People to Watch 2024 – David Flynn

David Flynn

Founder and CEO, Hammerspace

First, congratulations on your selection as a 2024 HPCwire Person to Watch. Before we get to the other questions, how does the name “Hammerspace” tie into storage? (Of course, we have all wanted to take a hammer to some type of technology in the past.)

Hammerspace (the concept) is a “fan-envisioned, multidimensional, instantly accessible storage area in fiction, allowing animated characters to produce objects out of thin air.”

We’ve seen this popular fictional trick pop up in many places over the years, such as in the new Spider-Verse movie when John Mulaney’s Spider-Ham character produces a hammer out of thin air, or in an earlier era when Mary Poppins reached into her carpet bag for a floor lamp or hat stand. This ability to manifest something valuable from thin air is a convenient fictional solution to otherwise unsolvable problems in cartoons and films going back to the beginning.

So it is with just the slightest wink and a nod that we called our technology and company Hammerspace. Because with Hammerspace (the technology), enterprises can now solve otherwise intractable data problems by “reaching inside” their existing silos of data on-premises, in the cloud, and/or across multiple locations to get immediate value and solve one of the industry’s biggest problems: Using data when and where you want it, no matter where it is stored.

Just as with the fictional hammerspace concept, many vendors are trying (and struggling) to produce that magical, metaphorical anvil or hammer from off screen or out of a bag of tricks. Until now, this has often resulted in a patchwork of multiple infrastructure-bound point solutions that enterprises have relied on to meet demands for data storage, protection, security, and cross-platform file access. But such point solutions add IT complexity, can create vendor lock-in, and typically compound the headache and expense of creating file copies that proliferate across silos and sites. What’s worse, all of this fragmentation causes security challenges in data management and data access, which makes workflow automation all but impossible.

Hammerspace simplifies and often eliminates this fragmented collection of point solutions with standards-based open architecture, which includes extreme performance to feed files to large compute clusters, automated data orchestration to place data when and where needed, and a comprehensive set of global data services that can bridge storage silos from any vendor.

So while Hammerspace software may not help you pull a rabbit out of a hat, it is a solution that can feel magical by supplying the ability to provide high-performance file data anywhere, while pulling the maximum value from your digital assets across an entire global data environment that can span vendor silos, clouds, and locations.

If running and managing several on-prem and cloud-based storage locations, what is your elevator pitch for Hammerspace?

Optimal hybrid cloud environments require seamless data mobility across diverse platforms. Mobility is needed to make existing data local to the compute or applications that need it, to deliver high-performance use of data stored anywhere to compute and applications everywhere. Here are a few benefits a hybrid environment will achieve with Hammerspace:

High-Performance, Anywhere: By intelligently managing data placement, Hammerspace can ensure that data is stored in locations that offer the best performance for specific applications or workloads, enhancing overall system efficiency.

Data Accessibility: Businesses need to ensure that their data is accessible regardless of where it resides, whether on-premises or in one or more cloud environments. Hammerspace facilitates this by providing a parallel global filesystem across all storage environments, making data easier to access and manage.

Seamless Data Mobility: As organizations grow and their needs change, the ability to move data seamlessly between different environments becomes critical. Hammerspace enables data to be moved or accessed across different platforms without interruption to users or applications, and without the typical complexities and downtime associated with such migrations.

Data Protection and Compliance: Ensuring that data is protected and complies with various regulatory requirements is a challenge in hybrid cloud environments. Hammerspace can help enforce data protection policies and compliance across all storage locations, providing peace of mind and reducing the risk of non-compliance penalties.

The terms “Data Gravity” and “Data Friction” have become parts of many conversations. How does Hammerspace deal with these issues?

Much as mobile device operating systems and data orchestration broke the hard tie between a consumer’s data and the device it was created on, making it possible to easily upgrade or replace a mobile device and immediately have access to all your historical data, Hammerspace has done the same in the Enterprise and HPC space to overcome data gravity and make data available where needed, no matter where it is stored.

Hammerspace addresses the challenge of data gravity in several innovative ways, making it easier for organizations to manage, move, and access their data across different environments:

Parallel Global File System: Hammerspace creates a parallel file system that spans across all storage resources, whether they are on-premises or in the cloud. This approach abstracts the physical location of the data, allowing applications and users to access data without needing to know where it is stored. By decoupling data from its physical location, Hammerspace reduces the impact of data gravity by making it appear as if the data is everywhere it needs to be, simultaneously.

Metadata Separated from the Data Path: Hammerspace separates the data plane from the control plane. This means that the actual data can stay in place, while metadata that describes the data can be moved or replicated. Applications can access and interact with the metadata, allowing them to perform operations on the data without moving the underlying data itself, effectively overcoming the limitations imposed by data gravity.

Intelligent Data Mobility: Hammerspace uses policies and machine learning to automate the movement of data across different environments based on access patterns, performance requirements, and cost considerations. This intelligent data mobility is file granular and ensures that data is located in the optimal place for its use, minimizing the need to move large volumes of data frequently and reducing the impact of data gravity.

Access to Data in Flight: Hammerspace provides orchestration and automation tools that simplify the management of data across different environments, and is able to continue to provide access to data for users and applications while it is in flight to a different location. By automating routine tasks and enabling data to be moved or accessed based on predefined policies, Hammerspace reduces the operational complexity and overhead associated with overcoming data gravity.

Readers may not know that Hammerspace is responsible for many of the features and performance enhancements in Linux NFS v4.2. Is NFS v4.2 currently a good alternative to other proprietary parallel HPC filesystems?

Parallel File Systems are a must for powering the data pipeline and storage in large scale compute environments. Hammerspace provides a parallel file system that spans different storage systems which can be located in different locations, much like an HPC Parallel File System. But those typically have a single dedicated storage system, or possibly two if there is some tiering involved, and run in only one location.

The innovations in NFS v4.2 make the performance of a parallel file system accessible to enterprise environments in which proprietary client software being loaded on each client machine is a non-starter for IT and security policies. We have committed a lot of time and resources to the Linux community in order to encourage the adoption of our Parallel File System for both HPC and Enterprise.

What inspired you to pursue a career in STEM, and what advice would you give to young people who wish to follow in your footsteps?

Early on, I had a fascination with understanding how things work, a passion for technology, and the potential to make significant contributions to society through innovation. As a nuclear physicist, my father laid a lot of groundwork for my interest in these areas.

As time went on and it was time to dedicate my focus to an education and career path, the tech industry’s dynamic nature, with its constant demand for innovation and improvement, attracted me to contribute in making a tangible impact on the future of technology.

Outside of the professional sphere, what can you tell us about yourself – unique hobbies, favorite places, etc.? Is there anything about you your colleagues might be surprised to learn?

I enjoy motocross and am very involved with my kids’ competitive hockey and gymnastics.

People to Watch 2024

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