Integrated Media Technology (IMT), a tech systems integrator based in Hollywood CA, has launched its first software product. Called SoDA, the enterprise app can be thought of as data moving logistics service for AWS.
Update: GCP and Azure support plans added. On-premises cost comparison to be added at future date. 27 July 2020.
SoDA manages cost and data migration time visibility. You can use it to decide where best to move data, including comparing on-premises and public cloud tiers. A dry-run, predictive analytics feature allows customers to model the cost and duration of proposed data migrations to and from AWS. Data can be moved automatically according to policies or via manual transfer.
Greg Holick, VP of Product Management at IMT, said in prepared remarks: “SoDA predicts the cost and speed of data movement between on-premises and cloud solutions, giving customers the tools they need to control their spend and understand the time it takes for data movement.”
We asked IMT how SoDA gets and uses on-premises storage costs to make its comparisons with AWS public cloud S3 costs. A spokesperson said “Customers are typically aware of their on premises CAPEX purchases. We are looking at adding a pricebook feature, similar to how we do AWS, for each on premises storage later this year to make that comparison and we will do a cost/month basis based on a period of time.”
SoDA is delivered as a subscription service, with software running in a local virtual machine. It contains a policy engine with cost and ingress and egress transmission rates for different kinds of AWS S3 storage: Standard, Glacier and Deep Archive. SMB, NFS and S3 protocols are supported.
Users set up a cloud transfer budget and monitor how individual file transfers affect this with a real-time dashboard. A budget limit can be set to prevent excess costs. Data transfer jobs are tracked and itemised so chargeback routines can be implemented.
SoDA’s subscription pricing model has unlimited data movement with no capacity limits. It has RESTful API integration with third-party media asset management packages. IMT’s datasheet and video marketing material do not say how on-premises storage costs are calculated.
IMT plans to add Azure support by the end of the year and GCP support after that.
Competition
SoDA appears to be an everyday data transfer tool – as opposed to a Datadobi-esque one-off migration project data mover. Other competing offerings include DataDynamics StorageX and Komprise’s KEDM. KEDM moves file data between NFS or SMB/CIFS sources and transfers it to a target NAS system or via S3 or NFS/SMB to object storage systems or the public cloud.
By the way SoDA is not an acronym. IMT chose the name because it’s a refreshing approach.
