// END-USER INSIGHT //
“
HAMMERSPACE ALLOWS US
TO REUSE AND REPURPOSE
ANY EXISTING STORAGE , THUS AVOIDING ANY DISRUPTION OR
PAINFUL DATA MIGRATION . us to flexibly relocate data between storage performance tiers and facilitate easy multi-site disaster-recovery / cloud-bursting for extra processing capacity , should the need arise .
We wanted to continue using our existing storage infrastructure and afford ourselves the opportunity to incorporate new storage technologies as they arise into our existing stack , without any disruption to our production services . Many alternative vendors wanted to sell us either a hardware appliance or lock us into its own managed cloud systems . This would both entail a significant reconfiguration of our production systems and did not give us the flexibility we were looking for .
It has also allowed ‘ plug-and-play ’ back end storage changes without affecting users with downtime or disruptions .
How easy was the implementation ?
The base implementation was very fast – we had it set up and functioning in an afternoon . However , we initially deployed it in a test environment and under-specced the storage . We scheduled our main production cut-over during the new year ’ s break , where we kicked off assimilation from our old servers , modified
DNS entries and allowed the process to run . Linux permissions in our environment were correctly assimilated by Hammerspace on the fly ( our own Samba servers were fudging the back end permissions a little for clients , so that needed to be corrected after assimilation was completed and Hammerspace was in control ).
We used read-only assimilation on our existing servers , so that if anything went wrong , we could revert the change and go back to using our old servers . Thankfully , this was not necessary . We had a basic set of placement policies which met our immediate needs in the first week of testing , but it ’ s a very powerful system and now that we have been in production for six months and I have observed our application interactions ‘ in-the-wild ’, I have more policy / objective tuning planned .
How will the new storage enable ellwood Evidence to grow as a company ?
Availability , integrity and confidentiality are key cornerstones in digital forensics . Hammerspace preserves and enhances availability through a global file system that makes data available ubiquitously throughout an organisation . Hammerspace ’ s programmable custom metadata ensures data integrity , protecting evidence from cross-contamination . Confidentiality is preserved by Hammerspace encryption capabilities which supports militarygrade encryption and External Key Managers ( EKM ). This ensures that data remains confidential even when stored in public cloud .
Does it make life easier for employees ? If so , how ?
A global file system that offers multi-protocol access with global undelete and granular administrative declarative control ensures smooth operations and makes life easier for staff . A global file system is a single source of truth , making it much easier to store , categorise and find data . Searching for data in a typical organisation is like looking for a leaf in a forest . Searching for data with Hammerspace Global File System is akin to looking for a leaf in a single tree . This saves time and enables employees to accomplish their work faster and without frustration . For ellwood Evidence this translates to higher productivity and profitability . �
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