Tarmin Inc.

Tarmin delivers GridBank, its proprietary next generation data management platform designed to address the big data opportunity. It is a single unified offering that can address the entirety of unstructured data management requirements for enterprises. Built around the Three Pillars of GridBank, Tarmin is pioneering the technologies that support organizations in storing data, controlling risks and gaining understanding and insight into their fast growing unstructured information.

Combining the latest in enterprise ready innovations with standards-based protocols, the GridBank Data Management Platform is an integrated solution that blurs the line between infrastructure and application to deliver the comprehensive scope, power and elasticity required to successfully address the challenges of unprecedented data growth.Rather than simply developing another storage infrastructure solution with costly architectural requirements that force customers to choose one type of storage hardware over another, Tarmin Inc. has pioneered a revolutionary hardware independent software solution that enables information assets and the corporate network to be used for what they were intended’ connecting people with information.

The Tarmin Approach

In the Information Economy, data drives competitive advantage, enhancing innovation and informing decision making. Organizations leveraging their information assets efficiently can flexibly adapt to changes in the business environment. Meanwhile, alongside data value creation opportunities, there are also significant risks involved in commercial and reputational concerns and in non-compliance with regulatory and legal mandates, as well as considerable costs in storing the growing flood of data in a secure and reliably accessible way. GridBank Enterprise, the flagship product from Tarmin, comprising the full set of features of GridBank Cloud Storage, GridBank for Files and Objects, GridBank for Exchange and GridBank for SharePoint, is designed to store data, control risk and understand information. To that end, it delivers a full-featured, comprehensive data management solution for hardware agnostic hybrid cloud-based object storage with high availability replication for disaster recovery, policy-based compliance risk mitigation, big data analytics and high performance on demand information access for understanding and business insights and a significantly reduced total cost of ownership.

The GridBank platform offers a comprehensive suite of features that translate into significant benefits for customers. Through a modular architecture delivering a wide range of functionality, clients are able to realize enhancements in their understanding of business critical information, improved regulatory and data risk control and significantly reduced storage costs.

Tarmin GridBank Architecture

Next Generation Data Management Platform Architecture

Tarmin GridBank is entirely built on the very latest in proven enterprise technology with a highly modular architecture to deliver benefits focusing on the Three Pillars of GridBank. These are storing data, controlling risk and understanding information. Through GridBank's all-in-one approach to data management, it delivers six core sets of functionalities; object storage, global namespace, archiving, replicating, searching and big data analytics. The technology stack that achieves these features and benefits is outlined below. The GridBank System and Software Architecture stack provides an overview of the core components within the technology stack.

Global Namespace

The top layer is formed of Application Servers including Exchange, SharePoint, file servers, virtualized data centers and other sources for the ingestion process. These servers gain access to the GridBank stack through the Global Namespace. Data flows from Big Data Applications can also access the grid via the Global Namespace. Finally, third party applications can be integrated through the API. The Global Namespace provides the access layer to all other GridBank services, including the Application Aware Virtualization of Streamed Objects, during the process of ingestion of the application data.

Elastic Metabase

The core of the GridBank platform, the Elastic Metabase, sits within the Sessions, Authentication and Authorization Zone where security protocols are implemented, ensuring that no unauthorized users have access to the data. The Distributed Command Framework is a key proprietary messaging bus which passes data between the Elastic Metabase, the nodes of the grid and to each of the services, including Clustering Services which maintain the grid, Discovery Services which drive the federated search and e-Discovery functionality, Policy Management Services, which build and execute security and data management policies and Archiving Services which allow for storage optimization by offloading infrequently accessed data to secondary and tertiary storage tiers. The Big Data Analytics Services operate underneath these services to analyse big data flows, generate business insights and understand information. Finally, within this section of the stack lies the Elastic Metabase, itself, which uniquely stores every email, file, setting, policy, audits or log as an object alongside the metadata store, offering enhanced performance, greater security, flexibility to extend the metabase through the API and reduced network traffic and latency.

Storage Pool Virtualization

The Storage Pool Virtualization links the grid to the physical storage resources, consolidating the separate storage pools into a single centralized view of the virtualized file system. It provides connectivity to a heterogeneous array of Private Clouds in Multiple Datacenters, Public Cloud Storage, SAN, NAS or DAS repositories, significantly reducing cost and complexity of the storage infrastructure.

Three Pillars of GridBank

The benefits of the GridBank platform are described below. It follows the Tarmin strategy of focusing on the Three Pillars of GridBank, storing data, controlling risk and understanding information.

Store

The GridBank platform addresses four key points of data storage. GridBank limits the growth rate of data volumes through Object Dedupe and compression, ensuring that any unnecessary replicas are eliminated. Through automated policy-based data tiering, GridBank ensures that data is stored on the most appropriate tier of storage, delivering an optimal performance for both frequently and infrequently accessed data. It reduces the increasing unstructured data sprawl through GridSync, its local to cloud synchronization client, and smart device ingestion functionality, as well as through network trawling for .PST and other file ingestion. Finally, GridBank reduces total cost of ownership through storage optimization and significantly simplifying the complexity of managing disparate storage pools across heterogeneous hardware resources.

Control

GridBank delivers benefits for customers for controlling regulatory compliance, legal and commercial risks. It offers an integrated information governance framework for retention and disposal, including digital shredding, granular legal hold, and e-Discovery solutions, ensuring that legal and data compliance risks are mitigated. Additionally, it controls the regulatory, commercial and reputational risks of data protection and security through object-level encryption and authentication with strict logical separation between multi-tenancy stores. GridBank also ensures that data is highly available through fail safe replication, offering continuous data access even in the event of a data center outage. Finally, through automated data and object check summing, GridBank protects clients from the risk to data integrity through corruption or hardware failure.

Understand

GridBank is designed to enable organizations to better understand and gain insights from their critical data to enhance decision making. It offers big data analytics, empowering organizations to use its big analytics framework and data classification tools to understand underlying trends in business critical unstructured data. Through these analytics tools, organizations are able to gain actionable insights from their data, preempting future opportunities or threats to their core markets. Additionally, through high availability, clients gain continuous access to their data repositories, reducing downtime due to outages and accelerating search and e-Discovery. Finally, through enhanced access to company information, customers are empowered to innovate developing sustainable competitive advantage.

Features Overview

Policy-Orchestrated Object Storage

GridBank delivers hardware agnostic object storage, scalable to PBs and billions of objects. It provides Object Dedupe, compression, encryption and policy-driven data management for storage optimization.

Global Namespace and File System Virtualization

The multi-site global namespace enables geo-dispersed storage pools to be consolidated through file system virtualization. Through this technology, GridBank delivers a centralized repository, eliminating data silos and reducing infrastructure complexity.

Archiving and Data Migration

GridBank offers archiving, migration, ingestion, indexing and policy-based tiering of data. This ensures that retention, preservation and disposal are managed with both read/write and tamper-proof WORM copies available at optimal performance levels, mitigating compliance risks.

Replication and Disaster Recovery

Failsafe replication functionality is included in the software core, providing high availability and disaster recovery in the event of datacenter outages.

Search and Discovery

Through consolidation of disparate unstructured datasets, GridBank offers unified search for e-Discovery, data classification and on demand access to information for accelerated innovation.

Big Data Analytics

Finally, GridBank provides a big data analytics framework for application aware data mining and big analytics reporting and dashboarding based on data flows from customers, partners, market metrics and unstructured data stores.

According to IDC Research Report (March 2007), the amount of digital information that was created, captured, and replicated in 2006 was estimated at 161 exabytes, or about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. The amount of information created and copied in 2010 will surge more than sixfold to 988 exabytes, representing a compound annual growth rate of 57 per cent!