Panzura unveils first offering after Moonwalk acquisition
Panzura, a hybrid cloud storage vendor, is kicking off an overture to data management with the release of Panzura Symphony.
Panzura Symphony is a data services platform that builds on the technology of Moonwalk Universal, a company it acquired in July. Symphony offers hybrid cloud data management capabilities such as data movement and discovery with granular controls down to file metadata.
The platform provides capabilities for monitoring storage usage, billing specific departments and connecting to other data services and systems through an API.
The definition of data management has become increasingly broad over the years, especially with the rise of generative AI projects in the enterprise, according to Mitch Lewis, an analyst at Futurum Group.
Panzura Symphony incorporates common data management technologies, but IT teams considering such applications for their technology stack should take stock of what their specific data needs are and what problems a given product could solve.
“Data management becomes a very malleable term,” Lewis said. “I think Panzura is hitting on a lot of the things that I’d consider data management between discovery and movement orchestration [technologies].”
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Specific Panzura Symphony capabilities include the ability for organizations to optimize data costs through metrics like usage, size and ownership. The platform provides the connections and relationships of a given file across both on-premises and cloud data stores, allowing customization of management policies per file.
Panzura Symphony’s Dynamic Workload Placement capability enables IT ops and storage teams to move, migrate and archive data as soon as needed. This can lower the cost of workloads running on more costly primary storage, Panzura claims.
The platform is a standalone offering and can be accessed and managed through a separate cloud console without any additional Panzura purchases. It does offer integration with the vendor’s flagship software-defined storage platform, CloudFS, and Panzura Data Services, a collection of data management and visibility tools for CloudFS.
Panzura Symphony is generally available today. Specific pricing for Symphony was not made available.
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The shifting responsibility of data management affects security, storage, backup and other IT departments, according to Jerome Wendt, founder and president of Data Center Intelligence Group.
Any IT department touching data should understand how it intersects with users, departments and budgets to find what product or service best suits their needs, he said.
“Who owns the budget for this?” Wendt asked. “The organization has to define who owns it. There’s a technical challenge here. … You need to be realistic about how much data there is and how secure it is.”
Organizations that are considering tools like Symphony might also consider platforms such as Komprise or Hammerspace, which also tackle data management but with varying levels of complexity and feature sets.
“Normally data management is where you’re placing your data,” Wendt said. “Now it’s evolving to what’s in the data and where is it [while] introducing intelligence.”
The rise of generative AI initiatives in the enterprise has drawn increased attention to data management tools, Lewis said. Generative AI capabilities, as well as more traditional machine learning, benefit from massive data stores but require significant organization and cost optimization to reap the benefits, he said.
“The more data you can throw at [AI], the better it is,” he said. “If you can identify that data with a data management tool, that can help you know if you need that data or if you’re refining your models to make them more accurate.”
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.
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