Caringo FileFly cleans data off Windows Storage Servers

Caringo Inc. last week launched the FileFly Secondary Storage Platform to archive unstructured data from Microsoft Windows Storage Servers.

The secondary storage platform is powered by FileFly 2.0 and Caringo Swarm object storage. The platform supports the Windows Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) that keeps folders synchronized on multiple servers to increase data availability. It also supports the Microsoft Resilient File System (ReFS). The FileFly Secondary Storage Platform allows Windows Storage Server customers to offload infrequently used data from primary storage to an archiving tier.

The platform uses file attributes and access patterns to figure out which data needs to be migrated to the secondary storage. The data can be moved from the second tier storage to primary storage while the applications are in use.

You can take passive data, put it on Caringo Swarm and you are putting it on a piece of storage that is much lower cost.

"We've had FileFly on the market for about a year and a half," said Tony Barbagallo, vice president of product for Caringo based in Austin, Texas. "We felt like we wanted to put the finishing touches on it. It's less about the features and functions of the object storage and more about solving process problems."

Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, said the FileFly platform moves data from other file systems into Caringo object storage and makes those files still appear in the original location.

"You can take passive data, put it on Caringo Swarm and you are putting it on a piece of storage that is much lower cost," Staimer said.

FileFly for Caringo Swarm is a Windows-based application that plugs directly into the Windows NTFS file system. FileFly uses policy-based automation to identify and migrate aged data from primary file servers and arrays running the Windows Storage Server operating system to Caringo Swarm on the back end. No changes are required to applications or end-user workflows.

"Eighty to ninety percent of data on file servers is passive data that is not being used all that much," Barbagallo said. "It's labor-intensive to move data off primary storage. We created a secondary storage [platform] to automatically and transparently move data to a storage platform that offers the benefits of a primary storage platform."

FileFly replaced the Caringo Content File Server, a Linux-based archiving tool that provided an NFS mount on top of Swarm.

The new intelligence is built into the FileFly platform, which has been integrated with DFSR so data can travel between remote and branch offices or a consolidated site.

"We are solving [problems with] an important and complex process," Barbagallo said. "It's really a process solution, not a storage solution. It replaces a lot of manual processes."