About This Documentation

Hammerspace presents a cross-platform global namespace where users and applications can have direct, multi-protocol access to all files, regardless of which storage type, cloud vendor, or location they are in today, or move to in the future. Within this namespace, the Hammerscript language allows you to define and work with customized rich metadata by allowing you to express things in a semi-English language that are evaluated in an intuitive way.

Hammerspace uses all the usual metadata you’d expect in a traditional POSIX-style file system such as name, permissions and access controls. Additionally, it expands the types of relationships you can express with richer metadata.

Our Hammerscript language syntax is modeled after the formula syntax used by spreadsheets such as OpenOffice Calc, Google Sheets, or Excel. If you know how to write a formula in a spreadsheet cell, you already know many of the basics of Hammerscript. The customized metadata embedded in a Hammerspace namespace by Hammerscript is typically a kind of business logic, yet extremely powerful and flexible to meet the many ways data is managed and moved.

This document is an introduction to the concepts of Hammerspace metadata, and the tools to manipulate, and use metadata and put it to work to achieve business objectives for data. The reader will learn what metadata is, what it includes or can include, and how it is managed. The Hammerscript language is introduced, along with tools that use Hammerscript to query and orchestrate data management functions. These tools include Hammerspace Toolkit (HSTK) and the Hammerspace Metadata Plugin for Windows File Explorer.

For support resources, see the Hammerspace Support Hub and the Hammerspace Licensing and Delivery Portal.