Frequently Asked Questions
Getting Started with Komprise
Can I point Komprise at my production storage? What impact will it have on users?
Yes, there will be no noticeable impact to users and applications when you point Komprise at your production storage and start analyzing it.
This is because Komprise uses an adaptive architecture – Komprise automatically throttles back as your primary storage and network resources are actively used, so that Komprise runs non-intrusively in the background. Think of Komprise as a housekeeper of data – just as a good housekeeper should never get in the way, Komprise too runs non-intrusively in the background. Learn more about Komprise Transparent Move Technology.
Can I get a Komprise demo or assessment? How does that work?
Yes!
You can see for yourself how simple Komprise is to deploy and operate, and assess how much cold data is in your environment, and the cost savings of using Komprise to transparently tier and archive cold data to less expensive secondary cloud storage or object storage of your choice as well as build Smart Data Workflows.
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Where can I learn more about Komprise customer benefits?
We’re always looking to showcase quantifiable customer results. Be sure to check out our case studies on the website. Also subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter and our YouTube channel.
Komprise Intelligent Data Management helps data-heavy enterprise IT organizations dramatically reduce storage costs while making unstructured data far more usable for the business. By continuously analyzing data across file, object, and SaaS environments, Komprise identifies cold, redundant, and low-value data (see ROT Data) and automatically tiers it to the most cost-effective storage, often delivering 50–70% storage cost savings without forcing migrations or disrupting users. Using Transparent Move Technology™, Komprise moves and manages data behind the scenes so applications and users continue to access files normally, even as data is optimized across tiers and locations.
At the same time, Komprise builds a Global Metadatabase across all unstructured data silos, giving IT operations a single, real-time view of what data exists, who owns it, how it’s used, and what it costs. This enables IT teams to operate data as a shared service, with storage as a service (STaaS) and showback models that make departments accountable for their data footprint. With self-service tagging and search, business teams can easily find, classify, and request data for analytics, compliance, or AI, without IT having to manually manage every request. The result is lower infrastructure spend, stronger governance, and faster, more scalable delivery of data services across the enterprise.
What are the main Komprise use cases?
There are many possible unstructured data management use cases for Komprise Intelligent Data Management, including:
Visibility:
Security:
Mobility:
- Data Tiering (patented TMT)
- Data Migration
- AI Ingestion
Where can I find Komprise documentation, support and training information?
Check out the guides, documentation, release notes, etc. on our customer portal.
To register for training or watch best practices videos, visit Komprise.com/KTP.
How is Komprise Different?
How is Komprise different from other data management solutions?
90% of the worlds’ data has been created in the last 2 years. Komprise was built from the ground up to solve today’s unstructured data management challenges such as analyzing and managing large scale environments but without the high cost, complexity and specialized skills to operate and administer of legacy software.
Unlike legacy data management solutions that are not storage agnostic, disrupt performance and/or are costly and complex to deploy, Komprise is a modern scale-out solution that deploys in 15 min, requires no agents on the storage, scales to handle massive data without any central database or bottlenecks, and works with any NFS, SMB/CIFS and REST/S3 storage. (Komprise Architecture Overview)
How is Komprise different from storage tiering solutions?
Unlike storage array data tiering solutions that treat the cloud like just another storage platter within the array and internally move blocks to and from the cloud within their file system without allowing native access in the cloud to the moved data, Komprise is an open file-based solution that enables access to the data either from the cloud itself or from the source, and retains a 1-1 mapping between files and objects, and requires no additional array software licensing to work. Komprise cloud tiering is not limited to any particular storage vendor and it works across any NFS, SMB/CIFS and REST/S3 storage. Why Komprise is the Easy, Fast, No Lock-In Path to the Cloud.
What is data rehydration and how does Komprise help me avoid it?
Data rehydration happens when you need to access data stored in cold or archive storage tiers, like AWS Glacier or Azure Archive, which triggers additional fees and latency as the data is moved (“rehydrated”) back to active storage. This process often comes with what feels like a penalty: you pay to retrieve data you already own, wait hours (or longer), and may even have to rehydrate entire datasets just to access a small portion.
Komprise helps you avoid these costs with transparent data tiering (TMT). Files tiered by Komprise remain fully accessible in their native format and location, without the need for rehydration. You can search, filter, and move only the data you need, when you need it, without incurring unexpected cloud retrieval charges. This lets you save on storage while maintaining fast, direct access to data for users, AI, analytics, or compliance.
How is Komprise different from cloud gateways?
While Komprise moves data to the cloud and provides a file gateway to the moved data for transparent access from the source, Komprise is intelligent and does not incur the high retrieval costs and performance degradation of cloud gateways. Unlike cloud storage gateways that incur high data retrieval costs and require dedicated hardware for hot data because they are using the cloud as primary storage, Komprise is intelligent, analytics-driven and uses the customer’s existing storage for the hot data and the cloud for inactive / cold data storage.
Komprise minimizes data retrieval costs, has no impact on the hot data path, requires no dedicated hardware, and works with existing storage without any rip and replace. Komprise helps you leverage the cloud while minimizing data retrieval and transfer costs so that you get the best of both worlds – lower cost of operations, greater flexibility but without high retrieval fees and unexpected transfer costs. Read the white paper: Storage-Based vs. Gateways vs. File-Based Cloud Tiering and the blog post Cloud Storage Gateways – A Good Choice for Cloud Migration?
