Dell EMC Isilon, ECS gain ClarityNow for unstructured data
Dell EMC on Thursday picked up file software to help project teams access, control and manage unstructured data on heterogeneous storage.
The deal for Agoura Hills, Calif.-based DataFrameworks is Dell EMC’s first storage-related acquisition since Dell Technologies merged with EMC in 2015. Terms were not disclosed. Dell EMC said the transaction would not be material to earnings.
The DataFrameworks flagship, ClarityNow, allows data sets to be grouped together and related to business projects or use cases. The tool will complement Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS and object-based Elastic Cloud storage, said Varun Chhabra, a senior director of product marketing for Dell EMC storage and analytics.
“ClarityNow gives users the power to manage where their data lives, so they can have a consistent experience. It allows you to cluster your usage by project so you get a better level of insight,” Chhabra said.
DataFrameworks has gained traction in electronic design automation, health care and media and entertainment. ClarityNow does not replace Dell EMC Isilon CloudPools, which migrates inactive data to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Dell EMC Virtustream object storage.
“The ClarityNow piece is suited for very specific business workflows, where the end user requires higher degree of control over where the data actually sits,” Chhabra said.
DataFrameworks patented a way to organize file-based workflows according to its business logic. ClarityNow agents scan multiple file directories and object buckets to present unified search results. A metadata server indexes tagged data and the software allows users to move active data between archive and production storage.
Data sets can be grouped or related to specific projects or business uses for access and retrieval. Data protection can be applied at the asset level, keeping certain files on disk for hierarchical storage management and parsing other files to low-cost tiers. ClarityNow will tag one attribute in an application and use it for metadata queries to other applications.
Customers use Dell EMC Isilon to consolidate multiple file data on a massively scalable NAS cluster. ClarityNow fills a void created by the end of life of Isilon Search, a Linux-based virtual appliance that provided file searching across multiple Isilon clusters. Chhabra said it was “too early” to discuss the ClarityNow roadmap, but he hinted future engineering could expand its use cases.
“We have ClarityNow to fill the gap, but it’s turbocharged, because you can search across Dell EMC Isilon, ECS and any other platform that DataFrameworks supports,” Chhabra said.