Mastering Unstructured Data Chaos With Datadobi StorageMAP 7.0

Managing data sprawl has become a daunting challenge for IT professionals in the era of explosive unstructured data growth. Traditional approaches' lack of visibility, standardization, and automation leads to inefficiencies, risks, and missed opportunities. Datadobi, a leader in unstructured data management, is changing the game with its latest release — StorageMAP 7.0. We sat down with Steve Leeper, VP of Product Marketing at Datadobi, to understand how StorageMAP 7.0 simplifies data management and enables organizations to harness their unstructured data's power.

Gaining Visibility With Exploration and Analysis

One of the key additions in StorageMAP 7.0 is the new Exploration and Analysis module. Leeper explains, "It's about peeling back the onion and drilling into your data. You start with your total data capacity, then apply a series of filters, basically questions or queries about the data based on metadata. Each filter narrows the dataset until you get to an interesting subset."

This capability allows organizations to finally answer fundamental questions about their data — what data do we have? Where is it located? Who owns it? When was it last accessed? With these insights, data owners and IT can make informed decisions about data lifecycle management, risk mitigation, and value creation.

Enabling Data-Driven Storytelling With Custom Dashboards

Another significant enhancement in StorageMAP 7.0 is the introduction of Custom Dashboards. These allow users to create focused views on specific KPIs and aspects of their data environment. Leeper highlights, "Instead of one massive dashboard reporting on all aspects of the environment, you can have focused views on aging, geography, business unit, on-premise vs. cloud, or any KPI. The dashboards can be easily exported for reporting to management or data owners."

This feature empowers IT to effectively communicate the state and value of data initiatives to stakeholders. IT can secure buy-in and resources for critical data management projects by crafting compelling data narratives.

Optimizing Infrastructure Utilization

StorageMAP 7.0 provides powerful tools to optimize infrastructure utilization by ensuring data is in the optimal location. "A common scenario is customers with expensive all-flash arrays that are 50-60% filled with stale data that hasn't been accessed in years. Using StorageMAP's Exploration and Analysis, you can easily identify this cold data and configure automated policies to tier it to cheaper object storage or even cloud archives," explains Leeper.

By continuously optimizing data placement based on access patterns and business value, organizations can reclaim capacity on high-performance storage, defer capex, and achieve significant cost savings.

Fueling AI Innovation With the Right Data

With the explosive growth of Generative AI, efficiently feeding relevant data to these new workloads has become critical. StorageMAP allows organizations to identify and mobilize the right datasets. 

"Using the Exploration and Analysis capabilities, data owners and IT can collaboratively ask a sequence of questions to zero in on datasets likely to be valuable for AI model training. Then, with a few clicks, StorageMAP can execute the movement of that data to the AI data lake, with robust handling of permissions, errors, network issues, etc," describes Leeper. 

By enabling targeted data feeds, StorageMAP empowers organizations to fuel AI innovation without introducing undue cost or risk.

Bolstering Data Resilience 

Data resilience is a top concern in today's threat landscape. StorageMAP provides critical capabilities to enhance data resilience. Organizations can quickly identify mission-critical datasets, configure automated protection policies, and non-disruptively test recovery procedures. The software offers a real-time view of data protection status, ensuring RPOs and RTOs are met.

"We're also seeing a lot more organizations air-gapping backup copies or creating immutable copies to protect against ransomware, and StorageMAP can automate those workflows as well," adds Leeper. With StorageMAP, organizations can proactively fortify their data resilience posture.

Driving Operational Excellence Through Standardization and Automation

One critical challenge in managing unstructured data is the need for more standardization and automation, which can lead to inefficiencies and risks. StorageMAP enables organizations to establish consistent, well-defined policies and workflows for managing unstructured data across its lifecycle.

Leeper elaborates, "With StorageMAP, you can create standard categories for data based on business unit, data type, age, etc., and then define automated management rules for each category. Exploration and Analysis capabilities also allow you to monitor and optimize these policies continually."  

Organizations can drive operational excellence by shifting from a reactive, ad hoc approach to a proactive, standardized, and automated approach. StorageMAP's robust API allows integration with broader IT automation initiatives, further streamlining data management.

Conclusion

StorageMAP 7.0 is a game-changer in the unstructured data management space. Its powerful Exploration and Analysis capabilities, Custom Dashboards, infrastructure optimization features, AI data feeding capabilities, data resilience features, and standardization and automation simplify the complex challenge of managing unstructured data at scale. By providing visibility, insight, and automation, StorageMAP empowers organizations to reduce risk, drive efficiency, and harness the value of their data.

Leeper sums up, "Ultimately, it's about shifting from a reactive, ad hoc approach to a proactive, standardized, and automated one. With StorageMAP, organizations can implement consistent best practices, continually optimize based on insights, and automate the heavy lifting. This leads to better efficiency, agility, and risk management — the hallmarks of operational excellence."