We are Data-Aware Storage!

Hello all,

I am very happy to have the secret revealed.  Yes, that is what I am doing here.  The product that I have worked on since January of this year, and in fact has been underway for two years, is something I can talk about.  Finally!

Our Product

Our product is a storage appliance, which is Data-Aware Storage.  What is that you ask?  How about some pictures?

Isn’t this cool?  How about this one?

Wait.  You think that boring?  Please, would I show you boring?

Watch what happens when you hit Find.

Little more interesting?  Note that I started with an * to show everything?  For the first file I found - a gif file, note the first icon to the right of it is the Preview button, the next is the Download button, and the Restore button.  Think about that - sounds interesting right?

How about we search for the word confidential?  A little more interesting?

Notice all the info on the screen?  Not just the files we found - nor the Preview, Download or Restore buttons, but also notice on the left where you can see Readers and Owners?  There is a lot of power and flexibility - if you need it - in this screen.

In the middle of the screen is a button labeled Collaborators.  If we click on it guess what we see?

What this cord diagram is showing us is pretty interesting.  It is showing who communicated with whom, and how much they communicated - each user is a color, and the color connects with whom they communicated, and the size of the line is how much they communicated.  This is done by knowing that the user read, or wrote in common documents.  You can click on the users on the right to limit what you see, or you can use the facets on the left to filter more closely if you want.

I really also like the Experience View.  So lets select that button and see what it shows.

Now we can see specifically what is going on.  Michael did some reads, but everyone else has read.

What is Data-Aware Storage?

Because our storage can actually crack NTFS, and a lot of different file types it can see who has read or wrote what.  Plus we can crack virtual machines as well.  So think about that - we have virtual machines on NFS, we crack the VM(s), then crack NTFS, next we crack the applications and with all of that information we create an index that you can easily search.  But we also have files and virtual machines that are now protected and can be restored quickly and easily as necessary.  This is why we call our storage Data-Aware as it knows what the data is on our storage and it helps you to understand clearly what is on your storage and I think that is amazing.  All of the protecting, cracking, and indexing occurs on non - primary storage so they do no impact to primary IO.

However, do you think that all of this is due to magic or a lot of work?  It has taken us a lot of work to produce our storage appliance, but it has not taken much work to get into a position to have these screenshots - all of which are real.

What does it take exactly?

If you have networking / electricity already, and a place in a rack for our appliance, it takes roughly 1 or 2 hours to get it going.  Maybe quicker for some if you really do have everything you need - like IP addresses.  Once that is done you create some NFS / CIFS shares and copy files onto the CIFS share(s), and Storage vMotion some virtual machines to NFS, and you are good to go.  What that gets you is what you see above but with only your name instead of a bunch of different names that are my users.  As you have other users start to create and modify files you will get something like you have seen in this article.

VMworld

We will be at VMworld, and we will be doing demo’s so please make sure to visit our booth!  We are at booth #1647.  You can see what sessions we are doing, and more info in this article.

What is next?

Now the embargo is lifted, and the veil of secrecy is gone, I will be sharing with you a lot of cool stuff.  Like instant file restore inside of the VM it was deleted from - and without any setup stuff.  Or maybe how you can track down information you do not want on your storage.

Very happy indeed to start sharing what I am working on!

Have a great day,

Michael

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