News & Events

Frontline is a very active participant in the Australian IT community. Come back regularly to read our latest news and see what's coming up on the Frontline calendar.

The intelligent way to manage unstructured data

May 30, 2012

The rapid growth of unstructured data has become a major challenge for many IT managers. Documents such as emails, videos, PDFs and more are all objects that are stored somewhere, somehow. Imagine if you could give all of these objects the power to think for themselves?

The urgent need to manage unstructured data more effectively is driving the technology towards making this possible.

While in the past, all you had to worry about was the capacity of your storage systems – and whether the 5TB you’d invested in would be sufficient for your business needs – now you have to think about the millions of unstructured files being stored on these systems, what information they contain, and how to manage and utilise them effectively.

From a compliance perspective, you need strategies for keeping particular data for a set period of time and then disposing of it. From a search perspective, you need to know that you can find the objects in your storage environment when you need them.

Technology companies such as Hitachi Data Systems are seeking to build solutions that make data ‘self-aware’ – turning all those millions of files into intelligent objects that understand their own requirements and the relationship with other pieces of structured or unstructured data. An example: objects that dynamically migrate and replicate between different tiers of storage as needed.

The Hitachi Data Systems File and Content portfolio contains solutions that are well on their way towards creating intelligent objects out of all types of information. It manages all block, file and content data leading to significant cost savings, operational efficiencies and risk mitigation for legal discovery.

Using File and Content solutions, it becomes easy to set rules for your data. For example, if a regulatory agency requires that a particular document be stored securely for seven years and then be deleted, you can set a retention and disposal policy – and then not have to worry about it again.

Data Discovery Suite can be integrated to offer an easy to use search mechanism at the storage level to facilitate speedy and accurate searching.

Depending on the level of complexity of your environment, there are a number of ways to leverage Hitachi Data Systems’ Technology.

The best place to start is by having a conversation with Frontline. Ask us how you can archive more, backup less and consolidate your environment to maximise current and future investments.