Komprise storage tiering service pledges flash savings

Data management software company Komprise today released Flash Stretch, an assessment service that identifies data sitting on expensive primary storage systems that users can move to less expensive storage tiers. 

It's common for organizations to have cold, backed-up or irrelevant data living on primary storage. If enterprises don't plan properly, that data will take up valuable high-speed storage space required for other initiatives, such as AI inferencing, and can even outrun storage budgets.  

"Both of these issues can be solved by really looking at how you're using your primary storage," said Komprise COO Krishna Subramanian. "So instead of buying new storage, you could offset maybe 70 percent of it by reclaiming the storage you already have through better data management."

Krishna Subramanian

Storage optimization and tiering are two critical practices that organizations need to address soon. These practices will help enterprise IT managers assess growing storage burdens, such as costs and the ever-growing volume of unstructured data required for AI.  

"The whole world of storage is going through a bit of a rethink at the moment. … As enterprise AI at scale starts to roll out over the next five to 10 years, it's going to become a big problem," said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of Deep Analysis. 

What is Flash Stretch and how does it work? 

Komprise offers similar products, such as Komprise Analysis, which is a paid subscription service that performs analyses and supports ongoing optimization on unstructured data over time. Flash Stretch is targeted as a free service for primary storage capacities.  

"We're providing an assessment that analyzes the customer's footprint, shows them what data is cold and can be tiered off," Subramanian said. Flash stretch doesn't make the optimizations for the customer; instead, it analyzes all stored technical metadata, then returns to the customer a model of potential tiering optimizations and suggests a Komprise product the customer can buy to make those changes.  

How much an organization might save in terms of space and cost will vary significantly, depending on factors such as the age of the system, the type of flash being used, the data being assessed or the data compliance requirements involved. Organizations with petabyte-level environments and less retention requirements might be able to save significantly more by migrating cold data. Pfizer, as an example, saved 75% of its storage, backup and disaster recovery costs by using Komprise to analyze, tier and migrate data to Amazon S3. 

"Being more efficient in the utilization of what you have and optimizing what needs to be on flash and what doesn't is a thankless but extremely important job in this kind of economy," said Rob Strechay, an analyst at TheCube Research.  

Flash Stretch is meant to be run on network-attached storage (NAS) systems using file or object storage. It can also analyze data across hybrid and cloud environments, giving organizations an analysis of all their data.  

Flash Stretch runs as a virtual appliance, where end users can set up rules to categorize and define tiering policies. Once Flash Stretch begins running, it will run a two-week assessment and provide its findings by the end of that time period.  

Being more efficient in the utilization of what you have and optimizing what needs to be on flash and what doesn't is a thankless but extremely important job in this kind of economy.

Flash Stretch is a free service for qualified buyers that possess at least 500 terabytes of data and have the need -- such as having capacity growth requirements. For non-qualified users, the service is $18/TB. The assessment will indicate potential savings, but users must still pay about $100/TB annually, with volume discounts, for the corresponding product to implement suggested changes. 

"It seems like a pretty solid place to start," Pelz-Sharpe said. "I think there's a couple [other] things. … One is just basic information management." 

There are a number of other vendor options that offer similar analysis and migration products, such as Starfish, Azure Migrate and AWS DataSync. Komprise is also already a part of the AWS partner network.  

"Komprise has been doing these types of engagements for close to a decade now, and knows what it's doing," Strechay said. "The way that Komprise does data movement is actually fairly efficient, which gives it an advantage."  

Alexander Gillis is a Technical Writer and Editor at Informa TechTarget, with more than 8 years of experience writing about technology.