VENDOR PROFILE Tarmin: Championing "Data Defined Storage" for the Big Data Era Ashish Nadkarni IDC OPINION As unstructured data growth continues unabated, the market for next-generation scale-out storage platforms will see a higher rate of growth relative to that of traditional disk storage systems. IDC estimates that worldwide revenue for scale-out file- and-object-based-storage solutions will exceed $26 billion in 2014, with corresponding capacity shipped reaching nearly 59EB (these platforms house much of the unstructured data in the world today). IDC expects the overall market to exhibit strong momentum from 2013 to 2017 (and potentially well beyond 2017), with market revenue forecast to grow at a CAGR of 12.4% from 2012 to 2017, translating to a capacity growth of 47.2% during the same period. This growth will offset the slowdown in the overall enterprise disk storage systems market as end users recognize that media-centric approaches of throwing more hardware at the problem are essentially unsustainable. Instead, end users will address relentless data growth with innovative solutions that take a data-centric or an application-centric approach to storage management. Tarmin, a supplier of innovative storage solutions, is championing the term "Data Defined Storage," with the goal of enabling businesses to leverage their data as a strategic asset. Such solutions offer massive scalability and are designed to allow organizations to consolidate their data globally and across multiple silos, thereby providing a single unified view of data across the entire organization. According to Tarmin, Data Defined Storage solutions should enable organizations to: Improve operational efficiency for reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): Tarmin has ensured that Data Defined Storage solutions are simple to deploy and manage and can be deployed using commodity hardware, on-premise or in the cloud. Because such solutions are massively scalable and software defined, it is easier for customers to add capacity and performance independent of each other. When required, the software also has the ability to reduce capacity required through the use of policy-based deduplication and compression. Reduce business risk by addressing data security and information governance challenges: Tarmin's Data Defined Storage offering is designed to be secure and operate in compliant and regulatory environments. Data Defined Storage solutions should offer advanced security mechanisms including data encryption, auditing, and retention and policy enforcement schemes. Enhance business agility and decision making for improved revenue growth: Data Defined Storage solutions are designed to be "data smart" meaning that they come with built-in data classification. They provide the ability to perform metadata search/indexing for use in environments where businesses need to know exactly what is stored as well as who has stored it and what its business value is. Furthermore, Tarmin has designed its storage solutions to be "workload adjacent" and then expanded such workloads to include analytics queries. With Tarmin's solutions, businesses can run in-place analytics on their data. March 2014, IDC #247359
IN THIS VENDOR PROFILE This IDC Vendor Profile reviews Tarmin, a supplier of next-generation data management and storage solutions for enterprises and cloud service providers. Tarmin's principal platform is the GridBank Data Management Platform a storage platform that IDC considers to be part of the file- and object-based storage (FOBS) market (specifically scale-out object-based storage solutions). The functionality of Data Defined Storage also overlaps with Big Data, analytics support, data governance, scale-out distributed/cloud NAS, data protection/security, and mobility markets, which extends the overall addressable market for Data Defined Storage. SITUATION OVERVIEW Storage will continue to play a pivotal role in the infrastructure both in datacenters and in the cloud. As businesses become data driven, the role played by storage will undergo a transformation. Businesses can no longer afford to maintain storage as a "dumb" infrastructure tier. As data sets move into the petabyte scale, businesses will need to become smarter about data storage. They will need to gain full insight into what this data is as well as what business value is associated with it and what the risks associated with storing (or disposing of) it are. The ultimate goal for businesses is therefore timely identification, classification, and efficient placement of this data in line with their goals and initiatives. Introducing Data Defined Storage IDC believes that the only way in which storage solutions can meet the demand of data-driven businesses is with an architectural overhaul in which the control plane is managed from outside and not by the storage platform itself. This means that storage solutions need to go from being data agnostic to being data aware. Taking this concept a notch further, storage solutions need to be governed by their primary (and only) tenant data. In other words, storage solutions need to become "data defined." Data Defined Storage solutions: Support business-wide data unification: The storage infrastructure should support the consolidation of all data types, removing silos for a single view of data across the entire organization. Are simple to implement and manage (can be deployed using commodity hardware, onpremise or in the cloud) and promote storage optimization: Since such solutions are massively scalable and software defined, it is easier for customers to add capacity and performance independent of each other. When required, the software also has the ability to reduce capacity required through the use of policy-based deduplication and compression. Are secure and can comprehensively address compliance and regulatory requirements: These solutions are designed with built-in security features (such as encryption and audit mechanisms) as well as data classification and policy enforcement schemes. Offer metadata search/indexing: These solutions offer the ability to perform metadata search/indexing for use in environments where businesses need to know exactly what is stored as well as who has stored it and its perceived business value. 2014 IDC #247359 2
Allow workload adjacency: These solutions allow in-place workloads like analytics such as Hadoop MapReduce operations to run right where the data lives. Additionally, the platform should support workloads that require movement of data to the compute, making them inefficient in petabyte-scale environments. In other words, the platform should support a compustorage or hyperconverged mode wherein the compute is run right where the data lives. To date, the approaches taken by the majority of the storage industry have been to start with building a storage platform and then force the data to conform to the characteristics of that platform. But in a data-centric approach to storage, the "initiator" and "target" roles are swapped. Rather than starting with storage and then defining how your data needs to fit, you start with data and automatically define what your storage needs to look like based on that data. This approach is similar to how NoSQL databases are challenging the world of relational databases. In relational databases, the database schema forces the data to be formatted before it can be fed into the database. In NoSQL databases, on the other hand, the data governs what the schema will look like and forces it to change on the fly as the characteristics of the data sets change. This fundamental shift has far-reaching implications on storage as we see it and on suppliers that offer traditional storage platforms. This approach has led to the rise of a new breed of suppliers like Tarmin with innovative storage technologies and solutions that are crucial for businesses as they undertake their data-driven journey. Company Overview Tarmin was founded in 2007 and has offices in London and Boston. Tarmin's principal product is the GridBank Data Management Platform, which according to Tarmin is the industry's first purpose-built Data Defined Storage solution. Tarmin's Data Defined Storage delivers a hyperscale, transparent, and unified approach for consistent data retention, search, policy, and security across cloud and traditional storage infrastructure. GridBank Tarmin's Data Defined Storage Platform On June 4, 2013, Tarmin launched version 3.0 of its enterprise object storage platform GridBank, thereby ushering in the era of Data Defined Storage. With the release of GridBank 3.0, Tarmin joined a growing list of suppliers like Scality, Exablox, Cleversafe, EMC, and Amplidata that focus on purposebuilt object storage solutions. Tarmin positioned GridBank as a platform that focuses on the value of information as a strategic business enabler. In order to do so, Tarmin provided critical value-added features to its object storage platform, building on the capabilities listed in the Introducing Data Defined Storage section: Linearly scalable object storage with random access Global object-level deduplication Distributed cloud file system across all participating nodes Integrated information governance framework Virtual global pooling technology Distributed metadata repository 2014 IDC #247359 3
GridBank's massively scalable model allows businesses to consolidate their data globally across silos to reduce cost. The policy automation features of GridBank allow businesses to rightsize the infrastructure to protect the data stored on it and, in the process, enforce data compliance. According to Tarmin, these two capabilities enhance the value of data by integrating the storage, information, and application tiers onto a singular infrastructure. Company Strategy With the release of GridBank in 2013, Tarmin stepped on the gas pedal to accelerate product adoption by way of partnerships. Its most notable partnership is with IBM in the area of integrating the GridBank solutions with IBM's own scale-out platforms like the XIV and IBM's software portfolio. IDC believes that such hardware and software partnerships will drive greater adoption of massively scalable storage platforms as businesses explore innovative technologies with familiar enterprise-friendly storage suppliers. Accordingly, with the proper formula for execution, Tarmin's approach will gain greater mindshare among businesses on the data-driven journey. Tarmin continues to enhance GridBank functionality and application support with the announcement in December 2013 of version 4.0, which further improves operational efficiencies, data governance, and search and analytics. GridBank 4.0 will be compatible with enterprise Linux operating systems and will support S3, CDMI, and OpenStack to provide simplified integration with cloud-enabled applications. Additionally, it will offer a social media API that delivers a common interface to any social media provider that ingests indexes and archives instant messaging and social streams into the central GridBank repository for compliance and analytics purposes. As Tarmin ramps up sales and marketing efforts in preparation for the 4.0 launch, it is forming a direct sales and professional services team, focused on enterprise markets with multiple petabyte-scale data challenges. By providing a comprehensive technology and services solution, Tarmin can ensure quality throughout the sales, implementation, and support cycle, taking a customer-oriented approach to excellence in execution and delivery. Tarmin is also taking a deep vertical-focused approach with specific use cases that touch upon the burgeoning unstructured data problems in businesses that belong to such sectors. It has also enlisted partners in such sectors for product integration and certification with industry-specific platforms and applications. Tarmin's goal is to accelerate the adoption of its platform as businesses transform their infrastructure to accommodate next-generation storage platforms. Some of the approaches taken by Tarmin are: Financial services: Use cases include globally distributed repositories, archives of billions of check images and insurance claims, compliance risk mitigation, private cloud object storage for exponential growth in trading data, and interfaces for financial analytics tools. Oil and gas: Use cases in this sector include global upstream oil/gas exploration and discovery, massive data growth from seismic imaging, and M&A activity that includes the unification of heterogeneous storage environments and the integration of newly acquired data assets. Healthcare: Use cases in this sector include multisite hospital campuses with specialized services and terabytes of unstructured data. 2014 IDC #247359 4