What is the Komprise Data Experience (KDX)
The Komprise Data Experience (KDX) offers enterprises a storage-agnostic, analytics-first platform that delivers global visibility, scalable performance, and intelligent data workflows across hybrid environments KDX benefits from a Global Metadatabase (KMDB) to index metadata across on-prem and cloud silos, providing fast, non-disruptive insights and enabling automation via Smart Data Workflows. Customers benefit by stopping storage decisions without visibility across data silos, overspending on migrations, paying rehydration penalties, exposing data to ransomware, and sharing sensitive information with AI systems. This translates to optimized storage and backup costs, migration efficiency, risk mitigation, and AI-readiness, all while maintaining uninterrupted access for users and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Unstructured Data Management for AI
Why is Unstructured Data Preparation a Challenge for AI?
Unstructured data preparation is a major challenge for AI because most enterprise data (files, images, and logs) is scattered across silos, poorly tagged, and full of noise. Without visibility and context, AI models waste time and resources on irrelevant or incomplete data. Komprise helps data-heavy enterprises overcome this by delivering global visibility, smart filtering, and automated workflows that identify, classify, and move only the right unstructured data to AI platforms, making AI initiatives faster, more cost-effective, and compliant.
How does Komprise prepare data for AI versus ETL?
Unstructured data, because of its size, varied formats and lack of context and structure, is not a good fit for ETL which works with structured and semi-structured data from databases and data warehouses. ETL also does not fit well with the non-linear processes for AI and requirements for AI data governance. Komprise Smart Data Workflows delivers an automated process for unstructured data preparation and mobility:
Global metadata indexing and curation: Identify relevant data before moving it, integrating with AI processors as needed for rapid content analysis and tagging.
- User tagging: Allow end users to tag their own data.
- Iterative enrichment: Store results as reusable metadata to avoid redundant processing.
- Built-in AI data governance: Automatically detect sensitive information and maintain comprehensive audit trails.
How does Komprise help ensure that the data fed into AI workflows is not only accessible but also high-quality, relevant, and governed?
Komprise doesn’t just move data, it curates it intelligently for AI using its Global Metadatabase Service, which continuously indexes and analyzes unstructured data across file, object, and SaaS environments. This unified metadata layer gives enterprises a real-time view of what data exists, where it lives, how it’s used, and how it’s classified. Komprise uses this intelligence to filter out noise such as duplicates, stale files, and ROT data, enrich valuable content with searchable tags, and deliver only the right, high-value datasets to AI platforms. The result is no data lock-in, higher-quality training and inference data, lower cloud and compute costs, and built-in governance and compliance, without disrupting users or requiring manual data preparation by IT or data engineering teams.
Komprise Product Questions
Data Migration: What is the thread capacity of Komprise for short migration windows. Are there guidelines for data size per duration that you can provide from a guidance standpoint?
Komprise approaches unstructured data migration differently from other migration-only tools. With an analytics-first Smart Data Migration, the Komprise architecture has the unique ability to tune the data movement components, scale-up, as well as dynamically increase the number of data movers, and scale-out. Built into the Komprise architecture is the ability to automatically, and elastically, spread the migration workload across the data movers so no special tuning is generally required.
Where we find performance limitations is often in the storage systems, network architecture or the file system. Some storage systems have limited abilities and ports to scale IO. Some networks may have limited bandwidth or poor configuration. Some file systems may contain many empty directories or an excessive number of small files. Fortunately, Komprise analysis capabilities can identify these issues before migrating to set proper customer expectations. In one simple console, Komprise combines multiple ways to easily manage large data migration jobs, scale dynamically and continue to add value after the migration job is complete.
Can Komprise manage sensitive data across storage?
Yes. Komprise Smart Data Workflows includes a built-in PII scanner to search for data such as national IDs, credit card numbers and email addresses. You can also search for text patterns using keyword and regular expressions (regex) search to to look for employee IDs, machine or instrument IDs, product or project codes, or even PHI data like healthcare-system specific patient record IDs. Users can set workflows to run periodically, so Komprise automatically finds and acts on any new sensitive data for ongoing detection, tagging and mitigation, with full audit capabilities. Read more about Komprise Sensitive Data Management.
What is the Komprise approach for data classification?
Data classification is vital for managing unstructured data in the enterprise. It helps IT leaders optimize storage costs, manage data over its lifecycle and prepare data for AI with governance. Komprise Intelligent Data Management with Deep Analytics analyzes metadata and allows IT to tag data automatically and by policy for improved search and segmentation. This creates a Google-like search experience for data across all storage – on-premises to the cloud.
What can Komprise Analysis tell you?
Komprise Analysis gives you deep visibility into enterprise unstructured data across files and object and all storage including in the cloud. You can see data volume, growth trends, hot vs. cold data, top users, file types, and directories. You can do cost modeling (FinOps) for tiering and migration scenarios, estimate total cost of ownership (TCO), and forecast data storage costs (how to save and avoid costs) with interactive ROI projections. Komprise has a library of prebuilt reports such as showback, orphaned or duplicate data, and user audits to that can be customized and scheduled to support governance, stakeholder communication and decision making.
