Procuring memory and storage in 2026 is a road that keeps getting rockier for IT teams. TrendForce said its Q126 forecast for NAND Flash contract prices increased by 55% to 60% QoQ, with enterprise SSD prices up 53% to 58% QoQ. South Korea’s SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said that the global chip wafer shortage is likely to persist until 2030, as demand driven by artificial intelligence continues to outpace supply, according to Reuters.
IT prices are always subject to supply chain gyrations and other unpredictable market forces, but the “RAMmaggedon” disruption is no short-term hiccup. Komprise just announced a new service to help IT teams considering how to adjust.
It’s called the Komprise Flash Stretch Assessment, an analysis designed to free up 70%+ of primary capacity without vendor lock-in. Komprise COO and Cofounder Krishna Subramanian gives further insight into the offering, and how customers will benefit.
Tell us more about this?
KS: Flash Stretch delivers a customized analysis of your NAS environment and models how to free up existing hot storage and reduce costs across primary storage and backups while avoiding the data rehydration penalty common with proprietary storage vendor tiering approaches.
It can help with the following:
- Analyzing data growth and usage across multi-vendor NAS and cloud storage
- Identifying archive-ready data based on type, age, and usage
- Review tiering policies by department, project or use case
- Projecting capacity reclaimed and modeling savings across cloud/object destinations so customers can choose the best option
- Highlighting savings from avoiding storage vendor rehydration penalties
- Estimating backup savings by shrinking the full file footprint with Komprise Intelligent Tiering.
If an IT leader doesn’t forecast a need for new storage this year, why not wait and see how the market adjusts before investing in a new data management platform?
KS: Gartner has predicted a 130% increase in combined DRAM and SSD prices by the end of 2026. Unstructured data is growing at 20% to 150% year-over-year depending on your industry. It’s risky to wait as we don’t know how long this situation will continue. By planning ahead and optimizing now, you can delay storage refreshes while getting better insight into data for long-term, continual data lifecycle management. That’s just good business and it will pay off in spades for many years to come.
Typically, Komprise saves enterprise customers between $500,000 and $4 million annually on storage and backups, depending upon the size of their data footprint. Think about what you can do with this reclaimed capacity and budget.
How does Flash Stretch work and who can sign up?
KS: The Komprise Flash Stretch Assessment is available immediately for enterprise infrastructure teams evaluating strategies to reduce storage costs and optimize primary storage utilization. After pre-qualification, Komprise conducts an analysis of an organization’s NAS and cloud file storage environment for organizations storing at least 500TB and provides a report showing:
- Data growth and usage across multi-vendor NAS and cloud storage
- How much primary capacity you can free up for hot data
- Which data is cold and ready to tier (by type, age, and usage)
- How much ROT (redundant, obsolete, and trivial) data can be purged
- Modeled savings across multiple cloud/object destinations to help you choose the best option
- Estimated storage and backup savings using Komprise transparent tiering to shrink the primary file footprint
- How much you avoid paying in rehydration costs that happens when switching vendors
How does Komprise uniquely solve the flash pricing crisis? How is Komprise different?
Komprise takes a different approach than block-based storage tiering. It addresses capacity waste and reclamation across all storage, eliminates rehydration fees and hassles for additional cost avoidance, and avoids user and application disruption with Transparent Move Technology (TMT)™.
- Works across any storage, any vendor. Storage-agnostic tiering across multi-vendor NAS, cloud storage, and on-prem tiers without proprietary lock-in, which saves customers on average 70% annually on storage and backup costs.
- No rehydration penalty. Komprise moves entire files (not blocks), so users can access cold data at the destination without triggering costly retrieval or rehydration fees.
- Transparent access with zero workflow disruption. Metadata, permissions, and access paths are preserved, so users and applications continue working as usual.
- Analytics-driven policy, not guesswork. Tiering decisions are based on real usage data, with flexible policies by department, workload, age, or custom criteria.
- Cuts storage and backup costs at the same time. Moving full files off primary storage reduces both primary footprint and backup overhead.
How is Komprise positioned vs. other vendors that are responding with new strategies and services?
That’s a great question. It’s not necessarily an either/or choice, as IT organizations typically look at multiple ways to solve problems across their complex environments. We’re seeing a lot of messages bandied about right now in response to the storage and memory crisis.
- Some vendors are suggesting repurposing customers’ existing SSDs from legacy storage systems and integrating it into their latest, most efficient storage platform.
- Others are promoting data tiering of cold data to the lowest tier supported by the primary storage, not to any cloud or object tier.
- Still others are urging customers to stock up now, before prices get higher and/or move more data to the cloud where prices remain stable for now.
These concepts are essentially sound: the execution is where things can level up or not. Komprise is a storage-agnostic unstructured data management solution that indexes and analyzes metadata across all storage, from on-premises NAS to cloud. With these holistic insights, storage managers can make better decisions about where data should live, based on its core metrics such as volume, growth rates, age, time of last access and so on. They can also easily find duplicate and orphaned data across storage silos and get rid of it.
Our file-level tiering capabilities, based on Komprise Transparent Move Technology, deliver a no lock-in, no rehydration, zero-disruptive experience for users and applications. This allows us to save our customers a lot more, with a better experience, versus using a storage-based tiering solution.
What are the top benefits for customers of Komprise Flash Stretch?
- Holistic visibility across unstructured data and all storage tiers;
- Analytics-based decisions to continuously optimize storage and meet departmental needs;
- Modeled tiering plans and projected savings under different policies and destinations;
- Reclaimed premium flash capacity for current and future hot data;
- On average, 70% savings on annual storage and backup costs by right-placing data and cleaning up data estates;
- More budget headroom for high-performance, secure, AI-ready investments instead of letting petabytes of cold data fester on premium storage.
How do Komprise channel and technology partners benefit?
Our partners are always looking to add value for customers and help enterprises address budget and timing overruns. The Komprise Flash Stretch assessment helps them do just this and recommend the ideal mix of reusing existing capacity and buying more. With Komprise Flash Stretch, partners can help customers make better IT infrastructure investments across all technologies, with a focus on unstructured data management.
Learn more about Komprise Flash Stretch here and how to get started.
