The unstructured data catalog from Data Dynamics

A good surprise of the IT Press Tour this week comes from Data Dynamics who markets StorageX, the famous Network File Management and Virtualization product born at NuView then acquired by Brocade in 2006 for $60M.

Data Dynamics continues to penetrate enterprise landscape with 26 Fortune 100 companies, 6 of 12 world's largest banks and operating 350PB+ over 17 years of technology market presence. It means that the technology is reliable, proven, well adopted and span multiple technology waves and refreshes. We realize that StorageX lasts longer than the storage it manages and for a simple reason data lifecycle is longer that the hardware device where it resides.

We had the privilege to meet Piyush Mehta, CEO of Data Dynamics, now owner of StorageX since 2012, and got an interesting update on the product and future directions.

About the product, StorageX is one of the most comprehensive file data management and analytics platform based on a very advanced metadata engine. However it suffers from a lack of visibility on the market.

It operates as a global file directory service for on-premises and cloud file servers and NAS like DNS plays for Internet. The slide above illustrates the features set of the product around the analysis of the unstructured data environment.

StorageX leverages a SQL database for several years, StorageX integrates now Elastic search and NoSQL engine when analytics and archives modules are enabled, for storing meta data collected and the tagging that drives categorization and intelligence into the data. This information can be accessed via StorageX UI, API or directly via Elastic.

In term of deployments, StorageX server receives data from UDE - Universal Data Engine - collectors running on-premises. As a pure software, StorageX doesn't require agents, gateway or stubs.

With the 8.1 release, several new features were introduced:

• Analyze: optimized file scan and analytics powered by Elasticsearch plus the capability to perform query search to create custom datasets for effective data analytics and reporting,
• Move: support added for Microsoft Azure Blog meaning that StorageX adds object storage target,
• Manage: Integration added for 3rd-party monitoring tools plus enabled data grooming for Cassandra,
• Modernize: New API functions for business workflow integrations.

StorageX is also a key solution chosen and selected for the delivered proven ROI. The image below shows an example that illustrates perfectly generated savings.

The pricing model for all StorageX modules is based or capacity per year per account in addition to a StorageX engine fee.

We expect StorageX 9.0 soon with some interesting new features and product architecture. First in term of architecture, Piyush Mehta told us that the product will be redesigned with microservices for the core and edge i.e the data collectors. AI will be also included and security extended. The last addition will see content analysis to complement metadata knowledge, enhance policy engine and align with some compliance requirements. Very good session, hope to meet Data Dynamics for a future IT Press Tour to see progress.