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NeoPath Networks of Santa Clara, Calif., has announced a product that detects and analyzes patterns among files, enabling faster and more effective file management.
The software, aimed at enterprise customers with large numbers of files, runs on Windows XP-enabled machines and can analyze any data on any type of storage device.
Dubbed Fileyzer, the product detects and analyzes file patterns visually using what-if analyses, enabling IT administrators to pinpoint problems quickly.
“It can allow you, for example, to request all files that havent been accessed within the past year, and then what would happen if you were to extract those files out of the storage device and put them somewhere else,” said Alan Baratz, NeoPaths CEO.
Baratz points to an example to illustrate his point.
“One of our customers pointed the Fileyzer at its storage environment and up came the map of their file storage environment. The minute the map came up, the customer realized it had four copies of the same file taking up huge amounts of space. In about ten seconds, it became obvious that they had a problem,” he said.
Brad ONeill, a senior analyst at Taneja Group of Hopkinton, Mass., said that Fileyzer will generate considerable interest because of the way it visually presents information.
“Its the first approach Ive seen to visualizing files, creating information that is immediately intuitive, then actionable,” he said.
“You can make a selection based on file type or frequency of access or the age of the data, and it visually sees at a symbolic level what those data sets were, and then you can act on it. Its an intuitive way to solve some of the basic file management challenges like deduplication of data.”
Although many other products on the market offer similar capabilities—notably SRM (storage resource management) tools—none of them have taken NeoPaths approach of arranging the information in a focused way to solve a focused migration or capacity optimization challenge, ONeill said.
Although Fileyzer is sold as a stand-alone product for $30,000, the product also can be used in conjunction with NeoPaths flagship File Director file virtualization appliances.
Using Fileyzer as the first step, organizations will first better understand what they have and how to make what they have more efficient.
At that point, Baratz said, they can use File Director to perform the migration to gain those efficiencies.
For NeoPath, the next step is to move further toward the ultimate goal where an organizations entire storage environment can be virtualized, unified and customized.
“If youre a global company with thousands of storage devices spread around the world, we want you to be able to treat them as one integrated, aggregated pool of storage with one unified namespace you can customize to meet the needs of your business, and then give you tools to efficiently and effectively manage that aggregated pool of storage,” Baratz said.
“Our products today are really good at dealing with file storage devices, but not yet at the level of being able to deal with all file storage devices spread around the world.”