In the cartoon world, hammerspace is an extradimensional place where a character can suddenly pluck a mallet out of thin air, bash a hapless figure nearby, and then swiftly return it out of sight. Now a company by the same name is seeking to do something similar with data in the real world of network-attached storage.

Hammerspace emerged from five years of stealth development in October and has taken dead aim at the NAS industry with new technology that builds a metadata catalog of locally stored files and objects for replication in the cloud.

“We’re saying if you want ease of use and manageability, there’s a better way to do that than NAS,” said David Flynn (pictured), chief executive officer of Hammerspace. “We have spent the last five-plus years fixing the fundamental plumbing that makes it possible to bring the shared file semantic into something that becomes cloud native.”

Flynn spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed the need for change in the NAS market and how Hammerspace’s technology will address that. (* Disclosure below.)

Disrupting a $45-billion future market

The shared file plumbing that Flynn is taking a hammer to represents a cornerstone of the enterprise computing world. One recent report estimates the NAS industry will grow to $45 billion over the next four years.

It is a market ripe for disruption, according to Flynn. “The networked storage protocols haven’t had innovation for 20 years,” Flynn said. “The world of NAS is very focused on the infrastructure guys and the storage admins. What you have to do is elevate the discussion to be about the data user and empower them with powerful metadata to do self-service.”

Hammerspace is seeking to address a fundamental issue within the enterprise computing world, where the spectrum of data goes from performance to ease of manageability, distance and scale. But as the amount of data expands, it strains capacity efficiency that works against performance. Flynn, who pioneered the use of flash for storage acceleration at Fusion-io Inc., is counting on the power of metadata to close the widening gap.

“It is possible to have a shared name space, both file system and object, that can span that whole spectrum,” Flynn said. “To do that you have to provide really powerful metadata as a separate service that has the competency to actually manage the realization of the data across the infrastructure. This is all about putting the data owner in control by giving them a rich, powerful metadata platform to do that.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Hammerspace sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Hammerspace nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE