CASE STUDYSOLUTION BRIEF

Addressing the Uncontrolled Proliferation ofUnstructured Data with InfiniBox® and Hammerspace

Over the last year, Gartner end users report 30% to 60% growth for their file data, and by 2026 large enterprises will triple their unstructured
data capacity across their on-premises, edge, and public cloud locations, compared to 2023.1 In addition, by 2028 Gartner estimates that 70%of file and object data will be deployed on a consolidated, unstructured data storage platform, up from 35% in early 2023. Most importantly,
Gartner predicts that all storage products will include cyber storage capabilities focused on active defense from cyber events beyond
recovery, up from 10% in early 2023.2
As unstructured data continues to proliferate at unprecedented rates throughorganizations, the need to manage that data, ensure its security, and provide
seamless access to it regardless of its location has become even more important.
Infinidat InfiniBox provides a multi-petabyte scale platform for file and block
workloads with guaranteed 100% availability, guaranteed performance, andInfiniSafe® cyber recoverability guarantees. Native InfiniBox NAS capabilities
include simultaneous dual protocol access via NFS and SMB protocols, filesystem
snapshots, compression, replication, WORM, and billion-file scalability for large
unstructured data sets. However, customers invariably have unstructured data
across other storage types, multiple data centers, and in the public cloud. To help
support our customers’ various file access requirements, Infinidat has partneredwith Hammerspace to provide sophisticated file indexing and automated data
orchestration capabilities. This provides Infinidat customers with a global filesystem (GFS) and data management system that bridges heterogeneous onpremises and cloud storage platforms to better manage their distributed data.
A global file system (GFS) presents unified file access with standard protocols
via a single global namespace that spans multiple storage silos and locations(on-prem, cloud, or edge). This means that users or applications mounting the filesystem at any of the locations will see the same file and folder structure as clientsin any other location. The benefit of using a GFS is that all users everywhere aresharing the same file metadata, rather than wrangling forked file copies acrossmultiple locations. Not only does this reduce copy sprawl and the resulting
complexity for users and IT administrators, a GFS also helps increase storage
utilization and enables far greater efficiency with the amount of data that istransferred between silos and sites.

“Infinidat has partnered with
Hammerspace to provide
sophisticated file indexing andautomated data orchestration
capabilities. This provides
Infinidat customers with a
global file system (GFS) anddata management systemthat bridges heterogeneouson-premises and cloud storage
platforms to better manage
their distributed data.”

A GFS works by keeping a file’s metadata, such as its creation date, size, name, and location, separate from the main payload of the filecontent (sometimes referred to as the essence data). The metadata is continuously synced between locations providing a universal accesslayer, while the payload is only transferred when required as a background operation transparent to users and applications. Since the metadata
for even large files takes up only a couple of kilobytes, using this system in production ends up requiring less data transfer than a full syncing
system based upon file copies.
The GFS abstracts these concepts away from the user. From an application’s point of view, the file system behaves the same as a local filesystem. The result is that the workflows built on top of local file systems will not need any modifications to work with a GFS.
This cross-platform, multi-site global namespace enables Infinidat customers to manage distributed file storage and seamlessly presents
access to file data regardless of its physical location. The factors driving the need for this global file system are:
 Data center consolidation and inevitable IT tech refresh The shift to more agile application environments
 A shifting landscape including hybrid environments of one or more on-premises data centers, plus multiple cloud service providers andregions
The Standard in Enterprise Storage Operational silos must be reduced to simplify IT management tasks, which enables better collaboration across interdepartmental teams

while also enforcing cross-platform data services
 New use cases must be rapidly supported for AI/ML and other innovative data-intensive workflows

Hammerspace
Hammerspace is a software-defined
data orchestration system thatprovides unified file access via a highperformance Parallel Global File System
which can span different storage types
from any vendor, as well as acrossgeographic locations, public and private
clouds, and cloud regions. Designed
to make data a global resource acrossdistributed or otherwise incompatible
storage platforms from any vendor,
Hammerspace presents a crossplatform global namespace whereusers and applications can have direct
multi-protocol access to all files on any
storage anywhere.
Hammerspace has a full suite of dataservices and automated orchestrationservices designed to protect data, andmanage its placement and replication
based on policies.

