What’s New With Hammerspace?

Overview

With the new Release 5 software, Hammerspace is consolidating a broad range of improvements aimed at increasing system performance and usability. As a whole, these improvements expand Hammerspace’s ability to meet or exceed without limitations requirements for high-volume, high-performance work loads across silos in the datacenter, between multiple data centers, and between on-premises and multiple cloud providers and regions. 

As a solution that already addresses the needs of decentralized storage and users, this new Hammerspace release goes even further, providing a 20% increase in metadata performance, and introducing official support for RDMA over NFS 4.2 that provides direct I/O between applications and any storage to support very high performance workloads. In addition, the release includes other system improvements that enable Hammerspace to now extend its Parallel Global File System to support up to 16 sites concurrently, doubling the supported site count from the previous release to support globally distributed workloads. 

With this new generation of Hammerspace software, Release 5 brings maturity to the code base built on years of iterative optimization and field testing. Other highlights in this release:

1. High-Performance across Data Centers and to the Cloud: Saturate the Available Internet or Private Links

  • New capabilities in Release 5 to advance high-performance use cases across multiple sites and the cloud include:
      • Certified with Backblaze, Zadara & Wasabi support, adding to existing support of all the other major cloud platforms.
      • Release 5 release takes advantage of continual system-wide optimization to increase scalability, improve back-end performance, and improve resilience in very large distributed environments. 
      • Improvements to allow greater scale-out performance, which increases the number of Hammerspace clusters supported in a single global data environment from eight to 16 locations. 

    2. High-Performance Across Interconnect within the Data Center: Take Full Advantage of Ethernet and Infiniband Networks within the Data Center

          • 20% increase in metadata performance to accelerate file creation in primary storage use cases.
          • Accelerated collaboration on shared files in high client count environments.
          • RDMA support for direct I/O over NFS v4.2, providing the simplicity and open standards of NAS protocols to all data in the global data environment, no matter where it is located. 
          • An improved Hammerspace Management GUI, with user-customizable tiles, provides a better user experience and increased observability of activity within shares, in addition to other enhancements for managing objective-based data placement policies.

       Hammerspace Release 5 includes major improvements to the primary Management GUI, providing customizable views so administrators can select the precise metrics they want to monitor data movement, storage utilization, file shares and more across all storage in the Global Data Environment.

          • Additional Hammerspace GUI improvements
              • New – User-customizable tiles to provide a better user experience and increased observability of activity within shares.
              • New – Column Selector for Table views
              • New – Broad selection of restartable tasks from within the GUI
              • New – Pull-down menu in Actions column of Shares View
              • New – System Backup Management tab
              • New – Getting Started Wizard/Workflow
              • New – Edit site name in GUI
              • New – Copy/Paste for commonly used fields.
              • Updated AD page for easier use.
              • Updated Snapshot-Now workflow
              • Updated Volume-Add Wizard. 
              • Updated Volume tools. 
              • Updated graphs in Managed Explorer views

      Hammerspace Data Mobility Viewer provides direct feedback to Administrators so they can monitor back-end file movement between shares and storage types in a Global Data Environment. This is one of many ways that administrators can maintain real-time global control across otherwise incompatible storage silos.

      Availability

      Hammerspace Release 5 is available now, and is rolling out in a controlled release. Please contract your Hammerspace rep, or customer support for more information.