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Komprise expands data management coverage to Azure

Komprise deepened its relationship with Microsoft, opening shop in Azure Marketplace and enabling customers to easily manage hot and cold data between Azure and Azure Blob.

Johnny Yu
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Published: 09 Oct 2020

Komprise just checked Azure Files and Azure NetApp Files off its list of supported environments.

The intelligent data management vendor rolled out support for Microsoft's public cloud this week and became available in Azure Marketplace. Customers can use Komprise to identify cold data in Azure Files and Azure NetApp Files and migrate them off to Azure Blob storage, which the vendor claims can reduce cloud NAS costs by 70%.

Komprise has been steadily adding support for cloud platforms to extend its data management capabilities beyond the data center. Komprise has already rolled out Wasabi and Amazon S3 support. Komprise works with any NFS, SMB and S3 environment and supports NAS and object storage platforms such as FreeNAS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Cloudian HyperStore and Spectra BlackPearl.

Komprise COO Krishna Subramanian said the goal is to be the "housekeeper behind the scenes" in as many storage environments as possible. She said many customers have hybrid infrastructure, as cloud has increasingly become a cost-effective place to house data. Komprise is designed to help those customers see across their on-premises and cloud environments and put the right data in the right place.

Komprise's data management software allows customers to analyze and move data across environments without installing agents. Identifying cold data in primary storage and moving it off to cheaper storage and migrating data off retiring hardware are use cases the product addresses. Subramanian added that she's seen an increase of customers that are moving off tape and into cloud object storage, making the Azure support more important.

Other tools that similarly separate data management from storage systems include StrongBox Data's StrongLink, Hammerspace and Spectra Logic StorCycle.

Duquesne University switches from Capex to Opex with Komprise

The Computing and Technology Services (CTS) at Duquesne University based out of Pittsburgh. provides all IT-related services for the school's faculty and students. This includes networking, email, support and storage.

Headshot of Matthew MadillMatthew Madill

CTS bought Komprise three years ago, but before then, it handled storage using a "very legacy approach," according to CTS storage systems administrator Matthew Madill. A "customer," which could be a professor looking for storage for their research data, would submit a ticket, and CTS would carve out space in a storage array for them and bill their department for that capacity. Because this storage purchase was treated as a one-time transaction, the customers expected to have the space they paid for even if the old storage hardware aged out and got replaced, forcing CTS to eat the cost of the new hardware.

Komprise allowed Madill to move customers' older data off to the cloud and bill them on a repeating basis. Customers could still access those files, but they were no longer taking up space on the storage array. The subscription fee helped CTS recoup some of the storage costs, but it had another effect. Madill said customers would more closely analyze their storage usage and needs when they're paying for it monthly.

Three years ago, CTS bought a NetApp all-flash array and wanted to avoid having to ask Duquesne for more money when it came time to expand its capacity. Madill's team wanted a tool to move data off and keep the array below a certain capacity. Madill happened upon Komprise at a storage vendor's conference and purchased it.

Komprise proved useful when COVID-19 hit. With students attending classes from home, Madill said there was a massive uptick in professors wanting to save their lectures on the cloud. He said Komprise allowed CTS to scale its cloud operations and accommodate the influx of files that needed to be stored.

"When COVID came, every school wanted to put more stuff in the cloud. Komprise gave us the flexibility and scalability to do that," Madill said.

CTS uses Wasabi's cloud, but a small group is dabbling in Azure. Madill said he's happy to see Komprise supporting more environments, but there are other features he'd like to see. He said some professors want visibility into the back end and the ability to self-service where their files reside, so he's hoping for role-based access control in a future release.

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