Upstart storage vendor DavaGravity came out of stealth mode Aug. 19 to launch its first product: a new data-aware physical appliance that plugs into an IT system to control unstructured data access and analyze digital assets as they are stored.
The DataGravity Discovery Series appliance handles both block and file data and is said to offer a ton of functionality in a single box: secure storage, data analytics, data governance and search and discovery utilities contained in an enterprise-grade hardware platform, according to the Nashua, N.H.-based company.
Because more than 80 percent of the data being produced today is unstructured, enterprises generally are struggling to maintain–much less derive benefit from–their rapidly growing stores of human-generated data.
“Companies are paying a premium for storage infrastructure, layered management applications and siloed processes that only introduce greater complexities without offering real-time insights,” CEO and co-founder Paula Long said. “DataGravity is addressing this challenge with a unified storage platform that offers insights at the same richness of intelligence.”
DataGravity Discovery Series supports NFS, CIFS/SMB and iSCSI LUNs, with the additional capability to manage virtual machines natively.
The DataGravity software architecture enables the automatic analyzing of information as it is ingested, without impacting production operations, the company said. The result is active insight that can transform how professionals in IT, marketing, compliance, human resources, sales and other departments work.
The Discovery Series uses an intuitive HTML5 user interface with authenticated, role-based access, so IT and business users can track their data, understand data usage patterns, restore content, gain insights into information relevant to their projects and initiatives, and identify subject matter experts and potential collaborators.
Why did DataGravity decide to go to market with a physical appliance, rather than a software-only or cloud approach?
“Layering applications on top of existing storage has only created more and more complexity and cost for organizations,” Long told eWEEK. “Introducing another siloed software layer wouldn’t have solved the challenges companies are facing.
“Just as importantly, there are insights that are uniquely available at the point of storage. To make those visible, we had to redesign storage metadata handling and storage architecture at a fundamental level, which we’ve done with the Discovery Series. We recognize that cloud is an important part of IT strategy for midmarket companies, and our product was designed to be deployed in the future in these environments.”
The new product, to be demonstrated at VMworld 2014 next week, will be priced between $50,000 and $100,000, depending upon storage capacity. The Discovery Series initially will be offered in two models, the DG2200 and DG2400, with 48TB and 96TB capacity levels respectively. It will be sold exclusively through the DataGravity Partner Network of resellers.
The appliance will ship in October. For more information or to see a live product demo, go here.
