Panzura adds data management product with Moonwalk buy
Panzura acquires Moonwalk Universal, adding data management tools to its software-defined storage, but analysts see data management products struggling as standalone offerings.
Panzura seeks to reduce the complexities of storage silos and migrations for its customers with the acquisition of data management provider Moonwalk Universal Inc.
Panzura executives said the acquisition will provide increased visibility into customer data silos, and enable data movement, storage tiering and other capabilities both within and outside Panzura's software. Panzura did not disclose financial details of the acquisition.
Moonwalk's engineering teams will be integrated into Panzura, and existing Moonwalk customers will continue to have access to its software and services, according to Panzura executives.
The acquisition will provide Panzura with functionality to help customers discover and prepare proliferating data sets for generative AI services or to meet industry regulations, according to Simon Robinson, an analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group.
"These are not new problems," Robinson said. "Fifteen years ago, there was a lot of data and it was still fragmented. But now that's even more complicated, and we've got data in more locations."
Storage analysts said they expect data management capabilities will continue to merge with storage to meet customer demand, but how Moonwalk will move the needle for Panzura remains to be seen.
A dance for data
Moonwalk, founded in 2004 in Australia, is a privately owned, global company with U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. It primarily sells its technology through OEMs and systems integrators that often rebrand Moonwalk's technology as their own.
Panzura sells a cloud file storage gateway called CloudFS, which enables a single namespace for unstructured data, alongside other SaaS capabilities for data management and access to edge storage.
Moonwalk software enables the movement of unstructured file data between on-premises locations and the cloud, as well as across storage tiers as needed with tools for data visibility and workflow controls.
Panzura CEO Dan Waldschmidt said the company will offer Moonwalk technology separate from CloudFS to provide customers a more complete picture of their data silos without the need to immediately bring data under CloudFS.
Moonwalk technology's workflow and policy controls for data will complement CloudFS storage management, Waldschmidt said, enabling customers to keep frequently accessed data within the Panzura system and tier off infrequently used data as needed.
"Moonwalk allows us to decouple the spiraling costs enterprises are facing with the need to purchase from us," he said. "It allows customers to have customized data pipelines that do not force [customers] to use Panzura's other products, like CloudFS."
Merging data management software with storage systems has remained a popular objective among infrastructure teams but often runs into organizational politics and unclear delineation of duties when deployed in the real world, according to Camberley Bates, chief technology adviser at the Futurum Group.
"Either the data storage guys don't have time to do this or the business unit owners around the table have difficulty [agreeing] on price or management," Bates said.
Stubby sticking point
Moonwalk's technology didn't catch on after almost two decades in the market due to its use of stubs compared with competitor technologies, according to Marc Staimer, president and founder of Dragon Slayer Consulting.
Moonwalk's stubs enable a form of hierarchical storage management to shift data from one storage location to another, according to a product brief by Futurum Group. A stub is generated at the original location with file metadata, security information and directory services transferring over. These stubs maintain the structure of the file system and indicate something was there previously.
Doing so provides a figurative paper trail to track data but can often break or appear as the target data itself, creating confusion over the years as new employees or systems try to track down a specific piece of data.
"As long as you have stubs, it's a tough [sell]," Staimer said. "Few organizations like stubs."
For comparison, Staimer said data management company Komprise uses symbolic links, also known as symlinks, which directly point systems and users toward the file itself, regardless of where it has ended up. Moonwalk's technology is similar to offerings from Caringo, an object storage company that DataCore bought in 2021.
Market migrations
Moonwalk competitors will now become Panzura competitors, but Panzura is already facing storage challengers that have fortified their offerings with data management capabilities such as NetApp and Vast Data.
Both vendors offer data management software alongside storage software and hardware, and their customers are unlikely to move to a third-party provider for that kind of functionality, Bates said.
"They're competing against some of the other guys that have done well in the market," she said.
It will be very difficult for a standalone data classification product to succeed in the market.
Phil GoodwinAnalyst, IDC
Still, data management companies and technologies will likely continue to be an acquisition target for storage vendors in the coming months to ensure that they're keeping up with competitors, said Phil Goodwin, an analyst at IDC.
"It will be very difficult for a standalone data classification product to succeed in the market," Goodwin said. "You'll see a lot of these companies acquired."
Industry and international regulations, such as HIPAA in the U.S. and the GDPR in the European Union, have already made customers demand a baseline of data management features from storage hardware and software provides, he said.
The new challenge for storage vendors, as well as customers, will be finding ways to bring their management tools into the data path earlier, such as after initial ingestion, he said. Generative AI model and application development depends on data tagging and classification, for instance, and customers might want their storage software to pick up some of those duties before turning to data lakehouse or data science platforms, he said.
"The question becomes when do you do that," Goodwin said. "[The data's] been ingested, [and] it's been stored, but you have to decide when you're going to apply those policies."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.
