Komprise Helps Enterprises Escape the Storage Price Trap

Enterprise storage has long had a potential pain point with growing unstructured data, but most organizations have tolerated the ballooning storage needs of their documents, video files, images, sensor outputs, project archives, and more because the cost of inaction seemed manageable.

That calculus has changed. The surge in AI workloads has triggered an acute shortage of high-performance memory chips, the same components that underpin enterprise storage hardware. As AI infrastructure competes for that supply, vendors have passed the cost along quickly, leaving organizations to urgently search for new solutions.

Recently I sat down with Solidigm’s Jeniece Wnorowski and Krishna Subramanian, co-founder and chief operating officer of Komprise, about how enterprises can better handle unstructured data, which makes up roughly 90% of all data generated worldwide. We explored how a problem that has been simmering for years has suddenly jumped to the top of to-handle lists for enterprise IT leaders.

The Budget Shock No One Planned For

The numbers are striking. “Just in the first few months of this year, most storage companies raised their prices by anywhere from 30% to about 75%,” Krishna noted. For IT leaders already managing double-digit data growth, that is a significant jolt to infrastructure budgets that were built around very different assumptions. Organizations are being asked to absorb substantially more data while spending far more per unit of capacity, with little room to maneuver.

The problem is compounded by poor visibility. Most enterprise IT teams know they are sitting on large volumes of cold data, files that are no longer actively used but continue to consume expensive primary storage. What they typically lack is the precision to act on it. “You can’t manage what you don’t know,” Krishna said. “Most IT leaders, I think the problem is they don’t know really what the issues are with their unstructured data.”

Unstructured data is sprawling by nature, generated across different users, applications, and systems with no consistent format to make analysis straightforward. Knowing the general shape of a problem is different from knowing which specific data can be safely moved, where it lives across on-premises and cloud environments, and what the real savings opportunity looks like.

Reclaiming Capacity Without Buying More

Komprise designed its Flash Stretch Assessment to close exactly this gap. Available to qualified customers with at least 500 TB of data for no charge, the service analyzes storage environments across both on-premises and cloud infrastructure to produce a concrete picture of data activity, growth patterns, and cost distribution by user, application, and data type.

The goal is to identify cold data that can be moved to lower-cost storage tiers, freeing up primary capacity without requiring new hardware purchases at today’s elevated prices. “We’re freeing up all that space, but you can now put new data onto it,” Krishna said. “You’re kind of reclaiming existing capacity without having to buy at these exorbitant prices.”

When organizations act on the assessment, the financial impact can be significant. Unstructured data accounts for roughly 30% of the average IT storage budget, and that figure encompasses not just primary storage but also backup and disaster recovery copies. Komprise reports that customers who tier their cold data can reduce storage and backup costs for their unstructured data by around 80%.

Transparent Access, Not a Trade-Off

A predictable concern with any tiering strategy is disruption. Moving data to lower-cost storage only delivers value if users and applications can still reach it without friction. Komprise addresses this through its patented Transparent Move Technology, which relocates data to the cloud or another tier while leaving a dynamic link in its original location.

“It looks like the X-ray image is still local,” Krishna explained. “Your applications can still open it, but when they go to open it, we stream that data from the cloud instead of it sitting locally. It’s transparent to users and applications so they don’t see any change.”

For data that follows cyclical patterns, such as project archives that go dormant for months before becoming relevant again, the platform supports bulk recall that restores entire datasets on demand, giving IT teams flexibility to handle the rhythms of how enterprise data actually gets used.

The TechArena Take

The current storage crisis is not a temporary disruption that patient organizations can wait out. Memory chip shortages tied to AI demand will likely ease, but the need to optimize your existing resources instead of planning to scale to meet increasing demand alone is likely the new normal.

The current pressure is forcing a discipline that should have existed all along: Many enterprises have been storing unstructured data without meaningful visibility into what they have, how fast it is growing, or what it is actually costing them. That was always inefficient. The difference now is that the inefficiency has become expensive enough to demand attention. Organizations ready to engage with decisions about what data to keep, where to keep it, and how to organize will be best positioned in the race to improve AI performance, slow infrastructure spending, and increase operational agility.

To learn more, listen to the full podcast or visit komprise.com.