Igneous Systems plans to introduce two new products Tuesday for hybrid cloud customers working with massive data sets, in yet another sign that cloud computing does not plan to leave any sector of the information technology economy untouched.
The Seattle data archiving company plans to introduce Igneous DataDiscover and Igneous DataFlow later on Tuesday, said Christian Smith, vice president of product, in an interview with GeekWire. Those two products will help companies working with data across on-premises servers and the three major U.S. cloud services find and manage what’s known as “unstructured data,” or data that doesn’t fit neatly into categories.
Companies working with massive amounts of data were once under the impression that they’d be forever stuck in their own data centers, Smith said. We’re talking about companies involved in drug discovery, cancer research, and geospatial analysis and other fields that generate large amounts of visual data; cloud service providers actually make and sell huge storage boxes for companies to upload their data over a local network and literally mail those boxes to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Google rather than transfer that data over the internet, which could take forever.
That’s starting to change as newer workloads are built in the cloud, and Igneous customers using its initial product — which will now be known as Igneous DataProtect — wanted more options to manage data across these emerging hybrid architectures, Smith said. But “that thing they are still struggling with is how do I move data into the cloud, and keep track of it and index it and simplify the processes to do that,” he said.
DataFlow will help companies sort and index unstructured data like images when working with data sets that move between partners and customers over multiple operating environments through an API, Smith said. DataDiscover is designed to give users one view of their data across homegrown servers and cloud service providers, capable of handling “billions” of files, he said.
Igneous, founded by storage veterans in 2013, has raised $41.7 million to date, including a $15 million Series B round in January that lowered the company’s valuation. It began life selling a hardware data appliance for companies to help manage on-premises storage systems, but all the growth in the storage and data market is clearly in the cloud, as the vast amounts of money being thrown at cloud data warehousing startup Snowflake Computing proves.
