Perhaps you’ve heard of DataGravity (@DataGravityInc), or perhaps you haven’t. They’ve been staying pretty quiet about what they’ve been working on. Today, however, they’re dropping the veil. Read on for a look into what you can expect from this exciting announcement!
Disclosure: I did not receive any compensation or benefit from DataGravity Inc. for writing this post. The product is purely awesome and excited me 🙂
Data-Aware Storage
What DataGravity has announced today with their Discovery Series is a storage array that is introspective and knows about the data being stored to a level that I’ve never seen before. Imagine if you could ask your array, “Who has accessed this file? How often? How old is it? Can you grab me a previous version of that?” This product does many things that we already have the ability to do with other tools; the difference between DataGravity and other like-tools is that this tool is providing you data about itself. Other tools look at your data and try to collect as much information as possible. This array has enough inherent intelligence to look at all the data being written and accessed and give you copious amounts of meta-information, all in realtime and without impact to production.
How??
A question that has changed the data center dramatically in terms of compute is about to change the way we interact with data. “How can I make use of these idle resources?” In the compute realm, we realized we could run many virtual servers on one physical server to drive up utilization and reduce hardware spend (with resources that were previously being wasted). When the founders at DataGravity asked this question about storage, they realized that an Active/Passive array could utilize the resources on the passive node to collect and process information about the data that is already being mirrored to it! Let me reiterate that – a passive node already has a copy of all this data, and then it just sits there. So DataGravity decided to take all that idle power and turn it into insights and intelligence about your data! 
The “Intelligence Node” chomps away on the secondary copy of your data while production IO hums happily along, none the wiser. This information is then digested and available for the business to use in as many ways as it can think of.
Put It To Work
So what are some of the ways DataGravity could help your business be more efficient, more secure, more intelligent? Here’s just a few:
- DataGravity recognizes and indexes content from over 400 different file types. All this is then searchable, and you can perform action on it.
- It identifies patterns within said file and can, for instance, alert you that a file contains PII like a Social Security Number. You can then contact the person who owns this document and ask them to remove the sensitive information.
- It interfaces with AD/LDAP and file-level ACLs to give you information about who owns/uses/modifies any given file. A company could then generate reports or take action based on correlations drawn from this information.
- Perform a file-level restore nearly instantly within a VM in a matter of clicks
Learn More
VMworld is coming up in a matter of days, and you can be sure that DataGravity will be there. You can find them at booth #1647 and if you have the time, you should be sure to stop by and have a chat with them. Also be sure to Follow them on Twitter and check out www.datagravity.com!
Write-ups by my friends:
- Why Is DataGravity Such A Big Deal? – Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett)
