Atempo in CEO Views July 2019

Data protection and data movement technologies are struggling to evolve within today’s challenging environments: exponential unstructured data growth, aging storage technologies, stricter data regulations… Traditional technologies used to move, protect or archive data no longer work efficiently within this paradigm. It is not feasible for organizations to keep such massive data volumes on expensive primary storage. Nor is it possible to have everything on long-to-access offline storage.

To address this challenge, Atempo has developed storage technologies that provide the best fit for company data. Atempo’s solutions and services also ensure the data is in an optimal location based on business needs and not just cost considerations.

The company’s flagship solution, Miria serves customers who appreciate the simplicity and security behind the platform which enables seamless backup, migration, synchronization and archiving even for multi-petabyte data sets. Atempo’s focus is primarily on innovation, which is its key driving force. “At Atempo, our solutions evolve but we haven’t lost sight of our motto – ‘Preserving Data Ecosystems’”, says Luc D’Urso, CEO, Atempo.

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ARCHIVE, PROTECT, MIGRATE with MIRIA

Miria functions as a single pane of glass which offers complete system configuration, management and monitoring for customers handling large unstructured data sets. The software and professional services are adapted to not only protect this data but archive it, migrate it without any interruption to production during a change of legacy storage, and synchronize it between different locations. Miria safeguards critical information and ensures that it remains available even in unpredictable situations. It provides long term retention of valuable assets in an organized repository that can be accessed for generations. Miria provides massively distributed and multi-threaded capabilities for fast, agile and reliable data operations during migration. The platform also provides powerful file synchronization solutions even across heterogeneous storage platforms and remote locations.

Miria works in the same way as a natural ecosystem. The quality of a data ecosystem is measured by its capacity to evolve over time, maintain equilibrium and resist outside aggression enabling rapid system recovery. Miria addresses the main challenges of petabyte-scale data management. To achieve high-performance execution, every operation is handled via fully optimized multi-threaded Miria Data Movers. Intelligent job schedulers dispatch tasks using adaptive load-balancing algorithms and continuously monitor activity and progress. The flexible architecture scales performance with additional Data Movers and supports mixed configurations for comprehensive integrations.

The split view user console allows for easy browsing of the archive contents and easy drag-and-drop task execution for true end-user self-service. Comprehensive CLI, web services and APIs are also available for automation and integration. Miria has been used for more than a decade in the Media & Entertainment sector by many Hollywood Majors. Today Miria caters to any sector faced with the data deluge. Finance, Insurance, Industrial Design, Smart Transportation, Satellite, Aviation, Aerospace, Health and Life Sciences, are just some of the sectors creating thousands of terabytes of new unstructured data every day.

Many hundreds of petabytes have been moved, synchronized and protected by large and small post-production companies. The platform is able to address multiple workflows on Premise, Cloud and of course Hybrid Cloud. “The next step for Miria will be for our research and innovation teams to integrate discovery, analytics and decision-making tools to help users maximize their data and save on storage costs,” adds Luc D’Urso. Atempo understands that Augmented Data Management (ADM), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) need to be applied to data storage and management solutions. Simply backing up, archiving and synchronizing will no longer suffice for customers who need help handling their data. Data will become increasingly less static and it will need to be available for analysis and to extract competitive business value.

Atempo FastScan enables petabyte protection

Atempo uses its unique FastScan technology to identify new and changed data at a glance. Parallelized FastScan file system scanning technology quickly and efficiently examines the contents of storage systems and ensures speedy and accurate execution of data workflows within the target window by eliminating unnecessary resources. The technology has been tightly integrated and optimized for shared parallel file systems and common enterprise NAS along with intuitive user interfaces for effortless productivity.

Atempo provides large-scale backup services for the University of Lausanne (UNIL), Switzerland. The University was looking for an efficient backup solution for around 1 petabyte of research file data. Most files were very small genomic data files. The data was stored on replicated ECM Isilon storage and the target was EMC ECS object storage. From a shortlist including some major vendors who submitted projects and underwent performance testing and data validation, only Atempo was able to check all the boxes. Atempo’s solutions are capable of managing the movement of several hundred terabytes to multiple petabytes with millions or even billions of files.

The company also worked closely with a Major Hollywood Studio, that needed to change their legacy storage for a different vendor. The primary challenge of the studio was the large number of files. The customer had two sites to migrate with substantially identical volumes. The total 1.25 PB volume was scanned in 9 hours, synced in under 12 days (over 100 TB/day), and incremental syncs lasted only 30 minutes. Atempo’s Miria successfully performed successive synchronizations to the new storage until the final cutover without any production downtime on the legacy storage. There were zero metadata or ACL issues.

THE FUTURE

Over time, the company has built a large customer base of global mid-sized and corporate organizations operating out of Europe, the United States and Asia. Having signed partnerships with leading HPC vendors, such as DDN, Qumulo or Huawei, Atempo now has new customer targets and is developing solutions to help them overcome new data management challenges that did not exist even two years ago. The company has also bagged new technological partners with recent inroads in the United States. In January 2019, Atempo launched an Innovation and Research Laboratory called Nextino with a dedicated team of data scientists to work on essential next-generation technology. Nextino teams will work closely with Atempo’s R&D teams to deliver the first versions of their intelligent storage management technology by the end of 2019.