The Wild West of Managing Unstructured Data Chaos

Unstructured data environments can be riddled with chaos. Masses of redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data idling on a network, the sheer volume of unstructured data, and heterogeneous storage structures all contribute to headaches for IT leaders.

Complicating matters even more is that every storage environment has a unique set of unstructured data standards. In our multi-vendor world, relying on native unstructured data management features from each storage vendor or cloud provider won’t cut it anymore.

The above factors have forced enterprises into what I like to call the “wild west era” of unstructured data management. Unstructured data is the new frontier and organizations who manage to “tame the beast” will have a serious edge over the other sheriffs in town.

Don’t Go into the Battle Empty Handed

Luckily, this isn’t our first rodeo. Our newest offering, StorageMAP, is the evolution of Datadobi’s field-hardened data migration and protection solutions into a fully-fledged data management platform.

StorageMAP is designed to enable enterprises to visualize, organize, and optimize their entire data landscape via one single pane of glass and put companies in control of their unstructured data’s cost, carbon footprint, risk, and value.

Here’s how:

1. Organizing, automating, and categorizing unstructured data.  This helps IT leaders understand what data they have, where it is, and who owns it.
2. Letting users create automatic unstructured data management jobs. Once IT teams have an understanding of how much data they have, where it resides, the types of data, and how active it is, StorageMAP enables teams to complete necessary data management projects automatically.
3. Scanning your data no matter where it lives. Whether your organization runs all of its data out of one data center, uses both on-premises and cloud storage options in one location, or utilizes multiple vendors around the world, StorageMAP can scan data and automatically tag it no matter where it lives.
4. Tagging the data. If one specific department owns any of the data, they have the capacity to put an ownership tag to identify that. For example, if marketing has 20 terabytes (TB) of data in one data center and 50TB in another, StorageMAP will be able to tag both under marketing data — regardless of it being on disparate systems. As more and more datasets are tagged administrators can begin to view the data according to its functional role in the organization instead of the traditional view looking through virtual servers, volumes, and file systems.
5. Presenting the entire unstructured environment in an accessible view. Users are able to search by tagged data in an easily digestible UI. Whether half the data is on-premises and half in the cloud, or half in one data center and half in the other, StorageMAP can find the unstructured data files and present it all in one dashboard.
6. Supporting action tags. Action tags allow administrators to take action on datasets of interest. For example, when viewing the analytics-driven results of a scan, it may be determined that some of the data is best suited on an archive tier, in the cloud, etc. Whatever the best action is for a particular set of data, StorageMAP can assign it. The administrator can then automatically create jobs to move the data around the environment regardless of original location.

No matter where your data lives, StorageMAP builds a virtual layer of organization over unstructured data environments of chaos. Ultimately, this makes life easier for enterprises to place unstructured data at the right place, at the right time, all the time.

Learn more about StorageMAP and how it can help your organization navigate the wild west of unstructured data management.