Life sciences: Use cases include large scientific data storage repository, high-performance data mining and analytics, Hadoop clusters for Big Data analysis, and petabyte-scale storage infrastructure with high availability and disaster recovery. Education: Use cases include storage infrastructure refresh, consolidation of a wide range of hardware, centralized control and high-availability access, compliance with organizational ILM policies, live and archive store implementations for collaboration data, compute of research data on live store, compliance with public data access mandates, and archive infrastructure with low TCO per terabyte. FUTURE OUTLOOK Suppliers are emerging with new and innovative purpose-built storage platforms that can intelligently manage today's data storage and management challenges. Some of these suppliers seek to accelerate product adoption by way of partnerships with established data generation and applications suppliers in the area of integrating new solutions with legacy technologies. IDC believes that such partnerships are ultimately what will drive greater adoption of cloud-scale storage platforms. Enterprises will investigate solutions and suppliers they are familiar with before building out extensive shared nothing server-based storage infrastructure for their private clouds. Yet, in general, these new approaches are only just getting started in capturing a piece of the $38 billion file- and object-based storage market opportunity that IDC has forecast for 2017. Today, commercial object-based storage technologies such as GridBank occupy a fairly small chunk of this market, but that picture is expected to quickly change as businesses realize the need to manage data intelligently. IDC expects that in the near future, more suppliers will move toward a Data Defined Storage approach, making their platforms more purpose built to deliver on use cases that resonate with buyers with specific tactical pain points while simultaneously addressing the strategic challenges of data growth. These use cases include compustorage (also known as hyperconverged or natively converged storage and compute solutions), Big Data and analytics, global collaboration, cloud-based enterprise sync-nshare services, and platforms for machine-generated and unstructured data. This move to Data Defined Storage is the only way to ensure greater adoption of these solutions. IDC also expects industry consolidation along the way, given that today most of the existing suppliers are start-ups that have been privately or VC funded. The future for Data Defined Storage is promising, and IDC expects that the next couple of years will shape this market. Partnerships that are specific to vertically focused use cases, TCO and ROI metrics and, ultimately, the need for businesses to step into newer technologies as they become data driven will be key drivers for success. ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE Suppliers examining an entry into the Data Defined Storage market segment should design their systems to offer singular data-centric management and unified access to data across the entire business. Besides the obvious need to be massively scalable and non-disruptively manageable, such 2014 IDC #247359 5
systems should provide data storage that's media independent, with distributed global deduplication, linear scalability, and unified file and random access object storage. Data security and identity management are key capabilities as well, with end-to-end data protection and integrated security across users, devices, and applications. Finally, such systems should also offer a distributed metadata repository with basic metadata, full-content metadata, and custom metadata indexing, with arbitrary key-value pair tagging. They should also strike partnerships with ISVs and application suppliers as a way to ensure that most unstructured data types can be supported and managed. Buyers examining Data Defined Storage should know that the basic premise for implementing Data Defined Storage is to improve operational efficiencies. Data Defined Storage can reduce the total cost of ownership for storage administration by increasing cross-silo data availability as well as increasing capacity utilization. It can lower regulatory risk, which likewise means lowering legal, commercial, and reputational risks. You get identity-centric compliance, information governance, and improved data security. Businesses also get on-demand access to the right information in the right place at the right time via deep content indexing. There's end-to-end data availability across all applications, users, and devices, which gives organizations greater business agility and enhanced decision making. Altogether, taking a data-centric approach to data management delivers sustainable competitive advantage by enabling businesses to leverage their data as a strategic asset. Any organization or business is a candidate for Data Defined Storage businesses experiencing rapid growth in unstructured data more so than others. Businesses facing the challenge of addressing diverse data retention periods or legal holds as a result of regulatory or other legal requirements or those that require search and discovery capabilities to run their business efficiently should also examine Data Defined Storage solutions. Advice for Tarmin Tarmin is trying to differentiate itself on the unique capabilities of its storage platform and in the process carve out a new market segment that it calls Data Defined Storage. This is a bold endeavor. Even though Tarmin has been around for a long time, it should consider itself a new entrant into the storage industry. In that sense, it will need to rely entirely on its partnerships to propagate the awareness of Data Defined Storage. It will need to rely upon incumbent server and storage vendors to create integrated packaged solutions that are focused on a data-centric approach to unstructured data management. Specific actionable advice for Tarmin includes: Develop sales and professional services teams specifically focused on enterprise accounts to drive increasing customer validation of its storage platforms. Continue to build industry, ISV, and hardware partnerships for application and platform integration. Assist customers in understanding how to progressively implement GridBank within their organization, rolling out from initial petabyte-scale projects to broader engagements as it is proven within their organization. 2014 IDC #247359 6
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