Up until this point, startup DataGravity have been rather secretive about the data-aware solutions they’re developing. But now they’ve released their Discovery Series, following a successful beta period. The Discovery Series is initially offered in two models, the DG2200 and DG2400, with 48TB and 96TB capacity levels, which essentially applies integrated search and analytics to storage so it’s no longer a black box.

IDC program vice president of storage Laura Dubois said the unstructured data dilemma is growing. “IDC has been predicting technology would catch up to provide an answer to the market demand,” she said. “The DataGravity approach is transformational in an industry where innovation has been mostly incremental. DataGravity data-aware storage can tell you about the data it’s holding, making the embedded value of stored information accessible to customers who cannot otherwise support the cost and complexity of solutions available today.”

More than 80 percent of the data being produced today is unstructured, according to a recent Gartner report. DataGravity explains that companies are struggling to maintain their rapidly growing stores of human-generated data. What’s more, enterprises are spending vast amounts of money on storage infrastructure, layered management applications and siloed processes that only introduce greater complexities without offering any real-time insights or benefits.

DataGravity intends to build on this gap with a unified storage platform that offers insights with the same richness of intelligence, regardless of whether the data is block or file. It supports NFS, CIFS/SMB and iSCSI LUNs, with the additional capability to manage virtual machines natively.

Long-time storage industry veteran and co-founder of EqualLogic Paula Long said,“We’ve integrated data analytics into storage — as data is ingested we capture who’s reading and writing it using Active Directory or LDAP. We capture who’s interacting with the data on the front end, we provide audit and activity trail, and on the backend we index over 400 data types.”

It offers fully visual view of the data and ways you can dig into it and surface information that typically was hidden inside storage containers in the past or required third party tools to view are now easily available.

The Discovery Series array has features that include information such as the top users and dormant data on a particular share or getting a facet filter that lets the user check different facets related to the type of data such as readers, owners and file types allowing zooming in or out of the data to meet particular needs. Each file put into the storage array is opened and indexed automatically.

It also uses industry standard algorithms to find personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security and credit card numbers. And as with any information in the DataGravity system, you can click any PII and learn more about it and then filter it by relevant facets.

“We believe that storage, provisioning, deduplication and in-line compression have become standard features (in storage),” Long, the startup’s CEO, said. “The features we’re talking about will be the next thing people ask for in their RFPs. Storage can’t be just a container for much longer.”

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(Image credit: Datagravity)