Panzura has integrated its Symphony software with GRAU Data’s Metadata Hub to provide access to metadata-based proxies covering more than 400 file formats.
Symphony is an unstructured data management facility – based on Panzura’s Moonwalk acquisition – that enables customers to have automated, exabyte-scale data discovery and assessment, along with risk and compliance analysis, and dynamic data movement orchestration. It is a way for customers to gain insights into their entire data estate, allowing teams to conduct comprehensive data discovery and assessments, providing a view of data’s structure, content, and relationships.
Panzura’s SVP of Technology, Mike Harvey, explained: “Every company is now a data company. With AI advancing, hybrid clouds expanding, and rising cyber threats, the potential of unstructured data is more crucial than ever. Our partnership with GRAU Data is setting the stage for future innovation and success by giving teams unparalleled data control and insights.”
Panzura calls Symphony a companion to its CloudFS hybrid cloud file services platform that supports large-scale, active data, multi-site workflows. It also augments Panzura Data Services, which provides data visibility, governance, and real-time access to data.
The cloud concern claims that unstructured data accounts for 80 percent of all global data – and a “staggering 90 percent of unstructured data is never analyzed” because traditional data management and analytics tools are not equipped to handle it.
David Cerf, chief data evangelist at GRAU Data, concurred: “Unstructured data and its metadata hold keys to driving innovation. Bringing together the strengths of GRAU Data and Panzura, we’re not just improving data accessibility and quality – we’re paving the way for the AI-powered enterprises of tomorrow.”
GRAU’s Metadata Hub covers over 400 file formats, and enables metadata mining. It claims that, “through the extraction and evaluation of metadata, files can be searched, analyzed and comprehensively evaluated.” You can search, find, sort, filter and group all your files via the metadata embedded in them.
According to Panzura, the integration of Symphony with Metadata Hub offers optimized data placement, transformation, and restructuring for AI and analytics workflows. It asserts that by “capturing content and context from data files, the integration creates a rich metadata repository that serves as a ‘proxy’ for the original file. Metadata is a fraction of the size of the file itself, so this proxy significantly reduces the need to transfer large files, optimizing network and storage resources.”
Symphony + Metadata Hub enables on-demand access to data across an organization – so storage operations, business analysts, data governance officers, and AIOps can use data for more accurate analysis or to feed automated processes and pipelines. Initial support is offered for on-demand data provisioning and policy-driven data management usage scenarios.
With on-demand data provisioning, Metadata Hub serves essential file information to users and processes, eliminating the need to access the original file – which is often thousands of times larger – dramatically reducing storage and network demands.
For policy-driven data management, customers can use Symphony’s policy-enforcement capabilities to define rules based on captured metadata, and contextual details such as usage patterns and relationships to optimize storage and automate workflows.
The integration can optimize data placement and tiering to reduce cost. Granular control over data assets and automatic policy enforcement can strengthen adherence to regulatory mandates. It locates needed information with content-based search and feeds insights directly into analytics, reporting, and AI tools, enhancing their capabilities. Panzura claims this streamlined approach improves data governance and provenance, and facilitates the creation of new data products.
Panzura and GRAU predict customer markets such as life sciences, healthcare and research institutions can benefit from a Metadata Hub-enhanced Symphony. They cite IDC research showing the healthcare and life sciences sectors generate an estimated 270GB of unstructured data for every person in the world each year. They need data intelligence to speed up research and diagnostic processes, make data more searchable and actionable, and improve data governance and compliance.
AI analytics are, they argue, “key to managing extensive datasets.” These can constitute sensor data and production logs in manufacturing, large datasets from climate models, and satellite imagery in environmental research. It’s claimed that intelligence often resides in metadata which contains hundreds of tags that capture critical content and context from data files. This metadata is much lighter compared to the actual files themselves, making a metadata-based approach “extremely fast and efficient” as it allows for quick access and processing of data without the overhead of handling large files.
What we have here is not a turnkey offering or self-contained application. It’s a set of capabilities that needs integration into existing customer processes around unstructured data. Panzura is offering “a comprehensive implementation and support process to ensure smooth deployment.” This includes a detailed assessment with a tailored strategy, phased deployment, training, and ongoing support and optimization services.
The capabilities of Symphony + Metadata Hub partially overlap those of Arcitecta, Komprise, and Hammerspace – and Panzura is making a determined move to expand its reach from its original cloud file services business centered on CloudFS.
It’s also differentiating itself from cloud file services competitors such as CTERA, Egnyte and Nasuni.
We expect, with the mentions of AI-powered features from both GRAU and Panzura, that feeding data to Gen AI models will feature on Panzura’s Symphony roadmap.
Bootnote
Panzura has released the latest version of the Panzura Symphony platform. Symphony 2024.4 introduces a Data Insights subscription tier, designed with data stewards in mind. It helps them align data with business requirements, enabling quicker, more informed decisions, auditing, and reporting in support of risk and compliance initiatives.
Glen Shok has returned to Panzura as VP, Product Marketing. He left in January 2023 for a career break.
