How Your File Management Can Avoid Data Lock-Out

If your data management vendor closes, will you be locked out of your data?

Recently, a major cloud solution for secondary storage, backup, archival, and disaster recovery shut down, likely creating anxiety and uncertainty for its clients. This anxiety is probably justified: many file management solutions take ownership of your data—effectively holding you hostage to their offering.

Data lock-out—including physical gateway appliances, filesystem software virtualization, proprietary filesystem namespaces, and individual file stubbing or sharding—poses several problems for customers:

– No direct access to your files.

– Increased cost, risk, and complexity due to vendor lock-in.

– Loss of enterprise-level scalability capabilities.

At Data Dynamics, we believe that you should always maintain direct control of your data, whether you’re with us or not.

Data Dynamics’ StorageX solution offers:

– Direct Access to Your Files, Your Way (SMB, NFS, S3).

– No gateway, file virtualization, proprietary namespace, stubbing, sharding, or agents.

– Scalability to enterprise levels.

– Automated source mapping and provisioning at destination.

– File transform and file to S3 object conversion.

– A solution based on policy engines and industry standards.

To learn more about Data Dynamics and our industry leading file management platform, contact us today or email us at sales@datdyn.com.

P. Mehta, CEO

StorageX is fast (baseline copy)

In a previous article, I stated that StorageX is multi-threaded. I also spent quite a bit of time discussing why I consider this fact to be (mostly) irrelevant to the administrator who is using StorageX to perform his file system migrations. What the user of StorageX really wants is for StorageX to do its job as fast as possible: when he is doing a baseline copy, he wants StorageX to fill his network pipe and move the data as quickly as possible, and when he is cutting over to his shiny new NAS hardware, he wants StorageX to do the final incremental copy within his allotted cutover window.

As I mentioned in my previous article, the techniques StorageX uses to fill the network pipe during a baseline copy are very different from those used to find changed files as quickly as possible during an incremental copy. In this article, I will focus on baseline copies.

Continue reading StorageX is fast (baseline copy) →

The Future of NAS is Object

If you’ve been around the computer industry long enough, you’ve witnessed major shifts in technology.

One such shift took place in 1992, when NetApp, Inc. was founded. NetApp pioneered a new enterprise storage technology called Network Attached Storage (NAS). Compared to traditional direct attached storage (DAS) and storage area network (SAN) storage, NAS storage offered access to large amounts of storage in an easy to manage appliance. NAS was enabled by improved network technology and new high capacity disk drives. NetApp combined the new technology in such a way to revolutionize the enterprise storage market.

In the 25 years since its introduction, NAS remains a highly viable enterprise storage solution, but some might say it’s beginning to show its age….

Continue reading the new white paper.

The True Cost of File Archival

At Data Dynamics, we are passionate about file management. Our belief is that You should always have control of your files. You control where they are located. You control access to the files. And importantly, your files should never be trapped by proprietary software. To be clear, proprietary gateways, virtual file systems and namespaces and file archive solutions that compress, de-duplicate, stub or shard your files, trap your files in a never-ending cycle of license and maintenance fees.

What is different at Data Dynamics?

Just recently we unveiled StorageX 8.0, the latest release of our flagship file management solution. StorageX 8 introduces a powerful, integrated analytics engine and support for file-to-object conversion for file archival. Together, you perform deep discovery on your file assets and identify files to archive, based on size, type, age, owner and more. File meta information is used to build automated file migration policies that move files to S3-compliance object storage, on premises or cloud-based. For large workloads, comprising hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data, file movement policies can be implemented programmatically using the StorageX RESTful API.

We not in the “archive” business. We do not market an archive application with indexing, legal holds, case management, etc.; that is not our business. Rather, we convert your files to object format and we provide a file movement engine capable of moving millions of files to the location you select. Files remain in native S3-compatible format, so you can always access your files directly using a S3-compatible API or S3-compatible browser. You never pay to access your files.

What is the true cost of file archival?

Archive vendors sell applications for moving files to Amazon S3 cloud storage or its equivalent. You get an AWS account which you pay for. Not a bad deal considering “cold” blob storage costs as little as one cent per GB per month. Archive vendors add approximately ten cents per GB per month for the archive application license and maintenance.

The Data Dynamics approach is different. You pay us to move your files to S3 and you pay for the S3 storage. And that’s it. That is a cost savings of $120,000 for 10TB of file archiving for ten years.

Do you have silos of aging unstructured data that needs archiving to new low-cost object storage? If so, call us to learn why 24 of the top Fortune 100 rely on StorageX for intelligent file management.