Panzura has launched Symphony to help organisations deal with the complexities of unstructured data. It supports on-premises, hybrid, private and public cloud object data stores. Importantly, it is already certified for AWS, Azure, GCP and Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage.
The goal is to provide organisations with a single DataOps solution to manage all their unstructured data. Symphony is not a completely new solution. It is the first product to come out of the acquisition of Moonwalk Universal Inc. That makes it effectively the next generation of what was Moonwalk, albeit with a new and expanding tool set.
The Symphony platform will enable organisations to deploy consistent governance and management policies to all their data. According to Panzura, this can be done at the file and object data level. It will also help ensure that compliance and data security are built in when the data is used for AI.
Sundar Kanthadai, Chief Technology Officer, Panzura, said, “Panzura Symphony helps organizations navigate blind spots within expanding data estates. They can get compliant, stay compliant, and scale into every corner of their unstructured footprint with meticulous analysis and policy application, flawless data movement, and evidence-based reporting to stakeholders.”
What is in Panzura Symphony?
Symphony is part of the Panzura Hybrid Cloud Platform. It sits alongside Panzura CloudFS and has access to some of the services that sit under it. For example, it extends Panzura Data Services with additional governance and control. It also adds to the unstructured data management that CloudFS provides.
Panzura has identified three key components of Symphony.
Data Discovery and Assessment
Data discovery is challenging for many organisations. The amount of unstructured data they own makes it hard to know exactly what they have and whether it is useful. Symphony goes beyond basic discovery to provide details on how that data is structured and the content.
That means it allows the business to gain insight into areas such as the volatility of the data, whether it is current or old (hot or cold), the volume of data and who owns it. Much of that data will exist in parts across other data management systems. Symphony is bringing that together and provides granular control at all levels of the data.
It also has specific support for AI use of the data. This ranges from how data is collected and analysed.
Other features include:
- The ability to chargeback costs to individual parts of the business dependent on data use
- A RESTful application programming interface (API). Developers can integrate into other solutions already used by IT to simplify control, workflow, billing, management and other areas.
- Support for DevOps teams through webhooks, APIs, post-run actions, and relational database integration.
Risk and Compliance Analysis
Panzura says Symphony’s ability to find all unstructured data reduces the risk of compliance breaches. Its claimed ability to scan billions of files daily and produce reports is key.
The question has to be how effective all that reporting is. IT teams are overloaded with reports and data, as are compliance teams. What is missing here is how this links to any audit solutions that an organisation uses. Compliance teams will want the reports to work with their audit solutions, not provide additional workload.
Panzura says that this will also help with automatic policy enforcement. That will be a major bonus for many organisations providing there is a mapping solution. To suddenly touch very large numbers of files and automatically apply policies can have unintended consequences. Identifying what has been caused by a policy applied through this process will be critical for trust.
One integration that Panzura has announced is with IBM Fusion. It says, “Integration with IBM Fusion allows them to take automated, appropriate policy-driven action for handling Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other sensitive data. This helps organisations prepare for regulatory audits and demonstrate adherence to data protection standards.”
Dynamic Data Movement Orchestration
This will appeal to ITOps teams, who will use Symphony and CloudFS to orchestrate data management. Additionally, they can plan data archiving and migration when it’s not required.
One area where the company says organisations will see a significant benefit is in application development of data-driven apps. Symphony will allow ITOps and DevOps teams to collaborate on data orchestration to speed up development and ensure faster user access when using new apps.
In addition to data orchestration, Symphony also has Dynamic Workload Placement. It automates the movement of a workload to the optimal location be that users or processing. Importantly, this is also part of the support for AI pipelines. Reducing the processing distance between the data and where the AI is processing it improves efficiency and lowers costs.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This is a major announcement by Panzura. It adds another level of data management and control, especially around unstructured data. It is also easy to see why it acquired Moonwalk. However, that acquisition was just a few months ago, so this is more of an extension of that product under the Panzura banner. It will likely be the next version, where we will see more of the Panzura expectations for the software.
It will be interesting to see how this is adopted by the customer base. At present, it sits alongside CloudFS and not under it. While it uses CloudFS and the rest of that platform, Panzura is also pushing it as a platform in its own right.
It raises several questions. Will it look at greater integration in the next release? Will it merge Symphony into CloudFS? How will it develop the Symphony platform if it doesn’t integrate it into CloudFS?
What is important is that the company is broadening its focus on data and especially data at scale. This is unashamedly a tool for large enterprises and, maybe, the top end of the mid-sized enterprise market.
