DataGravity emerges with bold but intriguing 'data aware' storage system

Transcription

1 DataGravity emerges with bold but intriguing 'data aware' storage system Analyst: Simon Robinson 19 Aug, 2014 The team that built iscsi storage pioneer EqualLogic is back in the market with a new company DataGravity. The two-year-old startup emerged from stealth this week with a bold take aimed at 'reimagining' storage, initially targeting small and midsized enterprises. DataGravity says it has developed a full-featured primary storage system, but with a twist: it claims to be the first storage system that has in-built awareness of the data stored within. This, the company claims, provides the foundation for a whole raft of intelligent information management capabilities. The 451 Take No doubt about it, DataGravity is a bold proposition; one of the most ambitious and intriguing we've seen in the storage space. There's also no doubt that many of the information management and storage challenges it highlights will resonate with a great many organizations, regardless of size. The solution it proposes to these challenges seems innovative, and its pricing approach means that customers are getting many of the information management features on top of the core storage platform at no extra cost. That will be key in gaining attention because while storage and information management are arguably two sides of the same coin, from an IT organization perspective they are often viewed as being worlds apart. Context DataGravity was founded in April 2012 by the same duo CEO Paula Long and president John Joseph that created and built EqualLogic, the iscsi storage systems specialist that was bought by Dell in 2007 for $1.4bn, which at the time was Dell's largest-ever acquisition. The Nashua, New Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 Hampshire-based company has so far raised $42m from investors Andreeson Horowitz, Charles River Ventures (CRV) and General Catalyst Partners. Headcount currently stands at 80. Other executives include VP of field operations David Siles, VP marketing Jeff Boehm and VP engineering Steve Noyes. DataGravity's 'data aware' storage system is in advanced beta now with 14 prospects. The company is initially targeting small and midsized enterprises, the logic being that these companies have the same storage/information management challenges as their larger brethren, but with far fewer resources to solve them, and hence are more receptive to an integrated solution. The company also notes that this is a very large market with some 8 million prospective customers worldwide especially when served by a large and motivated reseller network. Although DataGravity isn't ruling out selling to larger enterprises, it will initially focus on smaller and remote branch offices and enterprise departments: it believes its product is valid in the enterprise datacenter, but notes that buying behavior is more protracted, since teams storage, security, compliance, risk are more likely to be fragmented into stand-alone silos. In the typical SME, all of the above functions might be managed by a single employee, or by a much smaller team. As with EqualLogic, DataGravity is planning a channel-only, indirect business model. Strategy DataGravity is tackling a well-recognized and long-standing issue in IT, not to mention one that many have attempted to resolve over the years with relatively little success. The core issue is this: storage systems have little to no idea about the precise nature of the data that lives inside them. This is sub-optimal for a whole range of reasons. It partly explains why the overall storage environment is fragmented into so many separate parts such as physical storage (itself divided into multiple access methods and protocols; i.e., NAS, SAN and DAS), management software, backup software and archive software. It's also why additional applications have to be layered on top to extract any intelligence about the actual information residing in the system for data e-discovery, compliance and security purposes. DataGravity adds that this accumulation of products and processes drives complexity and cost, and is also profoundly sub-optimal. Features such as snapshots, de-duplication and so on have to be performed as post processes 'install and crawl' rather than in real time because of their impact on primary I/O. Similarly, processes around data search and discovery can only be carried out with significant latency. Additionally, this accumulation of products is generally beyond the capabilities and financial reach of mid-market organizations. Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 Products DataGravity's Discovery Series of storage systems is designed to address these shortcomings by providing a full-featured primary storage system along with intelligent information management capabilities in a single, integrated system. The company says that by evolving to a 'data aware' storage architecture it can transcend the 'speeds and feeds' dynamics of a traditional storage system by adding the dimension of time as well as content and user awareness. This, it says, will evolve the conversation from a simple $/TB or $/IOPS basis to a more valuable 'dollar per answer' basis. Specific embedded features include integrated search and discovery (with content extraction from 400 file formats) and data governance (with real-time, file-level user activity tracking, even within VMs, as well as the ability to identify and protect access to sensitive content). The company says its system also provides a new approach to data protection it says an approach called DiscoveryPoints offers speed and simplicity of snapshots with the control and visibility of more traditional, catalog-centric backups. And unlike snapshots, the company says DiscoveryPoints work even if the primary storage system fails. Restores are near-instant, the company