Datadobi is launching a data mobility engine that will leverage the capabilities of the company’s two original products to address the complex issue of managing the skyrocketing amounts of unstructured data that enterprises are generating.
The Belgium-based company’s Version 5.12, unveiled Tuesday, brings together a range of components that essentially creates what officials called a “step over the threshold” from Datadobi’s DobiMigrate — a data migration solution — and DobiProtect (data protection) and into a complete data mobility engine that can address the scale and challenges inherent in large storage environments.
The goal of the data mobility engine is to give enterprises the means for managing their unstructured data, which includes everything from images and videos to audio, emails, texts, social media content, spreadsheets, streaming data, and data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
The Challenge of Unstructured Data
Managing such data is no easy task, according to Steve Leeper, vice president of product marketing.
“Structured data consists of clearly defined data types with patterns that make it easily searchable,” Leeper told Enterprise Storage Forum. “In most cases, structured data is information that is highly organized, quantitative such as numbers and data, and to the point. Unlike its structured data counterparts, unstructured data is more difficult to manage and protect with legacy solutions. … Overall, unstructured data requires more storage.”
The growth in total data continues to increase sharply. IDC analysts are predicting that in 2025, there will be 175 zettabytes of data created. About 80 percent of that will be unstructured, with 49 percent being housed in the cloud.
However, the challenge with unstructured data goes beyond just the amount that is created. The data isn’t only housed in corporate databases and data warehouses in centralized data centers. Often it’s in the cloud or at the edge, beyond traditional corporate firewalls.
Read more: Managing Unstructured Data Across Hybrid Architectures
Scale and Complexity
Leeper said that enterprises today produce petabytes of unstructured data and that the “sheer scale and complexity of unstructured data in today’s heterogeneous storage environments can quickly complicate matters for organizations.” A recent report created for Databobi from 451 Research found that survey respondents listed a range of concerns regarding unstructured data, from capacity and growth to disaster recovery, high capital expenditure costs and managing the data store using third parties or cloud environments.
Databobi has created a vendor-neutral data mobility engine, which is important given that unstructured data can be stored both on-premises and in the cloud using appliances and technologies from a range of companies.
“Data mobility, protection and management that are rooted in clear ownership is how enterprises are going to be able to manage their ever-growing unstructured data, regardless of whether it is stored on premises or in the cloud,” Leeper said. “Business stakeholders and infrastructure owners will have no choice but to seek out tools and platforms that allow them to leverage a wide array of vendor and cloud offerings for the storage of their data, while also preserving cost-effectiveness and superior service.”
The Mobility Engine
Databobi engineers reworked the file access layer, enabling the engine’s NFS and SMB file access layers to focus on data copying and file system integrity verification in both the data center and the cloud, which tend to house products from myriad vendors. They used low-level optimizations in the NFS and SMB stack to drive more efficient data and metadata processing in vendor-neutral environments. This was done through pipelining of the protocol communication and parallelizing file access workloads across multiple servers.
The engine enables connectivity with all storage and cloud platforms, a key feature since most data moves between different storage products from different vendors, officials said.
In addition, the engine comes with what the company dubs its Integrity Enforcement Technology layer, a chain-of-custody technology that makes vendor-neutral data mobility more reliable and improves the preservation of data and metadata integrity during the move. It enables detailed reasoning of data and metadata semantic equality when data is copied, which officials said eliminates inter-vendor incompatibilities and vendor-specific behavior during multi-protocol migrations.
Scanning and reporting technology can drive fast insights into an entire unstructured data lake and show how the data is distributed. The engine is highly automated and orchestrated for faster and secure mobility. The DobiMigrate and DobiProtect products run atop the data mobility engine and are managed through a GUI.
Engine as Differentiator
The engine is a key differentiator for Datadobi, Leeper said. He pointed to Data Dynamics’ StorageX, Komprise’s Elastic Data Migration and Atempo’s Miria as Datadobi’s key competitors.
“Each of the incumbent solutions have migrations as an afterthought bolt-on and struggle in the large and complex environments commonly found in today’s enterprise,” he said. “Both DobiMigrate and DobiProtect are designed to eliminate the headaches that come with migrating and protecting hundreds of millions, or even billions, of files. The Datadobi engine powering these solutions allows for customers to see ROI sooner rather than later, allowing organizations to truly harness the power of their unstructured data.”
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