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Chaos Sumo Launches Data Management Service for Amazon S3
Four months after receiving $1 million in seed funding, Medford, Mass.-based startup Chaos Sumo is hitting the market with its flagship offering, a "smart object storage" service for Amazon S3.
The company this week launched its Smart Object Storage service, along with a free "community edition," touting it as the industry's first Amazon S3-specific data discovery, management and analytics service.
First unveiled as a private beta this past June, the Smart Object Storage solution aims to address the problem of managing large volumes of unstructured data, which Chaos Sumo sees as becoming increasingly common as object-based storage services like Amazon S3 gain popularity.
As Chaos Sumo Co-Founder Les Yetton wrote in a blog post at the time, "Object storage is cheap, reliable and incredibly scalable and eliminates a historically big challenge in bringing new and compelling products to market. But S3, and similar services, are schemaless and lack the tools to extract value from the massive amounts of data that they house."
As a result, he argued, organizations must frequently resort to using outside services to make sense of their data, which introduces additional costs and risks to the data's integrity.
Chaos Sumo's solution is to add an abstraction layer on top of assets stored in Amazon S3, obviating the need for extract/transform/load (ETL) code. Proprietary technology then "creates a universal file format that can be discovered and organized without moving the data," according to the company's press release on Thursday.
Chaos Sumo claims its Smart Object Storage product can discover all of a company's data sources in Amazon S3; organize them by type, size and other attributes; and identify which objects are private or publicly accessible, as well as duplicated data.
"All the new, powerful analytics tools on the market have one fatal flaw -- they can't do their own AWS S3 discovery without significant customization or specialists," said Chaos Sumo Founder and CTO Thomas Hazel in a prepared statement. "Our vision of Smart Object Storage is to inject analytics directly into the data store itself."
More information on Smart Object Storage is available here.