ArcaStream and General Atomics Introduced Ngenea, Data-Aware Cloud Storage Gateway

ArcaStream Ltd. and General Atomics introduce Ngenea, a data-aware cloud storage gateway.

 Ready for quick deployment, Ngenea integrates with popular cloud and object storage providers such as Amazon S3, Google GCS, Scality Inc., Cleversafe, Inc. (acquired by IBM) and Swift and is optimised for data-intensive workflows in life science, education, research, and oil and gas exploration.

Object-based cloud storage services are highly scalable, resilient and extremely cost effective, making them an attractive solution for storing scientific data, and sharing it globally. cloud storage, however, is not easily integrated into existing on-premises scientific workflows which rely on industry standard NFS and SMB (CIFS) interfaces.

The advantage of using the powerful Ngenea data-aware cloud storage gateway is that it integrates on-premises data-intensive workflows, based on NFS and CIFS, with cloud storage services. Ngenea technology is distinguished by its ability to add rich application-specific metadata so workflow constituents can easily find, track, manage, protect and verify provenance of their data throughout its lifecycle.

Ngenea’s fast on-premises storage stores frequently accessed active data on the high performance file system, IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS). Less frequently accessed data, including backup, archival data and data targeted to be shared globally, is directed to cloud storage based on predefined policies such as age, time of last access, frequency of access, project, subject, study or data source. Ngenea can direct data to specific cloud storage regions around the world to facilitate remote low latency data access and empower global collaboration.

Another key feature of Ngenea is its ability to create a single searchable global namespace over both on-premises and cloud storage – providing centralised visibility, management, and complete awareness of data located around the world through a powerful and easy to use GUI. It lets workflow constituents and administrators identify what data is valuable and verify the provenance of data stored throughout its lifecycle. Metadata, or ‘data about data’, is the key to handling this increasing growth of information. Metadata makes big data stored in the cloud easy to find, track, move and manage – at low cost.

Ngenea provides enhanced application-specific metadata, along with access rights and audit trails for data-intensive life science, media and entertainment, energy exploration and scientific workflows, so workflow constituents can find and access the valuable data they are looking for. It can track data throughout the workflow, through all transformations, analyses, and interpretations. With Ngenea, data is optimally managed, shared, and reused with verified provenance of the data and the conditions under which it was generated – so results are reproducible and analyzable for defects.

“Data-awareness is becoming increasingly important across all domains as cloud and object stores make it so easy to store tremendous quantities of data,” said Ben Leaver, MD and co-founder, ArcaStream. “Ngenea provides actionable insight into data stored in the cloud that’s previously been unavailable, enabling collaborators to find and share the valuable data crucial to their endeavours.“

“Since Ngenea knows so much about what data is being stored and how and who is using it, the gateway’s data awareness can be used to reduce storage costs by enforcing data retention rules and identifying old, unused data for archive and deletion,” confirms Robert Murphy, program manager, big data, General Atomics. “Without the application-specific metadata provided by Ngenea, organizations risk amassing a growingly unmanageable data junkyard of inaccessible, ultimately useless data – at very high cost.“

Ngenea Data-Aware Cloud Storage Gateway is available from ArcaStream.