Hammerspace offers a global filesystem that creates a single namespace across multiple storage systems and cloud storage providers. Hammerspace’s name is inspired by the name for the magical place that cartoon characters get them from (e.g. Bugs Bunny pulling a huge hammer out of his pocket). They’ve taken a different approach to a global filesystem, using metadata to significantly minimize actual data movement and increase performance. Molly Presley, their SVP of Marketing (and friend of the pod!), explains the interesting use cases for this technology.

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Transcript

[00:00:35] W. Curtis Preston: Hi, and welcome to Backup Central’s Restore it All podcast.

I’m your host W. Curtis Preston, AKA Mr. Backup, and I have with me my pick and pull analyst, Prasanna Malaiyandi.

How’s it going, Prasanna?

[00:00:46] Prasanna Malaiyandi: I’m good Curtis. Unfortunately, I’m not doing a great job in helping you, right. Just given the number of times that you sort of struck out

[00:00:54] W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I, I, um, I still want a part or two that I can only get from a about 2012 to 2014 Prius and, uh, the silver Prius. Right. I it’s a very specific, uh, subset. And the thing is, you know, with the pick and pulls, as you know, it’s like super cheap, right? The, if you, if you have the wherewithal to go and pull a part off the car yourself, you save tons.

Right? I mean, besides the fact that it’s a used part, it’s like, I don’t know a fourth of the price than, than a normal part. Um, and, um, so, but I have to

[00:01:39] Prasanna Malaiyandi: everyone has the same thought as you

[00:01:41] W. Curtis Preston: what’s that

[00:01:42] Prasanna Malaiyandi: that you go to the pick and pull. It’s cheap, but the supply is limited.

[00:01:48] W. Curtis Preston: Yeah. And, and the, and I have, and the, the company that I use L KQ pick your part, not a sponsor. Um, that they, they have a really good system for notifying me with when any, you know, uh, pick and pull yard within whatever radius I specify has the car that I’m looking for.

And then I have to go like right away, because. The Prius is popular and it’s either get there like that day or you get there and, you know, there’s not gonna be much left, but so I, I had another, I had another, uh, failed run, uh, at the pick and pull down in Chula Vista, which is about a 45 minute drive. But yeah, not a big deal,

[00:02:27] Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah. Now I’m

[00:02:28] W. Curtis Preston: here to counsel me on that.

[00:02:30] Prasanna Malaiyandi: well, and I’m sure some listeners are like, oh, why don’t you just get like a red color Prius door? They don’t understand how expensive it is

[00:02:38] W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, they, yeah, they don’t, they just don’t clearly. Yeah. Uh,

[00:02:42] Prasanna Malaiyandi: Body work and paint is insanely expensive to do it right

[00:02:45] W. Curtis Preston: it’s ridiculous. Yeah. This all started because I had a minor scratch on the door, a minor dent on the door and they wanted $2,500 to fix that. So I’m like I can get a used door from a pick and pull place for like 70 bucks. Anyway, anyway, we could talk about that for a while, but, I am once again, excited to have a long time friend on the podcast. She has been in the data protection space for a long time as well. In fact, I got to know her in one of her previous lives at Spectra Logic, They’ve been on the podcast a couple of times as you guys know.

She’s a fascinating person, both from a technical standpoint and also this other, very interesting, aspect of her personality that she really likes large animals. We’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about that because it’s a fascinating part of her. Uh, she is now the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Hammerspace, a global file system provider.

Welcome to the podcast, Molly Presley.

[00:03:50] Molly Presley: Well, thank you so much for having me, Curtis. I have to say, um, Curtis is also a colorful personality. I’ve known him long enough to know that to be very true. And without him knowing I’m gonna bring this up, I will mention that I remember the very first time I met Curtis was at Storage Networking World.

So those of you’ve been around for a while. SNW was a thing, um, both from a work as well as a personal perspective. So when I first met Curtis at SNW he was dressed like a clown, and we were sitting in the after hours, and it wasn’t just like a clown. It was, I believe, a net backup, or it was actually maybe a backup exec seven launch or something. And they actually offered to do Halloween costumes for everyone. And Curtis chose to be a very flamboyant clown.

So it absolutely stuck

[00:04:36] W. Curtis Preston: I do remember that. Yeah, that was,

[00:04:40] Molly Presley: There must be somewhere

[00:04:42] W. Curtis Preston: yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah, that was, yeah, that was a Symantec dinner event, like we were, we, I guess we were both guests, uh,

[00:04:52] Molly Presley: I think we were guests and it was on Halloween because it was the end of October. They tried to make right on keeping us away from home on Halloween by making a dress up event.

[00:05:02] Prasanna Malaiyandi: event? I.

[00:05:03] W. Curtis Preston: yeah. And, uh, I do, I do now. I was, when you first said me dressed up as a clown, I’m like, I think she’s sticking about somebody else. And then all of a sudden I’m like, oh,

[00:05:12] Molly Presley: No, it was

[00:05:13] W. Curtis Preston: Yes. The Symantec dinner, uh, where I was dressed up as a clown. Um, yeah, that was, that was something. Talk to us about the animals in your life, Molly.

[00:05:26] Molly Presley: Wow. Well, yeah, as Curtis has mentioned, I have a particular interest in large animals, and this is both from having them cruising around my home with a few, um, very large 200 pound great Danes that have at one point I had three of them at once. In a very small Seattle apartment downtown. So we were,

[00:05:45] Prasanna Malaiyandi: Oh, my.

[00:05:46] Molly Presley: tasked through COVID with walking 600 pounds of dog, um, without the apartment dog walk areas in downtown Seattle.

So everyone of course knew who we were in the area. Um, we have Clydesdales and then a particular interest in elephant protection and conservation. So in Asia and Africa, a lot of holidays spent, um, tending to cleaning up after large elephants as well.

[00:06:10] W. Curtis Preston: I like how you just casually mentioned that you have Clydesdales. It was like a parenthetical. Oh. And we have a couple of Clydesdales.

[00:06:17] Molly Presley: course, of

[00:06:17] W. Curtis Preston: Um,

[00:06:18] Prasanna Malaiyandi: like small to large, to larger. So you

[00:06:23] W. Curtis Preston: Um, and, and you live and you live in, uh, Colorado, right? Or you? No.

[00:06:28] Molly Presley: Yeah, I do. moved back Seattle a bit ago.

[00:06:31] W. Curtis Preston: Right. And, um, what’s, what’s it like, um, caring for, you know, animals like that, that are just that large.

[00:06:41] Molly Presley: You know, they tend to be the classic saying the gentle giant tends to be true. They’re very kind loving, good animals, but everything’s just harder. You have to have bigger vehicles, bigger bags of food, bigger bags of cleanup gear. There tends to be just, everything is a little bit more complicated as far as how, I mean, just think about how do you get arounda 600 pounds of dog. We ended up dedicating a minivan with no seats in the back to that.

[00:07:06] W. Curtis Preston: Wow. Yeah, I guess that makes sense, right? Yeah.

[00:07:08] Molly Presley: And you have to be the type of person who doesn’t mind being asked, in fact, enjoys being asked about them and people wanna pet them and know about caring for them. Or do you have a saddle for your dog or do you really ride your Clydesdales? Those kinds of questions, because people are, you know, truly interested, even though you may have heard the question before a few times.

[00:07:27] W. Curtis Preston: Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I mean, I mean there are horse people. But as just Clydesdales, you just don’t, you don’t see Clydesdales very often unless you’re watching beer commercials. Right? I mean, you,

[00:07:40] Molly Presley: So people

[00:07:41] W. Curtis Preston: see them quite often.

[00:07:43] Molly Presley: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people are surprised to see you on a trail ride with the low quarter horse and the little arabian goes by, and then the big old Clydesdale comes clumping along with his crew. And you know, his back stands over six feet tall and people like what? I didn’t ride a Clydesdale. I had no idea. This is incredible.

[00:07:59] Prasanna Malaiyandi: how do you get up on

[00:08:02] Molly Presley: Steps. they, they actually make steps, mounting blocks, type things to get onto. But even then when you use the ones that you would use for your traditional sized horses, quite a jump to go from the steps to the back of the horse.

[00:08:17] W. Curtis Preston: I, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, uh, Molly, but I, when, when my kids were little, they, they wanted to do some horseback riding. Right. And so we went to one of these places it’s actually on base I’m, I’m just south of camp Pendleton in San Diego. They had a trail ride, you know, uh, set up where you could go and ride these horses.

And, and we, we came up, me, my wife had zero interest in getting up. She, she actually has, she has a, a thing that happened to her when she was a teenager that like a horse ran away with her and she’s like, I’m not ever getting on a horse again. But anyway, so, so it was just me and the two kids and one of which was like really little.

And, um, we walked up and, and I hear the lady that’s leading this thing, say something along, you know, better get Bessy. And, uh, and I was like, oh, it’s cute. They got like a small horse for, for my little one. No, they weren’t talking about my little one. There was a special horse just for me, was basically like Clydesdale sized.

They’re like, yeah. Yeah. That’s your horse over there? That, that gentle giant. I was like, That’s just, that’s just harsh, yeah. Anyway. So I just, you know, whenever I talk about you, it’s just one of the things I find most fascinating about you, even though you, you are, you are like, you know, a nerds nerd. I mean, you, you, I love how much you’re into the technology and you know how good you are at your job.

I mean, we’ve, we’ve talked for years about, you know, multiple of your previous employers. Um, obviously, you know, I spent so many years talking to you about Spectra,

[00:10:02] Molly Presley: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:10:03] W. Curtis Preston: Yeah. And you know, yeah, great company. And, uh, now you’re, you’re close to them again. Um, uh, what do you call it? Uh, geographically speaking,

[00:10:13] Molly Presley: am just up the road. Now I can see all my old friends and probably the folks you’ve had is guests on the show

[00:10:18] W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah, we actually had them on, they had a, as I’m sure you’re aware they had a ransomware attack.

[00:10:25] Molly Presley: I did. And they recovered successfully.

[00:10:28] W. Curtis Preston: yeah.

[00:10:29] Prasanna Malaiyandi: So we had

[00:10:30] W. Curtis Preston: that was. Yeah to, yeah. Tony talked about that. That was great.

[00:10:33] Molly Presley: Good on them. Nathan’s always been good about using his own company as an example of technology.

[00:10:40] W. Curtis Preston: And I will insert our standard disclaimer, uh, Prasanna and I work for different companies. He works for Zoom. I work for Druva and this is not a podcast of either company. And the opinions that you hear are all Prasana’s. , if you like what you hear or are, you know, watching us by the way, if you, if you, if you’re listening and you wanna watch, you can go to backupcentral.com.

We have the video version of it over there. And, um, if you, if you like what you see or hear, then, you know, go rate us, at ratethispodcast.com/restore. And if you wanna join the conversation, just, you know, gimme a holler @wcpreston on Twitter, or wcurtispreston@gmail and we cover all manner of topics, uh, backup, you know, storage, archive, protection storage.

[00:11:27] Prasanna Malaiyandi: You said that

[00:11:28] W. Curtis Preston: what,

[00:11:29] Prasanna Malaiyandi: you already said that?

[00:11:30] W. Curtis Preston: oh, did I say, did I say storage twice? Yeah, well that I made a copy. I made a copy I just, I just can’t help, but make a copy.

The company that you work at now, how long have you been at Hammerspace

[00:11:45] Molly Presley: about six months

[00:11:46] W. Curtis Preston: Okay. I referred to them as a global file system provider, but I don’t think that it does justice. So why don’t we before we sort of say what, what, what it is, how about you tell us, what problem do you think Hammerspace was designed to, to solve.

[00:12:05] Molly Presley: Yeah, that’s always a better place to start. And we were designed to solve the problem of kind of using industry terms, decentralized environments. So you think about what’s happened with. Our industry from first, just a infrastructure perspective. It used to be all the data sat in one server. Then we started to maybe have multiple, multiple clusters in the lab.

Then we started to have some clouds and your data became decentralized or dispersed into many places. And that idea of now I have an application or a data scientist or somebody who wants to take advantage of my data and it’s all decentralized in multiple places. We make it easy for that computer or human or application who wants to use data that’s spread in many locations to work with it as a single data set. . And then along with that, you think about the other decentralization, which has occurred is where human beings are living. And so people are working remotely. Applications may be sitting in multiple clouds. And so where the things are that need to use the data are also distributed.

And so Hammerspace makes it very easy. Even if your data is geographically far from you over networking and latency, that would make it difficult to access. We overcome that, that barrier. So we solved the problem, making data accessible, that is decentralized, um, to remote users and remote applications.

[00:13:31] Prasanna Malaiyandi: Are you, when you talk about making data available, is it sort of intended for like the primary use case? Like someone’s building an application and the data for the application might be stored across like different clouds with Hammerspace being that interface, or is it more intended for data is already being stored today in various spots and Hammerspace sort of gives people who need to consume that data visibility in a sort of centralized way or both.

[00:13:58] Molly Presley: It’s honestly, a little bit of both. I’ll give you a couple examples. Um, one of our partners is Snowflake and I think most people would listen to this show would know who Snowflake is, but snow. Primarily worse with data that’s already stored in the Snowflake cloud. However, they’ve built an enormous amount of inter intelligence in the applications and the processing and analytics which Snowflake can provide.

So let’s just say that you wanted to use the Snowflake applications, um, but your data didn’t live in the Snowflake cloud. We could bridge that gap and make the data. Still live, live, where it was created, but easily accessible to the Snowflake application. So there is that application piece, but there’s also the visibility for the human being.

Whether it’s an AI engine or it’s actually like a genomics researcher working on looking at COVID variants, um, easier ability to access data sets that are dispersed over multiple places. So one of our customers, um, if you think about, um, the research around COVID. There’s variants coming out and different countries have their different data around which variants they have, how quickly is it spreading?

Is there a new variant and ideally. You would look at all that data together instead of Ethiopia looking at it separately from South Africa. And this is a African, um, initiative that’s underway right now is to bring all those data sets together with Hammerspace, to make it easier, to look at larger populations of data together instead of isolating the data sets.

So it can be person too.

[00:15:27] Prasanna Malaiyandi: And I guess in the case of the COVID example, you brought up the research it’s I guess another method people could do today is try transferring and synchronizing data manually across all these various sources, like moving the data, which is painful and probably not very practical either.

[00:15:43] Molly Presley: I mean, that’s exactly it. So of course it’s been solved somehow today, but it’s been expensive and inefficient, so maybe you’ve now got two or three or four copies of data, which you have to pay for. Storing two or three or four copies of the same data you have maybe ingest and egress charges around, moving in between clouds, networking issues.

Um, and then just the human factor of an it person making scripts to move data around. And then you try to figure out what’s the master copy? Who has it? Do I have all the data or not? So it’s being solved, but not very elegantly today. And this is an elegant, automated software driven solution.

[00:16:21] W. Curtis Preston: In our career, we are often fighting the laws of physics. And once again, that’s kind of what you’re doing. , you’re trying to, you’re trying to defy the laws of physics.

[00:16:31] Molly Presley: I think one way you might look at that is, um, There are lots of different ways. People have addressed trying to move data around, make data accessible. And even in our space, what is a global file system or global name space? It’s a bit confusing people, different approaches. But the thing that I think is super important to think about is, um, you know, for, to do data, data discovery, the more data you have access to the better.

So Hammerspace really tries to solve the problem of breaking down the storage silo, making it so you can look at all of your data together. In one view, that would be a global name space, and then to solve that latency problem, you, we don’t move the data around the data stays put. And so you were talking about physics and it’s funny, it’s something I talk about with our CEO pretty regularly that we actually don’t believe the concept of data gravity is valid anymore with the Hammerspace technology, because you no longer have to move the compute to the data. We will let the data stay put, and our everyone interacts with metadata instead of data. So metadata is light, you know, for every petabyte of data, you know, you maybe have a couple hundred megabytes of metadata, whatever it is.

And you can make multiple copies of the metadata. You can easily move that to a new location, a new application to solve the latency issue, but the data can just stay put. So all of a sudden this idea of are we trying to overcome physics and this concept of is there data, gravity and all of that, we’re trying to make it where really create your data where you want to.

And then use it where you want to, and we’ll use smart software so you can interact with it without expense and everything else that has become kinda, almost a truth in our. That’s

[00:18:14] Prasanna Malaiyandi: in the end you eventually will be pulling the data of some sort when you’re reading or accessing, if that’s what your application needs. It’s just because. Correct me if I’m wrong, because you’re sort of processed things by the metadata, which resides close to you, right? So you deal with the latency issue.

It helps you filter down what, in the end you need to access. So you don’t need to necessarily pull all the data, just the select data you need. Yeah.

[00:18:41] Molly Presley: That’s right. And then we of course take care of interesting technologies that exist today and, you know, using object storage in the cloud to move things around efficiently and low cost object, stored object store. Even though what we present is a file system, but we use the backend of smart object stores to move things around efficiently when it’s needed, but we only move what we need to.

[00:19:05] W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I guess I’m, I’m, I’m trying to fathom how that works. Obviously I get the difference between metadata and data. I’m trying to understand, like, if you could gimme an example of an application that’s first just using the metadata to make a decision. Then later accessing the data, I guess maybe because I spend so much of my time in the, in the backup space and we’re, you know, I mean, yeah, obviously metadata is important, but the data is like, we’re all about the data.

So

[00:19:37] Prasanna Malaiyandi: we, yeah, maybe we can expand on that COVID example from the beginning, if, and show that if that works.

[00:19:44] Molly Presley: we can definitely talk about that. So, if you go back to the COVID example that we were talking about, and you’re looking at variants of different, um, you know, generations and whatnot, that’s occurring within COVID a great example would be in a lot of cases. What organizations need to do is keep their data set in country for maybe compliance patient care regulations.

And they need to leave it in place, but they wanna be able to have a view to an analytics application through metadata of the, the amount of test results that have occurred maybe specific results, but they don’t need the entire data set. So we use something called objective based policies. And so this is getting super, like nerding out and I’m not gonna nerd out on you, but, um, you would set an objective saying really my objective,

[00:20:32] W. Curtis Preston: We love people that nerd out, Molly. It’s fine.

[00:20:34] Molly Presley: as the, you know, so my objective as the data administrator of this in the organization is, to be able to look at the number of tests and the number of variants that are occurring and all the rest of the data around that’s being collected, which could be location, um, you know, whatever ethnicity, gender, that stuff doesn’t matter to me.

So they would only interact with the metadata that’s associated with their objectives and pull in. If they need to move data, they would only move the parts that’s relevant to that objective. So there’s, and this is all automated and set through the Hammerspace interfaces so that you can say, these are the bits I care about.

I’m not gonna get a human involved with it. And then you can also set rules about, you can move my data, but only to this country and not that country. So you can manage your compliance. There’s a lot of different things that occur within an objective that helps to automate all of this.

[00:21:31] W. Curtis Preston: Interesting. And, and so like when you, when you say those, the data rules, if you can move my data, but only here. So when someone is accessing the data, are you a portal through which they’re accessing their data or is it just sort of giving

[00:21:50] Molly Presley: We’re yeah, we’re actually the name space. We’re a network share an NFS Mount point, an SMB Mount point that all the users. So if the three of us were using Hammerspace technology, we would all see the exact same folder structure, directory structure. As each of us made changes. We’d see each other’s changes, but that would be done on a single. We would be interacting with the metadata and that’s what we would be presenting the directory tree. So it is a NAS, it’s just a NAS that has storage environments that can be in many places.

[00:22:24] W. Curtis Preston: interesting.

[00:22:25] Molly Presley: I’m gonna give you another example that sometimes a little, so the fastest adoption that we’ve had of our environment is in visual effects studios.

And this is environments where again, you think about that, what happened with COVID and nobody was flying actors to have physical shoots of film, because they’re worried about travel and proximity and all social distancing. So visual effects and animation was how a lot of the entertainment and production films were done.

So the need for animation and visual effects went up dramatically. Like orders of magnitude. And in the meantime, the artists were scattering to all over where they wanted to live, where their families lives and they were no longer close to the studios. And so what they have done is used Hammerspace as the way to, um, make it easy to spin up a new artist.

So a new artist could be in Africa or India or wherever they happen to be living. You give them access to the global name space and they instantly can see. What is all the content, all the clips, they aren’t actually moving them. They’re making copies of the video close and they’re just viewing. Okay. I have, um, Moana and I have this Netflix show depending on who the studio is and I can see, okay, here’s all the content.

My job is only to edit the motion of the faces in this particular clip of film. So I’m just gonna move that one clip. The rest of the film can stay wherever it is, and they can work on that animation. And then as they do their work, this metadata is being synchronized. So if another artist says, oh, I thought I was supposed to be working on the animation of that face, they can see what the other person is doing and not step on each other or later have to figure out how do I merge changes, things like that.

So it’s, it’s really helped ramp up remote artists working on content, that’s massive and you can’t move around easily. And so they can just work on the clips and segments that they want to. And this is all done integrated with their tools. So with Autodesk shot grid and Tara deci their virtual studio tools.

So there’s a lot of tools that’s integrated with to make it really easy that they’re using their own tools and this kind of data orchestration. The background is automated.

[00:24:34] Prasanna Malaiyandi: I think that’s interesting. I feel a lot of storage vendors tend to sort of say, Hey, here’s an NFS Mount point or an SMB Mount point, go at it versus kind of what, uh, Hammerspace is doing is giving you that automation, those policy management, integration into the consumers or the end users tools, rather than just saying, Hey, here’s a point go for it.

[00:24:57] Molly Presley: Yeah. I, I really think this is just the next generation of how storage and data management and hybrid cloud will work. And I’ve worked in all of these types of companies. And I know this is a thing that customers and I’ve been using the term, the missing link in what customers expect will work when they go to a hybrid cloud versus how it actually works.

So if you think about the technologies that exist today, sure. You can run a NAS instance of any of the popular NAS vendors in the cloud and in the data center, but they’re separate silos of data. So you as user would still have to say, Hmm, okay. Where am I gonna put my data? Where is the data I created before?

How do I make that available to someone else? And. Then the matter of opening a ticket with it and say, okay, now Curtis needs access to this share and let’s open up a share and set up the IP networking for him to do that. And the DNS servers and everything is very manual. The way Hammerspace handles it is: you just set up both of you with access to our.

NFS share. Let’s say the Hammerspace share and no matter where the data is stored, if Curtis says you can have access to it, um, he just says that permission in TaDa! you have access to it. There’s no it involved. There’s no data silos where you’re saying, gosh, I don’t know what’s in, Curtis’ share. I only know what’s in mine.

How would I ever know? We, we overcome that so you can see the data that’s being created and collaborated on by many data users. And you know, most environments need that. It’s not designed for where you want your own personal information. Well, to yourself. It’s environments that are collaborative and are doing research or that type of thing.

[00:26:33] W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I, I will say I, I understood the second example a lot better than the first one. So that’s so that’s good. Um, it’s something that, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in and around the, the media and entertainment space. I’ve worked with companies trying to back up that stuff. Right. Um, because one of the problems that I remember I was working with the folks that were making Shrek 2, back when that was new, and their problem was each animator needed the entire set of data that at least they needed it to look like they had the entire set of data in order to select which backgrounds they wanted to to use. And, um, that was an interesting problem to solve. And it sounds like that this would, this would help to solve that problem.

[00:27:23] Molly Presley: Yeah, it does very much. Um, and that kind of problem occurs when you think about a studio, maybe that advertises the same film. In different countries and they have to localize a look and feel, or the clips they’ll carry for an advertisement in Japan may be different than America. That type of thing. It works beautifully for that type of solution.

It’s just overall, it’s become difficult as we have so many technologies that come out, one’s a little better, a little different, or has a little functionality than another in the storage space. And you need those differences.

You need the fast performance of Pure Storage or Vast Data, or you need the hybrid cloud, um, image that Qumulo has, or, you know, whatever it’s, as you go through the different technologies and you bought something for those reasons, and yet your users don’t have access to all the different storage vendors and need to know what data exists.

So having the name space that sits above it, that makes it so it can have the performance or capacity or security that they need in their storage systems. And that doesn’t limit a user from having visibility to all of the data is really kind of a simple way to think about it.

[00:28:31] Prasanna Malaiyandi: And I know you talked about some of the features that these individual storage vendors have. I know Hammerspace brings its own innovative features. For those other storage vendors, do things sort of get least common denominator, if you will. Right. In terms of the features functionality of those underlying storage arrays, or is Hammerspace still able to allow those storage arrays to bring their innovative features, functionality and Hammerspace leverages, or has its own capabilities on top.

[00:29:02] Molly Presley: Yeah, it’s a really good question. Um, So when you take, let’s say you assimilate the metadata out of your NetApp and your Vast and whatever it is. Um, at that point you’re using the features in Hammerspace, so they can be done at a global level. So if you wanna set that, you know, a specific replication functionality, or if you wanna be able to have ransomware policies put in place, um, if you wanna have encryption set, you can do that at a global level.

So you don’t have the risk of, oh gosh, I’m encrypting on this environment and not this one or, um, that type of thing. So we take over the management at that level. So really in the end, the other storage systems become capacity and performance. Um, and the features are handled at a global level within Hammerspace.

[00:29:46] W. Curtis Preston: By the way while researching Hammerspace, the company I come, I came across. I I, what I’m absolutely sure is the origin of, you know, why you would name the company that, and this, this idea of a, uh, so I just found the, the Hammerspace Wikipedia page, and, you know, they say a fan envisioned, extra dimensional, instantly accessible storage area in fiction.

Uh, and it it’s used to describe how, how characters can seemingly out of thin air make objects appear.

[00:30:21] Molly Presley: That’s where the name came from is that idea of, you know, bug’s bunny has the appearance of very small pockets and yet can pull a massive hammer out of his pocket and Bonk his bow on Um, Hammerspace is that extra dimension of what appears small, you can actually pull this massive amount of data out of.

So it’s that metadata kind of analogy.

[00:30:44] W. Curtis Preston: I will ask one very obvious question. Okay.

[00:30:47] Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yes,

[00:30:48] W. Curtis Preston: So does this beautiful, multidimensional, storage space, impact how I would back up the data because in the end, that is, you know, one of the things that we care about.

