experience with the ability to initiate roll backs to previous file states or Windows file versions, independent from ITOps. This function increases user productivity, while adapting to their existing skill set. Roll backs are immediate; users do not have to wait to revert to a previous file state regardless of its storage system in the Global Data Environment.
With Hammerspace’s File Reservation Policy, users can reserve files to alleviate conflict of workflow. When users want to work on a file in the same instance, this function eases that friction between opposing operations.
Creation and management of Global Audit log of file system operations via System ACLs across SMB and NFS is available in the Hammerspace Global Data Environment, cultivating rich and impervious security systems for decentralized environments. Like the aforementioned features, storage type or file instance location is irrelevant to the Global Audit’s functions. Copying or moving data to other sites or platforms isn’t a problematic process, either—Hammerspace management of data placements across various sites ensures the security of file systems.
In collaboration with Alchemi Data’s Elasticsearch solution, the Global Data Environment now enables searches within the Hammerspace parallel global file system for enhanced data search, as well as document scanning from Alchemi Data to identify user-defined keywords. Keywords are then acquired and implemented into Hammerspace metadata, enriching the management and access of files in the environment.
“Users can leverage whichever storage they want to achieve their data goals,” continued Christofferson. “Hammerspace’s innovation is to be able to enable people to take control of their data across any storage, from any vendor, in any location, in any cloud—and do this seamlessly. We’re enabling this top layer of users and applications to go on with their work and not have to worry and wrangle with the location of their data.”
The Hammerspace Metadata Plugin is readily available for Windows, and expects a future release for Linux and Mac. The File Reservation Policy and Global Audit are also readily available. User-Initiated File Protection will be available October 2022. A tech preview is available from Hammerspace for the Alchemi Data Elasticsearch Integration.
For more information about the Hammerspace Global Data Environment and its latest capabilities, please visit https://www.hammerspace.com/.