Komprise has added self-service features for line-of-business (LOB) IT, analytics, and research teams to its unstructured data management software, lessening the burden on admins by giving users controlled read-only access to their individual data estates.
The Komprise Intelligent Data Management (IDM) product helps users manage and monitor unstructured data estates across their on-premises and public cloud environments and store their data more effectively. That means moving little-accessed data to cheaper storage, migrating data to the public clouds if needed and understanding which users access what data and that data’s locations.
Todd Dorsey, a DCIG data storage analyst, said: “User self-service is a growing trend to offload administrative tasks from central IT and give end users the ability to get the data and functionality they need faster. By putting more control in the hands of departmental teams and data owners, Komprise is helping increase value from unstructured data in the enterprise.”
This is a tool for admin staff to give them the equivalent of night vision in a previously dark data environment and organize it so that access and storage costs are optimised. Komprise IDM is an example of a hierarchical storage management (HSM) or information lifecycle management (ILM) product.
At present, if central IT wanted to find out in detail what files and object data a user department needed on various storage tiers, tier-level retention and data movement policies, they’d have to ask the department – which takes time and occupies both IT admin and user department resource.
Now, with the new software, central IT can authorize departmental end users to access IDM to look at and into their own data and its usage. These users are given a Deep Analytics profile, but only with read access. They can then monitor usage metrics, data trends, tag and search data and identify datasets for analytics, tiering and deletion, which only IT admins could do up until now.
This capability builds upon Komprise’s Smart Data Workflows, which enabled IT teams to automate the tagging and discovery of relevant file and object data across hybrid data storage silos and moving the right data to cloud services.
Potential applications for this include:
- Showback: Authorized departmental users can monitor and understand their data usage in an interactive dashboard, with drill down features, and create queries to get real-time visibility and manage costs, rather than ask IT to create static reports
- Tagging: Users can enrich data with additional metadata tags to facilitate easier search and data management actions such as archival storage or compliance and legal hold
- Tiering: Authorized users can identify data sets with certain characteristics (such as project or age) to move to cloud storage or other secondary storage for more cost-effective data management or research initiatives
This addition of user-level DIY facilities should help to enable finer-grained unstructured data management and faster response by both IT admins and user groups to changing situations.
The autumn release of Komprise’s IDM software also features:
- Improved SMB protocol for data migration performance and share management
- Bulk data recall performance improvements (with less chatty protocols)
- Native support for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
- Plug-and-play integration with AWS Snowball to automatically migrate PBs of data to the cloud
- Enhanced data indexing to support faster data and file search with Deep Analytics
Komprise COO Krishna Subramanian claimed that the SMB protocol changes can accelerate data movements significantly: “It is orders of magnitude – around the 27 times mark that we benchmark; we will get that much. And it’s often much more than that.”
The new capabilities are spreading Komprise’s use with its customers: “We are seeing the adoption of our product really kind of scale out. Every day we’re getting new new use cases from all these departments, like some of them wanted to use it to run genomics, analysis, the cloud and things like that.”
She said Komprise’s customer count was approaching 500. More of these customers are using AWS than Azure, with GCP usage trailing the older two public clouds.
