Interview: Tarmin Manages Data Overload with Data Defined Storage

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Organizations the world over are looking for ways to re-define their storage infrastructure as data continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. Tarmin uses data-defined storage to collect enormous amounts of information and gain business insight in a single data-centric architecture. We caught up with Shahbaz Ali, President and CEO of Tarmin, to learn much more.

insideBIGDATA: As mountains of data continue to amass, the need for robust storage solutions is growing. How does Tarmin set itself apart?

Shahbaz Ali

Shahbaz Ali: Tarmin GridBank Data Management Platform, the premier Data Defined Storage solution addresses today’s petabyte scale unstructured data challenges by leveraging media independent, state of the art technology to deliver massive scalability using enterprise object storage. Additionally, with distributed deduplication, compression, and replication data volumes are substantially reduced and, through the GridBank File System global namespace, data repositories are unified, eliminating data silos and improving storage utilization. Data can be accessed in unified view using standard network protocols or cloud REST APIs. GridBank provides a comprehensive information governance framework to help organizations meet compliance regulations for retention management and disposal, and to mitigate data related risk by using end-to-end data protection. The GridBank Metabase, a distributed metadata repository, enables enterprise search and discovery and provides integration for big data analytics tools for increased data insights.

insideBIGDATA: Who are your customers? Which verticals does Tarmin go after?

Shahbaz Ali: Tarmin customers are data intensive industries with a rapidly growing unstructured data problems that typically impact data governance /compliance requirements, these include financial services, healthcare, education, oil & gas and life sciences and also cloud and MSPs.

insideBIGDATA: What has Tarmin done to keep pace with proliferation of storage in private, public and hybrid clouds?

Shahbaz Ali: Tarmin GridBank provides a non-disruptive solution for transitioning traditional storage environments to the cloud. GridBank seamlessly moves unstructured data including file, email, SharePoint, social streams into a public, private or hybrid cloud while ensuring that the migration is transparent to workflows. GridBank supports organizations at any point of their journey to the cloud delivering scalability, secure global accessibility, powerful enterprise search and integration to big data analytics to gain insight and to extract value from data.

insideBIGDATA: What are the advantages and limitations of cloud solutions?

Shahbaz Ali: The way that enterprises are consuming IT is changing as they increasingly take the path to the cloud. The key driver of cloud solutions is the reduced CAPEX cost associated with IT provisioning. This has led to cloud adoption as internal departments have been able to kick off projects in minutes or hours without a cumbersome procurement process. In doing so, it has become evident that there are clear economies of scale in offloading IT management to MSP and CSP providers, leading to reduced OPEX across the organization.

As organizations have increasingly adopted cloud technologies, further benefits in terms of business agility and data mobility have surfaced, as businesses have enabled organizations to allow remote staff to access data wherever they are, using whatever devices, ensuring home office workers and remote users have secure access to data.

Finally, these increasingly flexible approaches to commerce are driving transformations in business models, uncovering new opportunities for modernization. Innovation in products and processes and the capability to operate with massively scalable models and petabytes of data are changing the ways that organizations do business.

In terms of limitations of cloud solutions, the transition between on premise infrastructures over to the cloud can often be challenging and costly for organizations. This is why Tarmin is providing enabling technologies by offering transparent and non-disruptive solutions that can bridge the gap between on premise infrastructure and the cloud environment as organizations progress on their journey to the cloud.

insideBIGDATA: What advice can you give to those considering a cloud-based storage solution?

Shahbaz Ali: Be sure to consider solutions which enable maximum business agility through multiple protocol support. With Tarmin GridBank all data can be accessed either through standard network file protocols or via REST API. This provides the ultimate flexibility for future application changes and supports both enterprise and remote office users.

insideBIGDATA: Tarmin has outlasted many others in this space. What is the secret to your success?

Shahbaz Ali: Tarmin’s longevity has been driven by a clarity of vision, tenacity in the face of adversity, and, ultimately, an extremely dedicated team. When Tarmin was founded, 100s of TB was a relatively large deployment, cloud was still a new concept and no one was really talking about unstructured data. Now, we see 100s of PB deployments, over 80% of enterprises are using the cloud or plan to use it in the next 12 months and unstructured data growth is one of the biggest challenges in IT. By having the vision around Data Defined Storage before the majority of the market along with a robust product, GridBank, that meets the challenges of today’s organization, we have been able to exploit a growing market opportunity.

insideBIGDATA: What do you think the future holds for Tarmin?

Shahbaz Ali: Shahbaz Ali: Due to the huge volume of data produced and stored these days, CTOs, CIOs and CROs are seeking more automated data management approaches as well as solutions that will help organizations to leverage big data analytics to gain value and competitive advantage from these vast stores, GridBank is a game changer in this space.

Tarmin recently announced general availability of GridBank 4.0, which includes new features and enhancements that deliver end-to-end data protection, governance, search, discovery and access, regardless of the file type, device or social origination. It also offers random access with Enterprise Object Storage, which improves performance, accelerates data retrieval time and delivers scalability to multiple petabyte levels and beyond.  GridBank 4.0 delivers the industry’s first social media REST API, that provides a common interface to any social media provider, allowing social streams and instant messaging data to be brought into a centralized storage repository to be indexed and archived for compliance, e-Discovery and analytics. Its distributed metadata repository, GridBank MetaBase, embeds metadata intelligence into the infrastructure so organizations can point big data analytics tools, such as Hadoop, directly at the pre-processed 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.

Our customers are at the center of everything we do and we will continue to bring further innovation to the Data Defined Storage market.

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