Data Management

Komprise CEO talks up agnostic information lifecycle management

Published
mon 20 Feb 2023 // 16:38 UTC

On-prem and public cloud storage vendors can add information lifecycle management (ILM) features to their products – but that only confirms the need for a global, supplier-agnostic ILM capability. So says Komprise CEO Kumar Goswami.

Goswami has written one blog about whether customers should use public clouds, and another about optimizing cloud usage. We took these as starting points for a set of questions about Komprise’s place in the ILM area.

Blocks & Files: Komprise analyzes your file and object data regardless of where it lives. It can transparently tier and migrate data based on your policies to maximize cost savings without affecting user access. Can Komprise’s offering provide a way to optimize cloud storage costs between the public clouds; arbitraging so to speak between AWS, Azure and GCP?

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Kumar Goswami: Komprise enables customers to test different scenarios by simply changing the policies for data movement and visualizing the cost impacts of these choices. By running such what-if analysis, customers can choose between different destinations and then make their decision.

And yes, we support AWS, Azure and GCP as destinations. Komprise also supports cloud-to-cloud data migrations. Komprise does not arbitrage across different options. Customers make these choices and Komprise gives them the analytics to make informed decisions and data mobility to implement their choices.

Blocks & Files: How would you view AWS’s S3 Intelligent Tiering and the AWS Storage Gateway with integration between the cloud and on-premise, offline AWS-compatible storage. What does Komprise offer that is better than this?

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Kumar Goswami: AWS has a rich variety of file and object storage tiers to meet the various demands of data, with significant cost and performance differences across them. Most customers have a lot of cold data that is infrequently accessed and can leverage highly cost-efficient tiers like Glacier Instant Retrieval that are 40 percent to 60 percent cheaper.

Yet customers still want to be able to see the data in Glacier IR transparently and access it without rehydrating it up to a more expensive tier, and this requires a data management solution like Komprise that preserves native access at every tier with transparency from the original location.

Komprise manages the data lifecycle across AWS FSX, FSXN, EFS, S3 tiers and Glacier tiers and preserves file-object duality so you can transparently access the data as a file from the original source and as an object from the destination tiers – without rehydration – using our patented Transparent Move Technology (TMT). For customers with hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data, they want the flexibility, native access and analytics-driven automation that Komprise delivers.

AWS S3 Intelligent Tiering will move data not used for 30 to 90 days to its own internal lower cost tier, but if you access the object, it will bring it back up to the expensive tier and keep it there for another 30 to 90 days before tiering it again. S3 Intelligent Tiering has its own internal tiers so you cannot use it to put data in the regular S3 tiers like Glacier Instant Retrieval for instance.

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You also cannot directly access the tiered data from the lower tier without rehydration. Nor can you set different policies for different data, it automatically manages data within itself and is like a black-box. AWS S3 Intelligent Tiering is useful if you have small amounts of S3 data, you don’t have file data, you don’t have analytics-based data management and don’t require policy-based automation and are worried about irregular access patterns.

With Komprise you can migrate, tier and manage data at scale across the hybrid cloud to AWS. When tiering to S3, Komprise leverages AWS ILM to automatically tier data from higher-cost object tiers to lower-cost tiers including Glacier and Glacier IR using policies set within Komprise. This gives customers transparent access from the source while getting the cost benefits of ILM.

We also support options like AWS Snowball for customers who need to move data offline but still want transparent access. Most customers want to continue using their enterprise NAS environments like NetApp and Dell EMC as they tier data to AWS, and Komprise supports this. Komprise also supports tiering to Amazon S3 Storage Gateway which replaces a customer’s existing NAS with a gateway.

Blocks & Files: Azure’s File Sync Tiering stores only frequently accessed (hot) files on your local server. Infrequently accessed (cool) files are split into namespace (file and folder structure) and file content. The namespace is stored locally and the file content stored in an Azure file share in the cloud. How does this compare to Komprise’s technology?

Kumar Goswami: Hybrid cloud storage gateway solutions like Azure File Sync Tiering are useful if you want to replace your existing NAS with a hybrid cloud storage appliance. Komprise is complementary to these solutions and transparently tiers data from any NAS including NetApp, Dell, and Windows Servers to Azure. This means you can still see and use the tiered data as if they were local files while also being able to access the data as native objects in the cloud without requiring a move to a new storage system.

Blocks & Files: Google Cloud has lifecycle management rules in its storage buckets. What does Komprise offer that is better than this?

Kumar Goswami: