Komprise adds disaster recovery with granular restorations
The Komprise Intelligent Data Management platform gains new DR capabilities that enable granular recovery of file and object resources through the existing user console.
The Komprise platform's data management capabilities now include disaster recovery.
The new Komprise Elastic Replication offers file and object data replication capabilities to a customer's data center or cloud of choice. The capability is available now to existing Komprise Intelligent Data Management and Elastic Data Migration customers.
This capability enables customers to replicate unstructured data in either file or object format and recover to its original format according to metadata information. This enables customers to move large amounts of data to lower-cost cloud storage or to back up specific items to another data center without copying over an entire drive.
The new service isn't targeting customers looking to back up mission-critical data for immediate recovery, according to Dave Raffo, an independent storage analyst. Instead, it's for customers with large amounts of unstructured data that they discover is worth keeping through Komprise's management tools. The capability leans more into Komprise's existing data management capabilities by enabling customers to migrate specific files and objects from archives back into production without needing to mirror data, thus saving money through granular restores.
"They're making their file migration [services] much more granular," Raffo said. "This is stuff that should be built in to the major [storage] technology vendors."
From management to recovery
Specific use cases for Komprise Elastic Replication include disaster recovery from data center losses or ransomware attacks, according to Krishna Subramanian, COO and co-founder of Komprise.
Compared with backup software for mission-critical workloads, Komprise Elastic Replication focuses on unstructured data that can be recovered with a slight delay and for a potentially lower cost, she said.
"We say this is for non-mission-critical data," Subramanian said. "This is for the big amounts of unstructured data that you want to do per share or per directory."
The capability should help customers avoid the costs of duplicating the storage system by not having to mirror storage resources to off-site clouds or data centers or recover entirely from a snapshot. Customers select what to recover, down to the specific share or folder they wish to replicate, and set policies through the Komprise console.
The technology uses customer snapshots to ensure coherency on both sides of a recovery, Subramanian said. All stored data is kept in the object format, enabling customers to use replicated data even if they discontinue their use of Komprise software.
Crowded market
IT administrators aren't wanting for disaster recovery and backup services, according to Simon Robinson, an analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group.
Every storage vendor is playing into this market because the customer need is real.
Simon RobinsonAnalyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
Many storage hardware or software vendors such as NetApp offer some kind of disaster recovery capabilities or services, while backup vendors such as Commvault provide comprehensive feature sets to recover mission-critical data, Robinson said.
Those products aren't always tied into the software providing metadata or cannot work on commodity hardware, he said. More comprehensive namespace and data management products such as Hammerspace can provide similar capabilities, but lock customers into a platform compared with Komprise.
"Every storage vendor is playing into this market because the customer need is real," Robinson said. "It's important that [enterprises] know what they have."
Expanding beyond metadata tagging and data management makes sense for Komprise to keep pace with companies such as Hammerspace, said Ray Lucchesi, president and founder of Silverton Consulting.
"They're moving away from pure analytics to data management," Lucchesi said. "It's an adjacent [market]."
Tim McCarthy is a journalist from the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts. He covers cloud and data storage news.
