Igneous Systems takes on unstructured data management
With the addition of DataFlow and DataDiscover as-a-service offerings, Igneous is building out its portfolio of products to manage and protect unstructured data.
Startup Igneous Systems is moving beyond data protection with a set of services designed to manage large sets of unstructured data.
Igneous Systems, based in Seattle, is adding DataDiscover and DataFlow services, packaging them with its DataProtect backup and archiving. The three as-a-service offerings allow customers to protect, find and index data and move it around intelligently.
The complete Igneous Systems package will include data intelligence, data protection and data movement for file and object data, delivered as a cloud-native service. The vendor positions itself as one of the few that can offer a complete unstructured data management package at massive scale.
Igneous claimed it can deliver data scan and compare rates of around 420,000 files per second, per job, and move more than 21,000 files per second, per job, at a throughput of 1.2 GBps for small configurations. Its services can handle hundreds of concurrent jobs.
Igneous Systems' DataDiscover and DataFlow are in the early access stage, and Igneous expects to make them generally available in early 2019.
Igneous seeks to close 'dramatic gap'
According to Allison Armstrong, vice president of marketing at Igneous Systems, backup and recovery was no longer enough to deal with the rapid growth of unstructured data.
Data protection and archive are not the only facets of unstructured data management.
Allison Armstrongvice president of marketing, Igneous Systems
"Data protection and archive are not the only facets of unstructured data management," Armstrong said. "Over the last year, we really started to see a dramatic gap that's been created in the enterprise market for a broader set of unstructured data management solutions."
Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., said the challenge is managing data as it grows into the petabyte range.
"What's interesting here is the addition of the ability to figure out that bank or ocean of data and find out what might be needed, tag it, analyze it and move it around," Bertrand said of the new Igneous services.
Bertrand said the as-a-service component to the Igneous Systems offerings allows the vendor to handle software updates and infrastructure, lowering the IT burden on customers.
Igneous DataFlow will automate workflows for processes such as machine learning and bioinformatics pipelines, as well as IoT data workflows. Igneous Systems described particular use cases for its offerings in bioinformatics, which could benefit greatly from a high-ingest, low-maintenance unstructured data management service.
"I think it's going to be very valuable for high-performance-computing-driven workflows where people need to build a very powerful service or system that allows them to really crunch a lot of data, so they can apply smart systems to them," Bertrand said. "The twist [Igneous Systems is] adding is they're doing it as a service and adding a couple of components, which make it a lot more useable and implementable."
