Research Note: Hammerspace, Inc. raises $100 million in Series B funding as a prelude to IPO

Hammerspace, Inc. has announced a further $100 million in funding following its initial Series A round in July 2023. To date, the company has raised $156.7 million from institutional investors and industry partners. When can we expect the company to file for IPO?

Background

Hammerspace, Inc. is a start-up vendor of data mobility solutions. The company was founded in 2018 by David Flynn, who previously founded and took Fusion-io to IPO in 2011. The name Hammerspace derives from the cartoon concept where characters can produce objects from nowhere – including hammers.

Hammerspace evolved from the ashes of Primary Data, a company started by David Flynn and Rick White in 2013, raising $100 million but failing to bring its technology to sufficient customers to generate any revenue. Primary Data acquired Tonian Systems in August 2013, providing access to skills in the development of the pNFS protocol. Hammerspace has subsequently funded the development of NFS in the Linux kernel – Hammerspace CTO Trond Myklebust has been a maintainer and lead developer for the Linux kernel NFS client for over 20 years.

Standards

A key feature of the Hammerspace platform is focused on standards, specifically those embedded into major operating systems such as Linux. The Hammerspace data abstraction layer exploits these capabilities without the need to deploy client software, extending functionality with enhanced metadata, but without requiring customers to throw away existing hardware.

This design choice is a powerful approach and analogous to the one proposed by this article’s author back in 2016. You can read about Mobilus in this blog post. Essentially, we identified a need for data mobility (see this post), which is becoming more prevalent today with the rise in AI. Unfortunately, the laws of physics place severe restrictions on the ability to share data everywhere, all at once. Instead, solutions such as Hammerspace’s Global Data Platform provide a single namespace from which data on multiple disparate platforms can be presented and dynamically managed for performance and availability.

You can learn about the Global Data Platform and the requirements of distributed file systems from two podcasts we recorded in 2020, embedded below and linked at the end of this post.

AI

As the hype around AI continues to grow, one clear challenge emerging is the requirement to provide access to data wherever it resides. The alternative is mass copying of content, which has practical and cost implications (as well as risking issues of concurrency). A single, global namespace such as that offered by Hammerspace provides an answer to data migrations. However, with one of the latest releases of Global Data Platform, there is even more benefit for AI workloads.

As detailed in this white paper from the company, many GPU-equipped servers ship with considerable volumes of NVMe SSDs. While these devices are fast and offer very low latency, they create islands of storage that are difficult to aggregate across a cluster of servers and so can end up an unused and expensive add-on.

Hammerspace solves this problem by introducing a “tier-0” layer that enables local NVMe storage to be shared and protected across all nodes in a cluster. In addition, the data mobility aspects of Hammerspace provide the capability to move data into and out of the tier-0 layer as needed, but without complex management processes.

The Architect’s View®

The Hammerspace Global Data Platform (GDP) offers a solution for enterprises to build a single universal access layer for all data within the business. This is a trend we have seen (and reported on) repeatedly across the industry, specifically with start-ups including Weka and VAST Data. VAST Data announced the “Data Platform” in 2023, while we covered Weka 4 in a post from September 2022.

While each of these vendors takes a different approach, the underlying concepts are the same – providing a single, unified view of data with support for multiple protocols. The difference with Hammerspace GDP is the ability to use existing hardware resources, rather than throwing technology assets away.

This differentiating aspect could be a winning feature for Hammerspace as it looks to broaden the appeal and customer base of GDP. This is especially the case for GPU-enabled servers with essentially redundant NVMe drives that can now be incorporated into a single namespace, without building in complex data management processes.

With the prospect of an imminent IPO, how will Hammerspace grow the market for its technology? The tier-0 capability points to a possibility where Hammerspace could enable its customers to exploit the benefits of the latest 120+TB SSDs without having to resort to entirely new architectures.

As we highlighted in this post from 2023, the market for SSDs is bifurcating into performance SSDs with relatively low capacity and read-biased high-capacity devices. Bringing the two together to create an efficient solution is a challenge. Hammerspace could achieve this result using its tier-0 technology while helping customers transition from existing hardware as they gain confidence in the solution. GDP effectively becomes the software layer for the file system and data mobility using commodity hardware in a similar design to VAST Data’s Data Platform.

The ultimate solution for data in the enterprise is one that separates hardware from the logical view of data and metadata. With this abstraction in place, IT teams can optimise the hardware layer, bringing in cheaper and more efficient solutions without the forklift upgrades of years gone by.

We believe that Hammerspace is in a strong position to benefit from the current AI hype cycle, but even when that ends, the prospect of having a single, unified data platform is a nirvana most businesses would love to achieve. We expect to see an IPO announcement before the end of 2025 and are keen to see how GDP will evolve to address more data mobility and management needs.

Background

Standards

AI

The Architect’s View®

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