The post 2023 world is going to see an explosion in structured data alongside the flood of unstructured data, at least according to French data manager and protector Atempo.
It is a truism that 80 percent of the world’s data is unstructured (file and object) and growing. Louis-Frédéric Laszlo, Atempo VP of product management told an IT Press Tour briefing about Atempo’s view of what’s happening in 2023, detailing incremental developments for its Miria, Tina, Lina and Continuity software, but then surprised his audience.
He said he ”sees the structured and unstructured worlds converging with a need for unified storage.” That means a single piece of storage software will be able to handle blocks, files and objects, as Ceph does today.
For Atempo, although no details were revealed, it surely means its data managing, moving and protection software products will have to operate in a unified block+file+object world.
Laszlo also said: “For File, VM, Emails – think object first.” This is another turnaround.
Data management and data protection have to recognize these changes and Atempo wants to work towards offering a unified data management platform.
We have not heard similar views from its competitors, such as Data Dynamics and Komprise, but, unless Atempo is talking to different analysts, they may be coming around to the same point of view.
The short term roadmap, for next year, has four pillars: end-to-end data immutability, data integrity, cost reductions for unstructured data storage, and sustainability, meaning carbon emission reductions, which should equate to savings in customer energy use with its products.
The E2E immutabiity has immutability on each storage tier apart from tier one production data. It encompasses both protection data and production data on the secondary tier, such as nearline disk storage. File systems can have an immutability flag and, when set, a new file version becomes a fresh file or object. Naturally S3 object lock will be supported.
Data integrity will involve background scanning to combat ransomware, sanity checks before VM restarts and data retrieval, and testing to validate automatic restarts.
Atempo’s data analytics functionality will be extended to provide automatic tiering based on storage costs. Self-service data movement will supported as well. This use of analytics to drive cost reduction will also be used to drive storage energy reduction, with a revival of tape storage as the low-cost and low energy-use storage medium. We think it will be possible to see the storage energy usage levels via a dashboard report or graphical display, and arrange data placement to lower energy use.
It would not be a surprise to see Data Dynamics, Komprise and other vendors introduce similar functionality.
