Storage Insights from Komprise provides file and object capacity and usage information across multiple suppliers, locations, and clouds.
Update: Datadobi response to Komprise’s competitive characterisations added. 3 Oct 2023.
It’s a single interface designed to let IT admins spot storage usage and consumption trends across their hybrid cloud estate, drill down, and execute plans and actions in one place to drive a better return on data storage deployments. It uses, we’re told, Komprise’s Transparent Move Technology to execute data movement plans and migrate data to users or applications, without disruption or obstructing data acess.
Storage Insights is included in the v5.0 Komprise Intelligent Data Management release.
Kumar Goswami, co-founder and CEO of Komprise, said: “Enterprise storage is becoming more distributed across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge environments, and often across multiple vendor systems. This latest release gives customers an easier, faster way to proactively manage and deliver data services across this complex hybrid IT environment while optimizing their data storage investments.”
In March, Komprise announced an Analysis offering available as-a-service with a set of pre-built reports and interactive analysis. It could look at all file and object storage – including NetApp, Dell, HPE, Qumulo, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Windows Server, Azure, AWS, and Google – to see a unified analysis showing how data is being used, how fast it’s growing, who is using it, and what data is hot and cold. There was no ability to move files or objects with this service and a separate purchase was needed to get that functionality.
Storage Insights has that data movement capability, we’re told. Komprise bills Storage Insights is a new console that will be included in all editions of Komprise including Komprise Analysis. Komprise already provides visibility across heterogeneous storage, and Storage Insights delivers a new console that adds storage metrics to further simplify its customer’s data management. It gives admins the ability to drill down into file shares and object stores across locations and sites, and look at metrics by department, division or business unit, such as:
- Which shares have the greatest amount of cold data?
- Which shares have the highest recent growth in new data?
- Which shares have the highest recent growth overall?
- Which file servers have the least free space available?
- Which shares have tiered the most data?
They can then:
- Tier cold data transparently from the shares that have the highest amount of cold data to cheaper storage
- Identify cloud migration opportunities such as moving least modified shares or copying project data to data lakes
- Identify potential security threats and ransomware attacks on data stores with anomalous activity such as high volume of modifications
- Set alert thresholds to see unusual activity or other data requiring fast actions such as storage nearing capacity
Users can customize and filter a report facility to understand the current state of storage assets across sites. They can see details on capacity, percentage of modified or new data and can filter by shares, status, data transfer roles, and more. Admins can sort file shares and view by largest, most cold data, highest recent modified data, least free space, most and least data archived or tiered by Komprise and more. They can also look into specific file servers/services, such as NetApp, Dell EMC Isilon (PowerScale), Pure Storage, AWS, Azure and Windows to check out what’s going on and keep their unstructured data estate healthy.
Krishna Subramanian, Komprise president and COO, told us: “Storage Insights is a management console to quickly understand both data usage and storage consumption as well as where you add new data stores for analysis and data management activities. We created this because several of our customers were frustrated that each storage vendor tends to report free space or storage consumption differently and they had to search across different places for this information. By adding it to our consoles, customers do not have to look in multiple places and they get one consistent definition and view of their storage metrics as well.”
Storage Insights appears similar to Datadobi’s StorageMap offering. This has an environmental dimension that Storage Insights does not. Datadobi says it helps users meet their CO2 reduction targets through carbon accounting of unstructured data storage in their hybrid clouds.
Subramanian said: “Migration vendors like DataDobi have realized the value of visibility and are now adding another product for analytics but historically this approach has lacked traction because it is a separate product, not built in as a cohesive integration, and does not address managing data at scale.” (See update note below.)
Other competitors include Data Dynamics with its StorageX file lifecycle management software, and Hammerspace with its unstructured data orchestration offering.
Komprise’s v5.0 Intelligent Data management software release also includes new pre-built reports, including Potential Duplicates, Orphaned Data, Showback, Users, and Migrations reports as well as other platform updates. Storage Insights is also available with Komprise Analysis and Komprise Elastic Data Migration. More information here.
Update. A Datadobi source said: “The premise of Subramanian’s statement is untrue. Datadobi offers one and only one solution, StorageMAP. It is, in fact, Komprise that offers multiple “products,” as can be witnessed on their website.”
“We should note that we do, however, agree with Subramanian’s statement that “this approach has lacked traction because it is a separate product, not built in as a cohesive integration, and does not address managing data at scale.” But, it is important to point out that this is true of Komprise’s multiple products, not Datadobi’s one and only StorageMAP. Only StorageMAP offers the ability to assess, organize, and act from a single platform in order to gain optimum value from data, while reducing risk, cost, and carbon footprint.”
