AWS Architectural Achievements in 2021

Hammerspace AWS Marketplace in 2021

Year 2021 was a great year for Hammerspace and our partnership with AWS. We added several significant enhancements and support for more AWS instances and services in three main areas. Those include support for additional Amazon Machine Instances, support for more AWS services, and major enhancements to availability and data protection.

AWS Machine Instance Support

Hammerspace is Global Data Environment that is deployed as machine instances in Amazon EC2. Deploying Hammerspace software is easy, rapid, and automated through Amazon CloudFormation Templates. We added support for seventeen (17) additional AMIs in 2021, listed below:

Support for Additional AWS Services

Hammerspace Global Data Environment minimizes data gravity and empowers it with live mobility so that it can be easily and rapidly moved into Amazon S3. Data can be moved either permanently without any disruption to applications or productivity, or temporarily to leverage AWS compute services while keeping resultant data on premises. Hammerspace Global Data Environment makes it possible for you to orchestrate data on whichever underlying infrastructure you choose so that you can leverage the applications and services anywhere you desire without the risk of creating silos. Hammerspace provides simple declarative policies – we call them Objectives – that brings end-users, applications, and data together regardless of location.

Athena

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query application that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 with standard SQL. Hammerspace data orchestration and live data mobility makes it easy for customers to rapidly and non-disruptively migrate unstructured data into S3. Athena, then, allows this data to be organized with a schema for detailed analytics and visualization of unstructured and semi-structured data.

Macie

Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security and data privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to help you discover, monitor, and protect sensitive data in your AWS environment. By leveraging Hammerspace data orchestration to non-disruptively move data into Amazon S3. Macie automates the discovery of sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data, to provide you with a better understanding of sensitive data.

Kendra

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. By using natural language questions or keywords, Kendra makes it possible to search through troves of unstructured data and discover the right answers to your questions when you need them. Hammerspace Global Data Environment makes it a simple task to leverage Kendra by reducing the gravity and removing the disruptive nature of moving data from on-premises to cloud.

New Features and Enhancements

Multi-Region Availability and Disaster Recovery

High Availability across multiple AWS Regions and Availability Zones is fully supported by Hammerspace as of 2021. This includes both front-end protocol access and node failover, thus guaranteeing full end-to-end high availability and graceful failure behavior for all Hammerspace components. Please refer to the diagram for illustration:

Antivirus Scanning

Hammerspace leverages ICAP (Internet Content Adaptation Protocol) to provide antivirus scanning services across disparate storage systems when consolidated by Hammerspace Global Data Environment. Although ICAP support is not revolutionary, Hammerspace’s ability to provide this service across any underlying storage systems from third party storage vendors is truly unique and revolutionary.

Ransomware Protection

Protection against crypto-lockers that allows criminals to hold your data hostage in order to extort ransom has become a must-have wherever data is stored. Hammerspace protects your data from Ransomware by leveraging three mechanisms. Those are snapshots, undelete, and file versioning.

Snapshots are often used as a last resort to recover data that has been maliciously destroyed, altered, or encrypted by ransomware. Hammerspace snapshots can also be tiered or archived to an offsite location or a separate Amazon S3 bucket for additional protection.

Undelete

Files that are deleted accidentally or maliciously are easily recovered in a Hammerspace Global Data Environment. Simply set a declarative policy through a GUI checkbox, CLI, or API on one or more files to be protected. Undelete creates a “recycle bin” across any number of files, file types, folders, and/or custom metadata criteria. Then define the duration of protection. Once this is set, files can be recovered as easily and rapidly as a local recycle bin on a desktop or laptop computer. This is, of course, also very useful as an additional layer of protection against ransomware.

File Versioning

File versioning is an additional mechanism to protect files from malicious alteration by ransomware. Hammerspace file versioning is easily configured by a declarative policy (Hammerspace Objective) for any number of files, folders, shares, file types, or custom metadata criteria. File versioning is not another name for snapshots. Snapshots are scheduled. File versioning means that new file versions are automatically created when file content changes. This provides an additional mechanism to not only make it possible to recover but also to detect when malicious file changes occur, such as malicious encryption by ransomware. The combination of snapshots, undelete, and file versioning provides robust, multilayered protection from a multitude of threats against data integrity.

Summary

These improvements and enhancements significantly enhance Hammerspace’s capabilities, user experience, and partnership with AWS. Year 2022 should be an even more exciting year to look forward to with new and additional support for more Amazon Machine Instances, more service support, feature innovation, and best practice guides. Happy New Year from the Hammerspace team!