eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Data automation management specialist Primary Data, whose claim to fame is as creator of the world’s first enterprise metadata storage engine, revealed Aug. 2 that it has raised a total of $40 million in its second round of funding.
The funding includes a $20 million investment with participation from Pelion Venture Partners, Accel, Battery Ventures and strategic investors from prior rounds. It also includes a $20 million line of credit to support sales acceleration amid a new product release and new industry partnerships.
The Los Altos, Calif.-based company said it would use the funds to support continued sales growth alongside the 2.0 release of its DataSphere software platform, which includes machine learning capabilities.
“The days of manual data management are coming to an end, and this investment round indicates the growth our investors also see on the horizon,” CEO Lance Smith told eWEEK. “As data volumes scale out and up into the cloud, enterprises are looking for a way to intelligently manage and automate how data is managed across different storage systems. DataSphere 2.0 brings machine learning to data management, enabling our customers to set policies that ensure they have the right data in the right place at the right time, automatically and without application disruption.”
Metadata Plus Analytics Equals Real-Time Business Decisions
To bring machine learning into data management, DataSphere collects metadata of a client’s data access and how it experiences the IOPS, latency, bandwidth and availability provided by storage.
Intelligent analytics are then applied against the metadata, Smith said, enabling DataSphere to match business requirements for performance, cost and reliability, make real-time automated decisions, move data without application disruption to overcome or prevent outages, and maintain compliance of service level agreements or objectives.
The ability to automatically manage data by objectives enables enterprises to maximize the value of existing infrastructure and integrate with the cloud to achieve improvements in performance, efficiency and scalability.
DataSphere’s global dataspace makes different storage systems simultaneously available to applications, operating out of band and without application interruption. This delivers control and integration across flash, NAS and cloud storage systems.
Key Features of New Version
DataSphere 2.0 is designed to bring intelligence into data management through new customer-requested features and powerful management capabilities. These include:
Objective Expressions: DataSphere 2.0 enables IT to choose from a catalog of data objectives and now provides deep control capabilities with Objective Expressions, developed by Primary Data co-founder and CTO David Flynn. Data mobility and allocation can be set according to metadata attributes such as file size, atime (access time), mtime (modification time), and last open time.
Get the Correct Data to the Cloud: Users can move data at the file-level to both private and public clouds, with the ability to automatically retrieve it to performance storage if needed again. Parallel performance and support for multiple clouds delivers agility and flexibility to scale cloud adoption in tandem with business objectives. Snapshot enhancements deliver the ability to move or copy data to the cloud to protect data without impacting enterprise capacity.
Support for SMB 2.1 and 3.1 and Active Directory: DataSphere also supports shares used by both Windows and NFS (Linux) clients to ensure that security and file permissions are handled correctly across both NFS and SMB.
DataSphere 2.0 provides metadata assimilation of NFS storage without interrupting data access, so that data can be seamlessly into the DataSphere global namespace without the need to copy data. Virtual networks, VLAN support and support for IPv6 and IPv4 environments meets enterprise customer requirements for supporting large network environments. Snapshot enhancements deliver the ability to move or copy data to the cloud to protect data without impacting enterprise capacity.
Primary Data has partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Cloudian, Google, Scality, NetApp, and VMware. DataSphere 2.0 is now available from Primary Data and its reseller partners in a number of deployment options and can be distributed across the enterprise or to support smaller Lines of Business workloads.
To learn more, send an email here.