The News: Global file system vendor Hammerspace named former Amazon Web Services (AWS) general manager Marc Cree as its senior vice president of strategic partnerships. In this role, he will build out Hammerspace’s strategic partner ecosystem through alliances, integration collaboration, and OEM relationships. You can see the announcement on the Hammerspace website.
Hammerspace Adds AWS SVP and LLM Training Architecture
Analyst Take: Cree brings decades of storage, networking, and cloud experience to Hammerspace, which intersects in all those areas. The Hammerspace distributed file system spans data and applications in data centers and public cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Seagate Lyve Cloud.
At AWS, Cree was the GM for AWS Storage Gateway, responsible for product and business strategy for the service that allows on-premises workloads to use the AWS cloud. He has also been the CEO and founder of InfiniteIO, StorSpeed, and NuSpeed, an iSCI storage company that Cisco acquired in 2000. Cree joined Cisco as president and GM of its storage router business unit.
The Futurum Group classifies Hammerspace as a global file system, putting it in the same category as CTERA, Nasuni, and Panzura. These vendors use the cloud to provide access to data anywhere. Hammerspace also works with and competes with traditional NAS products, which makes its partner ecosystem crucial.
Future Steps
Hammerspace describes itself as “orchestrating the Next Data Cycle,” and you cannot do that without a strategy for AI and large language models (LLMs). Hammerspace last week released a data architecture for training inference for LLMs within hyperscale environments. The goal of the reference architecture is to enable AI technologies to design a unified data architecture that provides a supercomputing-class parallel file system that is as easy to access as standard NFS.
The reference architecture includes client servers, graphics processing units (GPUs), data storage nodes, and networking. Hammerspace software decouples the file system layer from the storage layer, enabling independent scaling of I/O and IOPS at the data layer. Integrated machine learning (ML) capabilities within the Hammerspace architecture will place related data sets in high-performance, local NVMe storage when the first file from the data set is accessed.
By bolstering its strategic alliances and its AI technology, Hammerspace is checking off two boxes it will need to compete with a plethora of unstructured data vendors, including some of the largest in the industry.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Hammerspace raises $56.7M in funding to unlock business opportunities
Hammerspace Introduces Data Orchestration Solution at NAB 2023
Key Trends in Generative AI – The AI Moment, Episode 1
Author Information
Dave’s focus within The Futurum Group is concentrated in the rapidly evolving integrated infrastructure and cloud storage markets. Before joining the Evaluator Group, Dave spent 25 years as a technology journalist and covered enterprise storage for more than 15 years. He most recently worked for 13 years at TechTarget as Editorial Director and Executive News Editor for storage, data protection and converged infrastructure. In 2020, Dave won an American Society of Business Professional Editors (ASBPE) national award for column writing.
His previous jobs covering technology include news editor at Byte and Switch, managing editor of EdTech Magazine, and features and new products editor at Windows Magazine. Before turning to technology, he was an editor and sports reporter for United Press International in New York for 12 years. A New Jersey native, Dave currently lives in northern Virginia.
Dave holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Journalism from William Patterson University.
