Igneous strengthens data management

Igneous, among the few innovators in storage for a few years, continues its change and move towards a full software model. The solution has evolved a lot now targeting enterprise data challenges with hybrid cloud approach with its Unstructured Data Management aka UDM.

We remember when we met Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO, in December 2016 with the IT Press Tour team with his promotion of an S3 compatible objet storage appliance with IP drives based on the coupling of a Marvell CPU board and HDD. That product named dataBox with its dataRouter was an brilliant approach a bit orthogonal with the SDS wave that implies to be hardware agnostic. This was for us the phase #1 of Igneous.

The phase #2 is related to the first software shift towards data management for the company seen for the second time in December 2017. Kiran spoke about secondary storage with data protection essentially backup, archive and tiering.

We understood some changes in the mission and clearly the strategy of Igneous is to move away from the hardware model and the recent software release - phase #3 - revealed a full data management approach with 3 key functions: Data Discover, Data Protect and Data Flow.

These 3 core elements feed an even more comprehensive UDM:

• Data Discover: Virtual views of data, easy search and classification thanks to AdaptiveScan and InfiniteIndex to answer famous "classic" questions of the How, What and Where about data growth, changes, ownerships... This is done without any agent.

• Data Protect: improved and enhanced backup, archive, tiering and DR for primary NAS, object and cloud (AWS, Azure or GCP) at the API level for NetApp, Isilon, Qumulo and Flashblade. Three keys points: metadata are stored in InfiniteIndex, Intellimove moves copy data at high speed and AdaptiveScan tracks changes.

• Data Flow: API-driven and automated data movement to create end-users driven workflow for data analysis.

Igneous is ready to shake the unstructured data management market segment and with several competitors, overlaps exist so they must deliver a unique approach, what they do. Since we follow Igneous, the positioning of the company changed from a hardware/device-centric driven solution to a software-driven platform. As we'll meet Kiran again in December, we hope to learn new end-users deployments an d their outcomes, what was competition for these users, a bit of technology, how things work and a bit of future of course.