…Literally!
We are a couple months away from the year 2023. For those of us in the data management and storage world, it will mark the 30th anniversary of NetApp’s first filer. Congratulations!
Unfortunately, many decades hence, Enterprise file data is still limited to being a local resource. Think about that. In today’s massively connected world, the data stored inside of NAS systems are anchored to its hardware.
Why is anything digital still confined by infrastructure and limited to the proverbial four walls that surround it?
Everything should be connected. It is through connectivity that we gain knowledge, improve productivity and enable collaboration – all of which leads to greater business value.
Data is a digital asset that should be globally accessible to users, applications and resources regardless of physical location. Not having this ability requires companies to either live with massive inefficiencies and/or implement complex Rube Goldberg machine-like configurations to gain a fraction of the capability they need.
Hammerspace Transforms Enterprise File Data Into a Global Asset.
- Our customers leverage Hammerspace to make literally billions of files visible and accessible to their distributed workforce whether they are two or 2,000 miles away.
- We enable collaboration between multiple geographically distributed data centers throughout the world by providing a single logical system across all of these locations. And not just two or three data centers but 10, 20 and more.
- Hammerspace moves massive data sets to compute resources for analytics, rendering, simulations and AI workloads. Data by its nature is distributed and compute farms are fixed and we easily connect the dots.
The reason our customers work with us is because they are faced with business problems that the status quo can’t address. Some of these are age-old challenges that have hit critical mass and demand a solution. Others are new use cases that are essential to their ability to grow and achieve a vision that heretofore was unattainable.
Local data is stupid on a number of levels. Enterprise data that is only accessible within synchronous boundaries is extremely limiting, stymies collaboration, restricts usage, and drives up costs. Beyond this, you also lose out on accelerating time-to-market, enabling competitive advantages, increasing profitability and driving revenue. All of which, our customers have experienced by making data a global asset.
Here is my prediction: The very notion of Enterprise data restricted to being a local resource will be obsolete within the next five years.
It is already happening. We are on the threshold of making local Enterprise file data an outdated construct. A bygone limitation that we will reflect back on shaking our heads on how inefficient it was – “Remember the old days when we stored files on NAS systems that could only be accessed locally? How did we get away with that for so long?”
Most companies and organizations claim to be data-driven. If your data is local, then you are just driving in circles. It may seem like you’re moving forward but in reality, you aren’t actually getting anywhere. Which, if we’re being honest, is kind of stupid.