Datadobi is moving beyond mapping unstructured data, allowing customers to dig deeper into their data and migrate it to best fit their needs and budgets.
Datadobi StorageMap 7.0, available in July, is the latest release of the vendor's management software, with new insights and analysis, as well as custom dashboards.
Released in April 2022, StorageMap gives users insight into the data they wish to migrate by tagging the metadata layer. This enables unnecessary data to be tiered to lower-cost media, such as tape libraries, or deleted entirely.
The new tools build on top of this while adding new migration functionality, including write once, read many (WORM) migrations from IBM Cloud Object Storage and Hitachi HCP Object Storage systems for S3 systems that support the S3 Object Lock API, the vendor said.
One of the trends in the data storage industry right now is a focus on data management, according to John Harrell, an analyst at Gartner.
"If you're going to migrate something from on-prem to the cloud or to another device, it makes sense to ask yourself, 'What am I migrating? Why am I migrating, and how much is it going to cost me?'" he said.
StorageMap can help users know what data is placed where for better optimization of the storage, Harrell said. While storage vendors offer tools to migrate and manage data within their ecosystem of partners such as NetApp's XCP, Datadobi remains vendor-neutral to help avoid vendor lock-in.
Other data management companies that offer vendor-neutral data migration capabilities include Komprise and Hammerspace.
Further analysis
To refine its management, Datadobi has added an analysis module to analyze trends in unstructured data. This gives customers a better way to "slice and dice" their data and figure out what they are storing, according to the vendor.
Datadobi has added new filtering and classification to data before or as it gets migrated, according to Mike Matchett, an analyst at Small World Big Data.
"[Datadobi] has gone from just giving you a map to summary report," he said, adding that users can "filter and query on some of the stuff they're actually mapping at a larger level."
If you can scan all your files and objects and look at your unstructured data as one map, you can implement fine-grained policies at scale.
Mike MatchettAnalyst, Small World Big Data
An example is the ability to move a petabyte of data directly into a data lake for generative AI, which would be costly if all the data isn't needed for training, according to Steve Leeper, vice president of marketing at Datadobi. With the filters added in the new Analysis module, users can query the data down to a more manageable size and give information about where the data resides and how old it is.
Petabytes of data is much more difficult to manage due to its pure size, Matchett said. Filtering that data down to where the storage administrators take useful actions makes migration and storage more efficient in general.
"If you can scan all your files and objects and look at your unstructured data as one map, you can implement fine-grained policies at scale," he said.
Custom dashboards
The analysis of the data feeds into custom dashboards for tracking the data, Leeper said. The dashboards enable libraries of views to be generated for specific goals, including data age, last access time, sensitivity and criticality. This allows for pertinent migration and storage of more valuable data and the ability to archive or delete data as needed.
Dashboards provide a way to further classify data to make it more manageable and digestible, Gartner's Harrell said.
"Vendors are going toward these visual representations just so that you don't have to be as technical, and you don't have to learn multiple interfaces," he said.
This plays a critical role in multi-vendor or hybrid environments where the data is under a lot of different vendors, Harrell said. Custom dashboards help paint a clearer picture of where data is when you need to find or migrate it.
The idea of custom dashboards isn't new to the storage industry, Matchett said. However, custom dashboards allow a wider array of users to utilize StorageMap.
"Customers can do something with the data that is applicable and actionable," he said.
Datadobi StorageMap 7.0 pricing is available through OEM providers. StorageMap lists on Amazon Web Services EC2 for an annual subscription price of $160,050 for 500 TB.
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.com.
