Komprise’s Flash Stretch tiers NAS to Cloud for flash capacity savings

Data lifecycle manager Komprise has a Flash Stretch Assessment service to find and shunt rarely-accessed files off to public cloud disk to free up on-prem flash.

The background to this is the worsening SSD supply situation with NAND shortages and price rises. Komprise cites a Gartner report estimating a 130 percent increase in combined DRAM and solid-state drive (SSD) prices by the end of 2026. This means enterprise SSD buying budgets could be inadequate and on-prem SSD storage capacity could run out.

Randy Hopkins, VP of Global Systems Engineering at Komprise, said: ”The Komprise assessment helps enterprises quantify how to optimize and squeeze more from current storage through standards-based tiering to maximize savings without lock-in.”

His company’s Flash Stretch Assessment analyzes an organization’s multi-vendor NAS (file) usage, looking at on-premises primary storage, meaning mainly SSD with some disk, and the public cloud, meaning disk. This is far less expensive now than on-press SSD. The assessment looks at files, and rates their access usage, age and type, and identifies which ones could be tiered to the cloud with little or no impact to users.

It suggests a tiering policy by department or use case, and estimates how much capacity would be freed up, and the savings to be made from moving these files to various cloud and object destinations so customer can choose the best option. If this causes a vendor switch with rehydration penalties it shows savings from any such penalty that forces the customer to buy more of the original storage if switching vendors.

It also shows backup savings using Komprise Intelligent Tiering which shrinks the entire primary file footprint.

A  case study shows Pfizer saving 75 percent of its primary storage footprint, backup, and DR by using this Flash Stretch service. The Flash Stretch Assessment service is available now from Komprise and you can find out more here.

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Several vendors have devised mitigating remedies for SSD shortages and price rises. For example; DDN, Hammerspace, StorONE with its Smart Auto-Tiering, VDURA with its Flash Relief program, VAST Data and its Amplify program, and WEKA. The supply shortage is set to continue into 2027 and storage tiering policies, such as this one from Komprise, could become more popular.