Hammerspace, the new adventure of David Flynn

Launched recently, Hammerspace is the new home of David Flynn, previously founder and CEO then CTO of Fusion-io and Primary Data, both companies we met several times with the IT Press Tour crew.

Fusion-io as a public company was acquired by Sandisk in 2014 for $1.1B. It helped David Flynn to acquire Tonian assets to launch Primary Data around data management software but the story ended differently and from an outside point of view let's say suddenly stopped.

Now Hammerspace, currently with 30 employees, is like an extension of Primary Data with all good stuff retained, I mean people and code, to address same data deluge challenge in the unstructured world. It is clearly a statement made by the company claiming to develop the meta data engine during 5 years. For the shot cut as well, the company is located in the same building in Los Altos, just the suite is different. Any superstition here?

The product is a software layer that orchestrates and virtualizes unstructured data wherever they reside, on-premises or in the cloud - private or public - or stored on file servers, NAS or even object stores. This approach is not about storage virtualization but data virtualization presenting a virtual global namespace.

The mission is officially "Access unstructured data anywhere, on -demand". The solution is multi-cloud hybrid, multi data center and provides finally a superb data controller via metadata mastery. The team articulates a few use cases around data agility, multi cloud data management, cloud burst and application data mobility. The product is offered as a software appliance or cloud service and charged as a pay as you go subscription.

David Flynn has insisted on the data catalog, the global search and index, data governance and of course the metadata management, crucial for such solution. The product supports the 3 cloud providers - AWS, Azure and GCP - and of course classic on-premises file serves, NAS and object stores like WDC, Hitachi Vantara, Dell EMC, NetApp, Cloudian and IBM. As metadata is the fundamental piece here, accessing and manipulating them in a super fast and reliable way is a must and product architects picked RocksDB to support the concept.

With one of the NFS champion in-house, the product leverages NFS v4.2 for in path optimization and works as an asymmetric file store in Linux environments and via the DSX engine for Windows, Mac and ESX. Lots of actions are made without any impact on the application even with open files.

Hammerspace develops as well a Cloud Data Profiler to understand how cloud is consumed, analyze associated cost and discover "dark data".

This example above illustrates the beauty of Tonian, Primary Data and now Hammerspace thanks to pNFS philosophy where data are distributed across multiple back-end data servers delivering high throughput.

Hammerspace brings to the table an universal approach via real simplicity, performance and transparency, try it, you will love it.