Komprise adds data lifecycle management, deeper analytics

'Compelling' Amazon Glacier use case

"The capability to archive to S3 and then after six more months of inactivity move to something really cold, like Glacier, is a compelling use case and hurts the tape guys a little, because Glacier is getting so competitive to tape now price-wise," said George Crump, founder and president of Storage Switzerland LLC. "Glacier has a different set of APIs, so most companies are slow to support it."

Also in the 2.6 version, Komprise is making available deeper analytics capabilities as a beta release. Customers can write custom queries and apply filters to the metadata to gain granular insight. Komprise enabled the new deeper analytics through its distributed architecture without a central database or in-memory state, according to Krishna Subramanian, the Campbell, Calif., company's COO.

Subramanian said customers could use the deeper analytics to find "zombie data" created by former employees, or to locate information specific to a company project. Komprise expects to finalize the deeper analytics capabilities later this year or early next year, she said.

PacBio anxious to use deeper analytics

Customer Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) plans to use the new analytics options to help employees locate information about laboratory experiments. The Menlo Park, Calif., genomics sequencing manufacturer has a controlled laboratory information management system (LIMS). But Jay Smestad, senior director of IT at PacBio, said the LIMS organizes information based on sample or experiment numbers, rather than descriptive metadata tags.

Smestad said he also expects to take advantage of Komprise's new data lifecycle management capabilities to move data between the company's storage tiers of fast solid-state drives (SSDs), cheaper hard disk drives, slower backup tapes and Amazon S3 for disaster recovery.

"It's exactly what we need to manage our data. We don't want to have to touch the data multiple times. Every time we touch the data, it costs us money," Smestad said. "We want to set a policy for a [data] share, and it should do the right thing automatically for years to come."

Smestad said he might set a policy to keep hot data on SSDs and move files that aren't accessed for six months to PacBio's primary disk tier, and later to cheaper disk and eventually tape. PacBio currently stores about 7 PB of data and faces data growth of about 70% per year, Smestad said.

Confinement feature targets GDPR

Komprise had General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance in mind with the addition of new capabilities to confine unwanted or obsolete data. Subramanian said Komprise added the feature based on direct customer feedback, as companies face a May 2018 deadline to comply with the European Union's regulation that gives customers the "right to be forgotten." GDPR applies to any organization that does business in EU countries.

The Komprise software can move data outside the user and application namespace to a location that is inaccessible, Subramanian said. She said customers could test to ensure there are no dangling pointers to the data before its final deletion.

"The ability to test the impact of data removal is really smart" to make sure applications don't break, Crump said.

Komprise's data management competition includes Caringo, Data Dynamics, ioFabric, Primary Data and StrongBox Data, according to Crump. He said they all take different technology approaches, so customers would need to determine what they want to accomplish to figure out which one makes the most sense for them.

Komprise offers monthly subscription and perpetual licensing options for its Intelligent Data Management software. The subscription list price is $7 per terabyte, per month to manage, analyze, move and replicate data, and the perpetual software license is $150 per terabyte.