[00:31:04] Molly Presley: It definitely could. Backup is one of those things that I think most storage vendors have not tried to take on too much. Of course we have data protection, we have snapshots and replication and all those types of things. But in the end, if you were setting up a Druva backup policy, you would point it at the Hammerspace name space, and set it just the way you always have.

You know, whatever your requirements are, your retention, you, your network shares. If you’re used to backing up NFS, you present NFS. So the process is the same. You just would do it at the Hammerspace level instead, backup for individual silo within the Hammerspace environment. It’s easier if you think about that, you can only set the policies once and it covers all of your data.

Um, but it do you know, it does require just integrating with Hammerspace file shares instead.

[00:31:56] Prasanna Malaiyandi: and I’m guessing because backup, you kind of need access to everything. Your policies might be slightly different, right. For someone trying to do a backup or like a tool trying to do a backup, then like a normal user,

[00:32:09] Molly Presley: Yeah. There’s a lot of access optionality built in, you know, super user access to everything versus you as a user only are allowed to access a certain thing for a certain amount of time. And of course, a backup environment would need access at a massive level, but you know, you can set it just as read, not write. Those types of things, which often would be a best practice.

[00:32:29] Prasanna Malaiyandi: You mentioned ransomware. I know that’s a hot topic these days. Could you talk about how Hammerspace protects you prevent or how you handle ransomware situations?

[00:32:42] Molly Presley: Yeah, definitely. I think anybody who’s in any sort of data management or data storage environment needs to be thinking about ransomware as a problem. Obviously that is top of mind for many companies, um, well for every company. And so if you think about a global data environment, which is what we call it, so you create this global data environment, which incorporates all of your data and you can think kind of ransomware person kinda putting their fingers together, going, Ooh, I want access that thing.

Um, certainly there’s multiple layers of what we have built into the environment, as far as access protections, um, immutable, snapshots. Um, we keep, because we have this very intelligent metadata layer. We actually have the ability to do undelete. So at a administrative level, even if somebody did maliciously delete data, um, we can do an undelete, which is housed in a location, you know, a different metadata environment that they can’t touch.

So there’s, there’s quite a few pieces. If you think about the different layers of access encryption. Um, taking of the data, things like that, that are built into the environment. Um, I wouldn’t say that we are a ransomware company. I think all of our technologies need to do things to help protect against ransomware.

There may be cases where somebody would go partner with a company whose job is to protect against ransomware. Um, and of course we would integrate with that, but there’s several levels of controls and we’ve had customers, you know, who know they’ve had are undergoing attacks. It’s very common. You know, that customers know that they’ve see, they see ’em having almost daily.

I think

[00:34:21] W. Curtis Preston: That is a perfect application for the metadata only access. Right? So if you have a SEIM/SOAR tool that’s monitoring what’s happening with the metadata changes to the files would react, would, would result in changes in the metadata, right? And you being able to provide access to just the data data without all the data. Um, that sounds like a perfect application for your tool as well.

[00:34:45] Molly Presley: Exactly.

[00:34:46] Prasanna Malaiyandi: Another example I could think of is, especially with multi-cloud right. People might be choosing different clouds for cost reasons or feature reasons, and they may not be experts at it, but with Hammerspace, right. You could kind of give them that seamless interface across the clouds as well.

[00:35:03] W. Curtis Preston: cool. Well, Molly, I’m glad we had you on. Thanks for joining us.

[00:35:08] Molly Presley: Really interesting conversation. I’ve known you for a long time. Curtis. Prasanna’s a smart, fun podcaster as well.

[00:35:15] W. Curtis Preston: a, he’s a great co-host. I am very lucky to have him, so thanks. Thanks Prasanna.

[00:35:20] Prasanna Malaiyandi: Thank You, Curtis. Molly, it was a pleasure to meet you.

[00:35:22] W. Curtis Preston: And, thanks again to our listeners. You know, you are why we do this after all. Well, that, and we’re bored, but, uh so we thank you for listening and remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all.

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