Tarmin ups the DDS `big data’ storage stakes

Some estimates now suggest that over 40 percent of organisations say their biggest technology challenge is the rapid growth of unstructured data. This is particularly the case where any business is hoping to get value from working with social media technologies. The data there can be of immense value – either as marketing input from public social sources, or as product development resources from in-company collaboration tools.

Storing and accessing that data in ways that can be exploited to add value to a business is now becoming one of the key issues, for shear enormity of the data being generated means that established methods of data storage and access are fast approaching obsolescence. A new approach to storage that is gaining traction as an alternative is Data Defined Storage (DDS), which focuses on utilising metadata about the meaning, content and value of the information, rather than the media, type and location of the data.

A number of new contenders have appeared in this space, such Tarmin, which has just announced the latest version, 4.0, of  its GridBank system. Dues to become available during the first quarter of 2014, this adds support for Enterprise Linux platforms, increasing GridBank’s addressable markets and ensures its applicability for cross-platform multi-petabyte enterprise storage environments.

In addition, both Linux and Windows versions of GridBank 4.0 offer random access with Enterprise Object Storage and enhanced performance through accelerated location and retrieval of data assets.

It specifically targets working with social media streams as they increasingly become subject to the same compliance mandates as other types of data, including file and email. GridBank 4.0 introduces what Tarmin claims is the first social media REST API that delivers a common interface to any social media provider. This means that social streams and instant messaging data can be brought into the centralised GridBank storage repository to be indexed and archived for compliance, e-Discovery and analytics. 

GridBank enables data intensive organisations such as those in financial services, healthcare, oil and gas, life sciences, education and research institutions to leverage data as a strategic asset. GridBank’s Distributed Metadata Repository embeds the intelligence into the infrastructure so organisations can point big data analytics tools at the metadata store rather than the broader data repositories, eliminating the need for migration to separate analytics storage pools and enabling real time, data-in-place analytics.

This latest version of GridBank features platform flexibility, enterprise Linux support, CDMI, OpenStack and S3 APIs, Sync and Share REST API for 3rd party clients, and support for Linear Tape File System (LTFS) for libraries, as well as tape in the cloud. It offers enhanced performance using random accessthrough Enterprise Object Storage and policy-driven automatic pool-to-pool and tier-to-tier performance profiling and migration.

The social media REST API delivers a common interface to any social media provider, with support for Outlook Web Access, offline email support and PST management. It also provides support for Android, iPad and iPhone smart clients for BYOD environments, together with support for healthcare file formats, including DICOM 3.0.

The company claims it can add value to data by using Windows search capability to integrate global data access into existing workflows, and using post processing tagging and policies for enhanced data classification.

It also claims that the GridBank Data Management Platform is the first to deliver a DDS solution that allows data to determine the underlying storage infrastructure, using the DDS architecture to eliminate data silos for operational efficiency, reduced business risk and improved business agility.