About This Documentation

Hammerspace Service Level Objectives are a new paradigm that empowers organizations and stakeholders to declare the intent of their data. It couples desired outcomes with programmable conditions. That is the essence of declarative data control. The significance is that data can, then, be organized through metadata characteristics, inherent or custom, and further tailored to empower desired business outcomes. Declarative statements, such as Hammerspace Objectives, are a far more effective and modern way to create business outcomes from data than the more archaic imperative policy construct.

In the imperative policy world, such as used by most "policy engines", you have to be exceedingly detailed about exactly how to accomplish a desired end-state. This often translates into lengthy, complex instructions that outline exactly how something should be accomplished. This can translate to a hundred lines or more of instructions. The problem gets worse when you try to scale, upgrade, extend, or troubleshoot imperative policies. What if your workflow and production requirements need ten, twenty, or more imperative policies? It’s easy to imagine that this quickly becomes untenable.

Declarative policies, like those used with Hammerspace Objectives, remove the complexity and inefficiency of imperative workflows and skip directly to the desired end state. Telling a system WHAT you want to happen is infinitely simpler and far more elegant than the error-prone, tedious, time-consuming procedural instructions required in the old imperative paradigm. Declarative policies accelerate workflows, operations, and business outcomes.

This document explains key Hammerspace Objective concepts and provides detailed examples of how to configure Hammerspace Objectives for common deployment scenarios.

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