Komprise adds full lifecycle management abilities, as well as the ability to confine defined data to make it invisible without deleting it, and the ability to build custom queries.

LAS VEGAS – At the NetApp Insight 2017 event where they are exhibiting, data management vendor Komprise announced the Fall 2017 release of their Komprise Intelligent Data Management software, version 2.6. The enhancements facilitate full lifecycle management. They also add a data confinement capability which allows data to be essentially rendered inactive, without having to take the step of permanent deletion, Finally, the new release adds a new deep analytics capability where customers can build their own custom queries.

Komprise makes a data analytics-driven data management solution, which analyzes and indexes metadata in a scale-out adaptive architecture across any NAS, NFS, SMB/CIFS and Cloud/REST/S3 storage. It’s an intelligent solution, that learns from the customer’s environment, doesn’t interfere with their use of their storage, and automates active archive, replication and data management strategies to significantly reduce costs.

“Just this quarter, we added another 20 plus customers, across different verticals, including a couple of major research universities, several country governments, and some new banks and pharmas,” said Krishna Subramanian, Komprise’s COO. “Most of the time, they weren’t using a competitive product – they were just buying more storage.”

Subramanian  said that this release isn’t about adding brand new capabilities, but rather about extending a lot of the capabilities they already had in order to meet customer needs.

“We were already moving data across storage and to the cloud, with colder data moving to less expensive tiers,” Subramanian said. “We have now added new lifecycle management capabilities, so you can set up data to be moved multiple times, according to policy. You could do this before, but you would have to create another plan to move that data. Now you can do full lifecycle management with a single plan and it is all transparent. You can even move data to things like Glacier which have a latency, where you can’t look at it right away.”

A second addition is what Komprise is calling data confinement.

“Some customers have told us that they cannot keep data beyond a certain time, but are always scared to delete it, because deletion is a permanent act,” Subramanian said. “This is becoming more  of an issue with GDPR in the EU, which has a right to be forgotten. As a result we have developed a data confinement capability. It allows you to create a new rule to confine data that fits any criteria, such as a User who has left a company, or data that is more than a certain age. It moves the data to a hidden location that looks like it’s not there. IT can still get to it but no user application can see it. It’s also taken off of Tier One storage and active management, so the customer isn’t paying to replicate it or to back it up. If they choose, they can then determine if anyone uses the data, and possibly delete it if no one is.”

The third new capability is allowing customers to do their own deep analytics.

“Sometimes, customers want to build own custom queries and just look at just the subset of data that belongs to that query,” Subramanian said. “We added the ability to build any filter you want. It does this all without a central data base, which is unique. It’s completely distributed architecture, which can have no bottlenecks, to do deep analytics.”

Komprise also announced that they now support NetApp ONTAP 9. They have key strategic relationships with several large OEMs, and NetApp is one of those.