The Solution
Unlike traditional “unified” storage, which is an open source file system bolted onto a block array, InfiniBox was built from the ground up to deliver
petabyte-scale NAS and SAN in parallel. The Infinidat File System (IFS) is a first-level peer to the block service and is a clean-sheet design that
employs a stateless, functional programming paradigm to deliver petabyte-scale NAS services that couple directly with Neural Cache. Along withconventional NAS workloads, InfiniBox excels at extreme use cases, such as trillions of objects in a file system and millions of files per directory, which
are simply not possible with traditional NAS filers supporting SMB and NFS.
With Hammerspace, users and applications throughout the enterprise interface with InfiniBox, third party storage, or cloud repositories via a common
unified file directory, regardless of where they reside. As a standards-based platform, this greatly simplifies the administration of data and enables
customers seamless access from anywhere in the world. No proprietary client software is needed, since users and applications are accessing files
via the same standard SMB and/or NFS file protocols they are used to. Further, with the suite of data services (the blue section in above diagram),
Hammerspace enhances the native data protection offered with InfiniBox and extends that protection across the rest of the unstructured data notsitting on the InfiniBox.
The platform’s automated data orchestration capabilities enable customers to create policies to manage the lifecycle of their unstructured data andplace it where it is best suited. This data orchestration capability can be automated with objective-based policies, triggered by any combination ofmetadata including file system attributes and custom metadata tags. For example, policies can be used to transparently migrate data from a retiring
platform to tier 1 storage on InfiniBox, or to move data to a deep archive in the cloud, as needed. These policies can be set at a file-granular level, andare completely non-disruptive to user access, since with Hammerspace all such data placement actions now become a background operation, evenon live files. Users simply see their files in the same expected shares and folder structure via the unified metadata layer, regardless of where the files
are today or may move to tomorrow. Hammerspace also provides antivirus capabilities, using standard Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP)
to implement virus scanning in transparent HTTP proxy caches.
With the Hammerspace solution, InfiniBox can be installed in existing infrastructures and immediately participate in the global file system. Customers
can choose to migrate sensitive data to InfiniBox to take advantage of the cyber resilience features of InfiniSafe, including immutable snapshots withrecovery within one minute, air-gapping, and malware scanning with InfiniSafe Cyber Detection. As data is aged and access is not as critical, policies
can move it to other archive tiers for long term storage.
Hammerspace scales to meet the volume needs of the customer environment. Deployed as a fully-integrated software solution on bare-metalservers, VMs, or cloud machine instances, Hammerspace software includes Anvil servers for metadata management, and DSX data services nodes,

The Standard in Enterprise Storage

which handle all I/O and data actions. There is no one-size-fits-all specification for the server requirements for Anvil or DSX nodes, which means thesystem can be tuned to the specific load requirements of the customer’s use cases. This enables the system to be dialed-in to minimize unnecessary
infrastructure expenses, and also to dynamically scale-out when needed to saturate a high-performing infrastructure without disrupting user orapplication access.
The partnership between Infinidat and Hammerspace offers customers a high-performance
multi-protocol file system that seamlessly works with the industry-leading storage solution
in capacity, performance and availability. This powerful solution provides assurance that data
across the entire organization can be readily accessible from anywhere, at any time, and it will
be protected from cyber-attacks.

A Typical InfiniBox Configuration

If you are struggling with uncontrolled sprawl of unstructured data or need storage capabilities with new data access for data analytics, we’ve
got your solution! Contact your Infinidat sales team for this comprehensive solution to securely manage your data, provide cyber resilience,guarantee its availability and performance, and place it where it makes the most sense. Not a current Infinidat customer? We are easy to reach atinfo@infinidat.com.
1.

Modernize Your File Storage and Data Services for the Hybrid Cloud Future, 28 February 2023

2.

Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, 1 November 2023

sales@infinidat.com
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