Tarmin Defines and Refines Data Defined Storage

1. Tarmin Defines and Refines Data Defined
Storage
Tarmin [1] steps away from media dependent storage and reliance on costly physical
infrastructure to a more storage-centric approach to gain value from massive data flows.
We caught up with Shahbaz Ali, CEO/Founder of Tarmin, to getting a better
understanding of what his company does and what data defined storage is all about.
insideBIGDATA: I understand that Tarmin is all about Data Defined Storage. Can you
please tell the uninitiated among us what that is exactly? And can you tell us a little about
the origins of the technology.
Shahbaz Ali: Data Defined Storage is a next generation storage and data management
platform built around the notion of data centricity, which differs from traditional
[2]architectures that tend to have a ‘media centric’
storage
focus. A media centric focus generally relies on throwing more infrastructure elements
(disks, etc.) to resolve a number of problems associated with massive data growth.
Today’s organizations need to do more than just store data, they need to find ways to
gain value from data. Data Defined Storage focuses on metadata (the data about data)
with an emphasis on the content, meaning and value of information instead of the
media, type and location of data. This approach enables organizations to take a single
scale-out, unified approach to managing unstructured data across large, distributed
locations which erases the legacy silo information storage barriers, reduces risk and
provides greater business agility, enhance decision making and ultimately, a more
productive work force.

2. insideBIGDATA: How does Tarmin uniquely approach this?
Shahbaz Ali: Tarmin delivers the three pillars of Data Defined Storage though it’s
GridBank Data Management Platform.
1. Media independent data storage. GridBank provides high performance, random
access enterprise object storage that optimizes data volumes, aggregates and
consolidates existing storage investments, by creating virtualized storage pools
based on cost/performance and capacity characteristics. Data is stored in the
appropriate pool, according to its value. Storage pools can use fast disk, nearline
disk, tape or cloud from any manufacturer, utilizing each of its strengths through
intelligent tiering and deduplication/compression policies, driving reduced TCO
while presenting consolidated information into a single unified view of data.
2. Data Security and Identity Management. This delivers a complete information
governance framework designed to mitigate data related risk by providing
organizations with policy-based retention management and disposal, granular legal
hold and automated data migration for archiving and tiering, along with end-toend identity centric data protection down to the individual user and device level,
providing greater security.
3. Distributed Metadata Repository. ThisCaptures the value of data and provides
global enterprise search for enhanced business agility and big analytics integration
to gain insights from critical data delivering improved competitive advantage.
insideBIGDATA: For what organizations might this be useful?
Shahbaz Ali: New data types and sources driven by volume, variety and velocity occurs
in almost every industry and organization. Verticals that are data driven intensive and
that continuously strive to gain better insights from data, using big data analytics tools
such as Hadoop, gain tremendous competitive advantage by using a Data Defined
Storage approach. Tarmin GridBank supports a wide variety of data intensive industries
such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Education, Oil and Gas, or Life Sciences, all of
which face challenges with digitized unstructured data, making them ideal for
employing a Data Defined Storage solution.
insideBIGDATA: Specifically in the enterprise realm, what might these companies glean
from your suite of products?
Shahbaz Ali: Financial Service Organizations create huge volumes of unstructured data

3. and are faced with commercial risks, legal risks and compliance mandates associated
with long term data storage, security and access. FSOs are turning to Big Data, using
insights taken from daily transactions, market feeds, customer service records, location
data, and click streams to carve out new business models and services to transform the
go to market strategy. By implementing a Data Defined Storage solution, using Tarmin
GridBank, the Finance industry is able to reduce infrastructure cost, satisfy risk
management and industry wide regulatory compliance requirements for data retention
and e-Discovery and accessibility for all devices including mobile devices. In addition,
FSOs will be able to mine the net worth of their data and manage through data-inplace dashboarding and analytics. This not only creates potential cost savings but also
adds to the company’s competitive advantage.
Data is the lifeblood of the Oil and Gas industry; GridBank enables the most data and
compute intensive applications consisting of seismic imaging data and other
geophysical information to be optimized for Oil and Gas exploration. Data must be kept
for decades or until technology has reached a point to exploit the natural resource.
GridBank indexes and catalogues all data, and stores it securely on tape for the longterm, ready for future search and analytics. Delivering on all Oil and Gas data
management requirements, reducing costs and increasing storage utilization, GridBank
provides a single view of data across the enterprise to accelerate the monetization of
Oil and Gas digital assets.
Universities, research institutions and other higher education facilities have a diverse
set of applications to support, including HPC-based research and engineering
applications, and typically battle budget constraints. Ideally, the research they produce
and publish should be easily searchable and accessible by authorized personnel
through a Cloud-type interface. Tarmin Gridbank consolidates the storage required to
support all this data, simplifying the creation of storage pools of varying cost and
performance by using a scale-out infrastructure that supports the HPC multi-petabyte
world.
insideBIGDATA: I understand that one of your goals is to “monetize data”. That probably
gets a lot of attention for obvious reasons. How do you go about this?
Shahbaz Ali: Information is knowledge, and knowledge is power; without these,
organizations are at a significant competitive disadvantage. Complete understanding
of an organization’s landscape, competitors, customer requirements, and the market
landscape directly translates to actionable insights. Tarmin makes data monetization

4. possible through our unique distributed metadata repository. GridBank can support the
ingestion of standard files and over 550 industry specific file types, as well as email,
SharePoint, and social streams. GridBank conducts full indexing across multiple file
types within an organization. In addition to indexing basic file metadata, GridBank
also indexes content and custom metadata. All ‘data about data’ is stored in a
distributed metadata repository giving global access for enterprise search and discovery,
and large scale analytics.
GridBank’s analytics integration framework provides content-based indexing and
filtering across all unstructured data sources. Unlike ETL tools, there is no need to
separate data into a separate analytics pool. The metadata repository efficiently exposes
content throughout the grid, allowing GridBank to point analytics tools at data-inplace while maintaining high performance.
Making decisions based on data driven outcomes results in increased customer
satisfaction, retention and loyalty, better targeted products and services, and
competitive advantage.
insideBIGDATA: This seems to be pretty cutting edge stuff. What can we look forward to
from Tarmin?
Shahbaz Ali: Tarmin knows that as businesses become more data driven and mobile,
they will continue to look for better ways to cost effectively consolidate, store and
protect data from risk. There is also a strong trend within organizations to better
leverage big data via analytics to drive business and market growth. As these needs
continue to grow, we are looking forward to an industrywide shift away from media
centric, focusing on the content of data above all else.
We are continuing to align GridBank with the growing demands of the information
economy to deliver a future proof data centric solution for organizations. With
GridBank 4.0, we are adding a Linux version to our existing Windows-based product to
address Petabyte scale Linux customers. In addition, we continue to expand data
capture and data accessibility features to include social streams and all mobile devices.
All data will be streamed and indexed into the GridBank distributed metadata
repository to add significant ROI, reduce overall TCO and gain greater insights.
1. http://tarmin.com/products/data-defined-storage/what-it-is

5. 2. http://worldfinance100.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Tarmin.jpg