Storageless data, really? – Doug Fallstrom – Ep156

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Data is everywhere and part of every strategic business conversation how do we use it better? How do get more value from it? How do we truly make it a business asset? The answers to those questions are driving a whole new way of thinking in the way we deliver IT services to a business. New workflows, new development architectures and exploiting technology shifts to try to break the shackles that traditional infrastructure often enforces on how we can use data to meet our business needs. This has led to a steady evolution, virtualisation, cloud and architectures such as serverless which allows us to run our code and services independent of any underlying platform.

What if we could achieve that same flexibility for our data? Data does present a different challenge to that of code, because unlike code data has much more “weight” to it shifting 1PB of data is not easy, regardless of how fast your connections are. But what if you could free your data from those shackles and have the same flexibility your code has? What If you could have storageless data? If your business could use its data without restriction what would that allow you to do? That was the thesis of a blog post that I read recently from David Flynn the CEO of my guest Doug Fallstrom’s company Hammerspace.

While you have to have somewhere to run your data (like serverless doesn’t mean no servers) the point of the article was about how we need to change the way we architect our data platforms and shift our thinking to something more data-centric. This is an idea I’m a big advocate for with any enterprise I speak to, whether it’s how we store our data or protect it, if we are still approaching platform design from a hardware-centric view we are hugely limiting how we use our data.

How then do we begin to make this shift? That’s the conversation my self and Doug have, join us as we discuss.

• Why we need to be data-centric.
• Getting additional value from our data.
• Users don’t care where the data is and why should they?
• Talk to the non-storage people in your business to know how they use data.
• Tips for shifting to a data focussed approach.
• The Hammerspace Tech.
• The power of the “as a service” model.

For today’s enterprise taking a data-centric approach to the way, we build our IT platforms is critical if you want to be a data-driven business. Approaches such as those discussed by Doug, coupled with technical innovations to enable your data strategy is going to be central to your success. If you want to find out more about Hammerspace you can do so by visiting hammerspace.com where you will be able to chat with the team as well as access the free 10TB version of their platform.

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Until next time, thanks for watching and listening.