Data Dynamics, a leader in unstructured data management, unveiled recently a new major milestone in its enterprise strategy.Data Dynamics has entered into a new era for the company but also for the market as they set the pace now with a rich solution.
At the company level, the team grows with new key people like Helen Johnson as CTO and Brijesh Kumar as VP of software development. New offices as well in Pune, India, London and expansion of Houston, the historical site even during the NuView time. We don't know exactly what was the trigger of this almost sudden wave of people and development as we didn't see - yet - any money injection.
The first reaction about this is the company's wish to go beyond a product approach as they're known for StorageX and StorageX had a long life already under different companies. Companies changed but the product persists, a good sign perhaps.
The second info here resides in the company desire to build product families coupled under a platform model. This platform named Unified Unstructured Data Management platform is defined with key words, the term Unified is central here meaning an aggregation of various functions centered around file management but also covering object storage aspect. Of course the company is for unstructured data, nothing new here, but platform is essential as it invites users to understand a consolidation of usages and a central role in that data management aspect. It's even more critical today that enterprises live in an heterogeneous world with multi models and brands, file servers and NAS running Windows, Linux or "exotic" OS, deployed at local and remote offices and also connected to cloud entities. Having a wide solution that can cover this heterogeneity by nature with one file management umbrella is attractive.
The market is very segmented as it exists several point products in different categories of file management and consolidating functions into one platform is key for IT operations efficiency and investment protection.
Multiplying point product functions for every file management aspect creates complexity, introduces divergence, integration potential issues, compatibility questions and of course increases costs. The firm understood some time ago that one of the key differentiator across these solutions should come from the content and how you take decisions from the info you discover in files. For sure discovering some financial words in a file should invite the engine to increase file redundancy, add security for access, classify and tag that file, and potentially promote it to an encrypt workflow... the reverse is also true, "basic" files have to be processed with regular policies and this alignment has to be transparent and homogeneous across the enterprise. For this reason and more globally for data governance needs, Data Dynamics made a clever acquisition with Infintus end of 2019 to feed this strategy and today the integration provide real fruit with Insight Analytics 1.1.
Current enterprise class file management products embed what was named many years ago SRM (Storage Resource Management) when you wished to understand users access patterns but also find duplicates and potentially create links to them, remove space and gain empty space thus delaying new purchases.
StorageX 8.2 brings new capabilities and one of them is the file to object storage copy feature, to local or remote, on private or public cloud finally, that finally extends sharing. The term used "Transform and Sync" can lost the reader as there is no transformation of the file, it is just a copy giving then the access of the content via a object protocol but there is some actions on metadata for sure.
Platform supported are wide: any NAS exposing NFS or CIFS, Amazon S3 or EFS, NetApp StorageGRID or Cloud Volumes, Azure Blob or NetApp Files (NFS and CIFS again = NetApp Cloud Volumes), GCP Object Storage and IBM Cloud Object Storage. Other brands like Cloudian, MinIO, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Hitachi Vantara, Dell EMC ECS, PowerScale and Isilon should be supported as soon as NFS, SMB or S3 is exposed.
Data Dynamics expands its relationship with Lenovo, works with Dell EMC in the field and of course continues its partnership with NetApp. It seems that it is talking with IBM, illustrated by the support of IBM COS listed above, so the coverage is pretty large now. Azure should become a key cloud partner as Data Dynamics supports already several Azure storage services.
We wrote a recent article about NAS migration challenge and our last comment was "The NAS migration battle is on and there will be in 2020 some new partnerships and developments as this is a common need and often a nightmare for admins.". This Data Dynamics announcement confirms our anticipation.
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