says, and can be done at any level of granularity: file/file system, files within a VM, a VM or an entire LUN. All of this comes packaged on top of what DataGravity describes as a 'state of the art' primary storage architecture, featuring a unified (file [CIFS/SMB and NFS] and block [iscsi]), flash-optimized, hybrid architecture, including in-line storage optimization. In version 1.0, the company will support in-line compression and 'targeted' de-duplication; these both occur prior to the data being persisted to disk. It's not talking about specific performance capabilities, except to say that it expects to be competitive with other arrays in its class and price range. For the first release, it has focused de-duplication on things that are highly de-dupe-able, such as VMs. This is done on both the primary and intelligence side. The company says it will expand further on this in the future. Another roadmap feature is replication, which is expected in the next release. How does DataGravity enable this combination of capabilities without affecting performance? The idea is relatively straightforward. DataGravity's systems are deployed as a traditional dual-node pair for HA; the primary node is used for all production I/O, while the second node which in a traditional architecture would be idle for most of the time includes the DataGravity Engine (rather than being 'active/passive,' DataGravity calls this configuration 'active/proactive'). This second 'intelligence node' provides the data protection, activity tracking and content extraction capabilities that create the information management capabilities. The system uses an analytics engine to capture data in-line on the primary node and consolidate this on the intelligence node as a catalog Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 of enhanced metadata. This data is then fed into a rules engine for processing, some of which can be computed in real time and some when a DiscoveryPoint is created. DataGravity says a key aspect of its platform is the way it brings all of this varied information together, into a HTML 5 interface, in a configurable manner depending on the user's role. So, for example, the 'file analytics' dashboard could provide a graphical view into top users by capacity and activity, identify dormant data, file type by category, and file categories over time. The system can be used in a governance context to gather, for example, personally identifiable information as well as identify who is accessing what data and when, as well as determine who is reading, creating and modifying data. Systems will be available in two form factors, offering 48TB and 96TB of raw disk capacity and 2.4TB and 4.8TB of flash capacity (using 400GB and 800GB SAS-connected SSDs respectively). For system expansion, DataGravity will initially provide capacity expansion by way of an additional disk shelf and associated flash. This will be delivered after V1.0. The company says it will follow this up with the ability to scale for primary storage and intelligence independently. It says it will do this in a way that doesn't complicate the server and client networks, and will expand upon exactly how in the future. The Discovery Series systems come with all software features as standard, priced at about $2,500 per TB, or between $50,000 and $100,000, depending on the system. The system will be generally available in October. Competition DataGravity is first and foremost a primary storage system, and will have to prove itself as a capable platform in what is an ultra-competitive market, especially in the small and midsized enterprise space it is targeting. As well as entrenched large incumbents EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell and IBM there's a new generation of players pushing flash-optimized and all-flash systems, including Nimble, Tegile, Tintri, Pure Storage, SolidFire and Nexenta. Over the coming months, DataGravity's claims of having a 'state of the art' primary storage will be put to the test. But the real value of the system is its ability to expose the information stored within the system in ways that are actionable along a number of planes. This is where the competitive net potentially widens substantially in theory, DataGravity is providing the functionality of not only a primary storage system, but also security functions such as DLP and auditing and e-discovery platforms from the likes of HP Autonomy, Symantec, Guidance, AccessData and Recommind. DataGravity Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 does not pretend that it provides all the rich functionality of all of these specialist point products out of the gate or even in the future but believes it offers enough functionality to be of interest to an over-burdened SME IT manager who historically has not had the resources to invest in such capabilities. At the same time DataGravity believes that its implementation of such features offers a vastly superior approach that comes without the baggage of historical approaches, such as installing and managing agents. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Coming from EqualLogic, DataGravity's founders have a proven pedigree in building successful and disruptive storage companies. At first blush, the Discovery Series looks like a category-defining product. There will be a few notable omissions in the first product, including support for scale-out and replication. Opportunities Threats Almost every organization large or small - will admit it could do a much better job of managing its unstructured information in particular. Few companies to date have put such a breadth of capabilities into a single platform. DataGravity is pitching its product to a storage market that is arguably at its most competitive, and it will have to stand on its own two feet as a best-in-class platform. Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 6