Unstructured Data Management is Becoming Increasingly Important
GigaOm notes in their 2024 Unstructured Data Management Radar Report: “As data ecosystems flourish, sophisticated unstructured data management (UDM) tools are emerging, poised to unlock the vast potential of dormant data and propel organizations into a data-driven future.” The report also advises: “Strategic deployment of UDM solutions grants organizations full visibility into their data, informing the development of cost-effective roadmaps that maximize ROI on data storage.”
Unstructured Data Management is Not Storage Management
Unstructured data management has emerged as a new category that encompasses elements of data classification, mobility, governance, and cost optimization. While data storage and backup vendors have some data management capabilities, these solutions are focused on optimizing their own devices and deployments, not providing comprehensive data visibility, mobility and value across heterogenous environments. Furthermore, they address the problem from a storage-centric perspective, leveraging their storage file system, which leads to inefficiencies and lock-in that can be paralyzing to customers.
Five Requirements for an Unstructured Data Control Plane
Here are five requirements for a modern approach to unstructured data visibility, mobility and management which achieves maximum data storage price/performance optimization and data value:
- Ease of Set Up and Administration. Are you administering a unified product or multiple piece parts? How many admin guides are there? What does it take to deploy and administer the solution?
- Agentless Architecture. Can the solution scale across environments without complexity or are you stuck managing many brittle connectors? What are the connectivity requirements and what is required for upgrades and ongoing management?
- Visibility + Mobility. Can the solution provide actionable data and storage insights? Can it help you define and execute data movement at scale with policies suited to your data and not to the storage cluster?
- Native Data Access without Vendor Lock-In. As you move your data (e.g. tier data to the cloud) are you able to access that data in the new location natively or do you need to go through the source storage system? When it’s time to upgrade your storage system, do you need to rehydrate all the data you tiered to migrate to the new system and then tier the data again from the new system?
- Unlock Data Value. Does the solution provide easy mechanisms to find specific data sets and feed AI/ML engines and other processors? Does it allow you to tag your files based on its content and create custom workflows to address data governance and compliance, which are core data management functions?
Why Storage Agnostic Matters in a Control Plane
Unstructured data management requires a cohesive product vision, product architecture and long-term commitment from a vendor to deliver enterprise scale. This is exactly what Komprise has done since its inception, and why we are successfully managing an exabyte of data across customers. At Komprise, we believe that data management functionality is a layer independent of storage. By considering data to be separate from the storage in which it resides, it is possible to manage data holistically across vendors, be they on-premises storage arrays or cloud providers–and across technologies, be they files or objects. This approach has allowed Komprise to create an unstructured data management solution that is vendor agnostic and integrates tightly with on-premises and cloud storage to create a hybrid data management platform.
Komprise has also achieved multiple industry honors for our Intelligent Data Management platform.
Check out the Awards page here.
In my next post I’ll summarize how Komprise does against these five requirements for delivering a unified control plane for unstructured data management services.
