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Copy data solutions specialist Catalogic Software announced the release of ECX 2.0, its copy data management platform that manages the full lifecycle of copy data.
The ECX software platform is hardware and hypervisor agnostic, integrating with the copy and replication capabilities of ecosystem partners through extensible plug-ins.
Currently supported platforms include NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP, ONTAP 7-mode, CLOUD ONTAP and VMware.
“The need for copy data management has been building for years. All the major storage guys see the problem but it is a hard problem to solve. Hard but doable,” Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software, told eWeek. “The industry has spent the last 10 to 15 years enabling companies to copy, replicate, backup and clone their data. In fact, most every data management problem was solved by making one more copy.”
Walsh explained this has created a situation where enterprises are over copying their data and don’t know what they have, let alone how to leverage these copies.
“The next great leap in data management will be enabling clients to see what they have and leverage these copies, driving out cost and driving up data access,” he said.
The platform is available at prices starting at $5,000 per controller, and the company is also offering a free 30-day evaluation of ECX, which can be downloaded from the company’s website.
Features include detailed insight and analytics through advanced search, customized reporting and file level analytics and data copy management, including one-click automation for all copy data workflows—from creation of copies, to usage, to expiration and reclamation.
“Copy data management is the missing link for analytics teams, full access to production environments as they looked an hour ago,” Walsh said. “This can also be done at scale without the need for a separate disk environment.”
In addition, ECX offers service level agreement (SLA) compliance and recovery assurance by providing exception-based reporting on all policies that are managed, as well as detailed logging which allows IT to troubleshoot failures and help get the systems back into compliance.
Having completed an early access program early this year, ECX 2.0 is already in production in dozens of IT environments, and it is distributed worldwide through Catalogic’s network of value added resellers (VARs) and distributors.
Customers using NetApp Snapshots, SnapManagers, SnapVault and SnapMirror or VMware’s snapshot and cloning capabilities can leverage ECX to gain an intelligent copy data management solution, and support for other storage platforms and hypervisors will expand as Catalogic plans to test and certify new products.
“We orchestrate and automate the process to simply mount a copy of the production environment as it was an hour ago, based upon hourly snapshots. Additionally, this data is full fidelity,” Walsh said. “If an application group adds data or capabilities, that data shows up immediately in these snaps. Without copy data management, the analytic team would have to first find out about the new data and then negotiate how to get access.”