Hammerspace solves the siloed data problem for AI – News

Data is the lifeblood of artificial intelligence, but siloed data has become one of the biggest obstacles to realizing its full value. Over the years, businesses have scattered unstructured information across storage systems, clouds and applications, creating friction as they shift toward an AI-first posture.

Data orchestration company Hammerspace Inc. addresses this challenge by offering fine-level granularity and seamless access across protocols, providers and geographies. The result is a unified platform that simplifies, accelerates and manages data so enterprises can unlock AI-driven outcomes without costly migrations, according to Sam Newnam (pictured), senior director of AI solutions at Hammerspace.”

“For years we’ve had traditional network-attached storage systems and unstructured data and we’ve stuffed it everywhere, on-prem, in the cloud, in some vendor or some SaaS application,” Newnam said. “Cleaning up those strategies, everybody’s looking for a way to use that data to find the value of that data. Hammerspace is uniquely fit to step in and help add visibility to that, as well as manageability to that chaotic data state.”

Newnam spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay at the Future of Data Platforms Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Hammerspace positions itself as a platform — not just storage — that mitigates siloed data and unifies, accelerates and simplifies data for AI-driven outcomes. (* Disclosure below.)

Hammerspace’s approach to the siloed data problem

For decades, enterprises have wrestled with unstructured data sprawled across incompatible systems. AI only magnifies the issue, demanding data that is organized, accessible and usable at machine speed. Hammerspace solves the issue across three solution angles: simplification, automation and acceleration, according to Newnam.

“These applications need data from everywhere,” he said. “It’s different when a human can look at a file directory and understand the context of that, but when you have two agents talking to each other, trying to negotiate a decision on real-time inventory purchases and that sort of stuff, data has to be organized. They don’t have that same cognitive ability to make decisions on data.”

Simplification comes through a global namespace that gives enterprises visibility and control across environments, eliminating the need for costly migrations. On the automation side, data pipelines run repeatably and reliably, ensuring that critical datasets — from finance and marketing to AI training inputs — arrive where and when they’re needed. And by unifying storage tiers, including NVMe scratch disks on GPU servers, Hammerspace can speed up AI pipelines by as much as 50%, enabling faster time-to-value, according to Newnam.

“Now we can help customers that have traditional NAS storage, where we can assimilate that data, take all the metadata from things already in their environment, promote that to tier zero, directly above the GPUs and have it be used — whether it’s in a RAG pipeline, embedding training or fine-tuning — and then restore that data to where it was,” he said. “We’re not asking customers to take a massive forklift migration onto yet another data silo to achieve these AI outcomes.”

Hybrid cloud has become the default strategy for most enterprises, but stitching the entire framework together has proven challenging. Hammerspace abstracts away the complexity by unifying file systems across cloud and on-prem environments. Whether data resides in AWS, Azure or a local NAS, users experience seamless access under a single namespace. This eliminates the need for forklift upgrades or costly duplication, delivering the “cloud operating model” enterprises crave, Newnam added.

“A user should be able to sit on a console in the cloud or a console on-prem, open some files and see their whole thing and not worry about which bucket it’s in or the economics of that bucket,” he said. “We usually take an easy approach to say, ‘Hey, let’s simplify all this.’”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Future of Data Platforms Summit:

(* Disclosure: Hammerspace Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Hammerspace nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

Photo: News