Panzura says it is buying Moonwalk Universal for its hybrid cloud unstructured data estate scanning, migration and tiering technology, to help customers get AI-ready.
Update: Waldschmidt views on Panzura enablement of Gen AI amd RAG added. 19 July 2024.
Days after competitors Nasuni and CTERA each received additional funding to add Gen AI facilities to their cloud file services products, Panzura is making its own investment.
A statement from Panzura CEO Dan Waldschmidt said: “When it comes to your data, you need to see more to do more. We are thrilled to bring Moonwalk together with Panzura to help our customers achieve the visibility they need to do impossible things with their data. Leveraging our combined strengths will add even more fuel to Panzura’s next phase of growth and innovation.”
Moonwalk is a 20-year-old company with around 30 employees and was owned by Australia’s Dialog Group, which bought Moonwalk in January 2021. It itself was bought in May 2022 by Singapore-based NCS, a Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (Singtel) subsidiary. Moonwalk has developed Enterprise Data Management software which monitors a customer’s unstructured (file and object) data on-premises and in the public cloud. It can tier less well-used files from massive datasets to cheaper storage, such as on-prem and public cloud object stores. Migration can be governed by policies based on project, location, user, group, size, name, time, access, etc.
Moonwalk supports Aliyun, AWS, Azure, Backblaze and Wasabi cloud storage plus: Cloudian HyperStore, DataCore’s (Caringo) Swarm, Dell ECS, Hitachi HCP, RStor and Scality’s RING. It has integrations with IBM’s Cloud Object Store, Spectrum Scale, Spectrum Discover, Aspera and IBM Watson. Competitors include CloudSoda, Datadobi, Data Dynamics, Komprise and Rimage.
The new acquisition has offices in Brisbane and Palo Alto, Singapore Malaysia and the UK. Its products are often provided through system integrators, such as Atlanta-based Concurrent, and partnerships with suppliers such as NetApp and its StorageGRID offering. It also has OEM deals. Moonwalk’s end-user customers are found in the banking, healthcare, government, research and development, education and mineral resources market sectors.
Acquiring Moonwalk gives Panzura data scanning, onramp, and migration technology. Panzura CTO Sundar Kanthadai said: “IT teams grapple with extraordinary challenges due to the vast amounts of data siloed in disparate storage across their organizations. Lack of visibility makes it difficult to understand that data’s content and purpose, who has access to it, and how it should be appropriately treated. The result is heightened compliance risk, security vulnerabilities, diminished efficiency, and poor data quality.”
Waldschmidt said in a blog: “While it has served our customers well in the past, an “inner ring” approach of providing file data management for only the “top layer” of unstructured files – those which are in flight or accessed frequently, and only through the lens of Panzura CloudFS – is simply no longer sufficient.
“It’s time to extend the powerful functionality of Panzura CloudFS to the next “ring” of data – the 90 percent of file data for which organizations need visibility, access, and control to take full advantage of digital transformation in their own unique contexts.”
HGe added: “The Moonwalk acquisition marks a significant shift in our strategy. It positions Panzura as a platform provider in file data management, extending powerful functionality for a more complete solution.”
Panzura says the Moonwalk acquisition will allow it to provide ”customers with pervasive visibility over their data with seamless access, security, and scalability across hybrid-cloud environments.” It will help enterprises “make their data and workloads more productive, cyber-resilient, and AI-ready.”
Specifically it will have a role in “preparing data infrastructure for AI-driven insights and innovation, and helping customers harness the value of AI in their own environments.” This suggests to us that there is more to come here, that Panzura will introduce Gen AI large language model-related facilities to enable customers to use their Panzura-held data in intelligent chatbot analysis and response. It will also make a bid to become an overall unstructured data management supplier to its customers.
When asked about this Waldscmidt told us: “Moonwalk’s technology enables us to stitch together a global namespace, allowing organizations to see all data footprints in their organization. A key component of our approach, this scalability will ensure that data can be intelligently accessed and filtered based on specific, policy-driven requirements.
“Integration of Moonwalk’s technology will help Panzura make data and workloads AI-ready. Under development, our platform will work seamlessly with GenAI-powered assistants, acting as an enabler. Customers will be able to filter and expose relevant data sets for intelligent chatbot analysis and response.
“We see RAG as a powerful strategy for leveraging existing LLMs. By integrating these proven models, our platform will seamlessly connect our data management solutions with GenAI assistants, facilitating efficient data flow and intelligent responses.”
Mike Harvey, Moonwalk co-founder and SVP, based in Palo Alto, becomes SVP Technology at Panzura, and actually started work there in May, according to his LinkedIn entry. He said: “We are committed to a smooth integration with Panzura and existing Moonwalk customers will continue to receive the highest level of uninterrupted support and service as a part of the Panzura family.”
The acquisition terms were not revealed.
