Metadata-Driven Workflow Enhancements Give Users Control of Data While Simplifying Administration for ITOps

Hammerspace, the pioneer of the Global Data Environment, has a mission to enable the agile global workforce and agile global compute with an agile global data environment. Today, it introduced another leap forward for the data-driven global workforce with the Hammerspace Metadata Plugin, User Initiated File Protection, and an Automated File Reservation. Hammerspace also announced a new integration with Alchemi Data Elasticsearch. These capabilities enable users to better access, collaborate and get more value from their files globally from their desktop, regardless of which vendor system the data is stored within.

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The Hammerspace Metadata Plugin enables users to add rich custom metadata to files and directories directly from within Windows. Such custom metadata can trigger workflows or other data placement policies, be used for chargeback/showback reporting, and much more. (Graphic: Business Wire)

Rich, actionable metadata is critical to deriving value from data. The Hammerspace Metadata Control Plane already enables custom metadata tagging through application integration with the Hammerspace UI, CLI, and open API options. While machine-generated metadata and data orchestration are crucial to data insights, users often want the ability to take direct actions with their data. These new enhancements to the Hammerspace Global Data Environment make it easy for IT Operations (ITOps) to set global data policies that apply to all data, regardless of which vendor storage it is on or where it is located. With today’s announcement, Hammerspace is supplementing these global capabilities by allowing users to create and act on custom metadata from their desktops.

Hammerspace Metadata Plugin

With the introduction of the new Hammerspace Metadata Plugin, users now have direct access to add custom metadata tags and manage metadata-driven workloads from their Windows desktops with a click of their mouse.

• User Benefits
  
  With the ability to leverage the Metadata Plugin from their existing Windows desktops, users can directly manage their data policies to complement global policy objectives set by IT administrators. Combined with Hammerspace’s powerful objective-based policies engine, custom metadata can enrich files to trigger downstream workflows, data protection actions and other uses at a file-granular level to mobilize files with metadata directly from a Windows desktop GUI.
  
  
  
  
  • Actions users can take with their data through the Hammerspace Metadata Plugin include the ability to:
    • Automate data movement across silos or locations for collaboration or other uses.
    • Globally link files to cost centers, projects, and more, without moving them.
    • Automate workflows transparently to users.
    • Ensure that file placement and protection policies are aligned with business rules at a file-granular level across any vendor storage or location.
    • Automate data policies to meet corporate compliance and national data sovereignty requirements.
      
      

• Administrator Benefits
  
  The Hammerspace Metadata Plugin also simplifies the job of ITOps. When combined with automatic metadata inheritance within Hammerspace, the custom tags can trigger automated workflows globally. The plugin enables unprecedented global data intelligence for functions such as chargeback/showback usage reporting, placement policies aligned per tag, per user, per storage type, and more. In this way, it also enables easy implementation of business rules across all digital assets, which may now be applied to classes of data at a file level on any storage type or location. The IT team no longer needs to set policies on each NAS silo; instead, they can apply global data service objectives to meet business needs and enable compliance and data protection requirements.

User-Initiated File Protection and Recovery

Users can now roll back to a previous version of their file(s) with a simple click of their mouse at a Windows workstation. If a ransomware attack or an inadvertent file change occurs, users do not have to wait on the IT team to recover the file from backup to stay productive. They can roll back to the previous version of the file they need immediately, no matter which storage system the file is stored on within the Global Data Environment. Integrating existing user workflows with the powerful cross-platform capabilities from Hammerspace extends the user experience without requiring them to learn a new application. Even features such as the ability to recover previous Windows file versions can now be done directly by users via this integration, reducing the need for users to call IT for help.

File Reservation Policy

One of the most popular use cases for the Hammerspace Global Data Environment is data collaboration across multiple sites. Two or more users may wish to edit the same file simultaneously, which could cause a write collision on rare occasions. Hammerspace has implemented a File Reservation capability that allows users to reserve files to mitigate these conflicts. This feature illustrates the power and versatility of the Hammerspace objective-based policies and their ability to elevate the user experience.

Global Audit

Hammerspace now supports System ACLs across both SMB and NFS to create a Global Audit log of file system operations such as file/folder deletes, renames, and other actions. This significant enhancement is a critical security innovation for decentralized environments to enable persistent System ACLs to be applied across the Global Data Environment, regardless of which storage type or location the file instances reside. Hammerspace manages the data placement across different sites behind the file system, ensuring that security enforcement is not broken by moving or copying data to other sites or platforms.

Alchemi Data Elasticsearch

Hammerspace has worked closely with Alchemi Data to integrate its Elasticsearch solution with the Global Data Environment. Users can now run searches on the Hammerspace parallel global file system to quickly and efficiently locate the relevant data they are looking for. Alchemi Data can also scan documents, including MS Word and PDF files, to locate user-defined keywords. Hammerspace can then harvest these keywords and add them to its metadata, making it far easier to manage and access files for projects, research, organization, corporate governance and compliance.

Summary: Enabling the Data-Driven Global Workforce

Today’s announcement highlights the latest expanding ways that Hammerspace enables customers to seamlessly integrate their existing workflows and applications into a Global Data Environment. It also includes native integration to workflow management applications such as Autodesk ShotGrid, Projective Strawberry, Slurm, fTrack and others. With these capabilities, users can take global actions impacting data services across multiple sites, silos, and the cloud and leverage Hammerspace metadata-driven policy engines directly from their desktops using tools they are already familiar with.

With this announcement, Hammerspace continues its mission to make access to global data increasingly simple and automated. The days of working separately with each siloed NAS target in the multi-vendor storage infrastructure are over. By elevating the metadata control plane from the infrastructure layer, Hammerspace can integrate with users’ existing tools and third-party applications without adding to the time burden on ITOps teams for management oversight while retaining compatibility with any storage type from any vendor. This approach reduces or eliminates vendor-locked point solutions and manual processes typically used for applying policies to each storage silo. It enables global data services to be easily automated, leveraging powerful data protection and other capabilities, including multi-instancing, ransomware mitigation, and more.

Availability:

• Hammerspace Metadata Plugin
  • for Windows - now available
  • for Linux and Mac - expected in a future release
• User-Initiated File Protection for Windows - available October 2022
• File Reservation Policy - now available
• Global Audit - now available
• Alchemi Data Elasticsearch Integration - Tech Preview available now

Learn More:

• Read “What’s New” in the Hammerspace Global Data Environment
• Read about the capabilities of the Hammerspace Metadata Control Plane
• Download the Hammerspace Technology White Paper

About Hammerspace

Hammerspace delivers a Global Data Environment that spans across on-prem data centers and public cloud infrastructure enabling the decentralized cloud. With origins in Linux, NFS, open standards, flash and deep file system and data management technology leadership, Hammerspace delivers the world’s first and only solution to connect global users with their data and applications, on any existing data center infrastructure or public cloud services including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Seagate Lyve Cloud.

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