While the world’s largest organizations are working to decouple their workloads from underlying hardware, DataGravity Inc. is helping small- and medium-sized businesses move in the exact opposite direction with its analytic storage arrays. And its integrated value proposition was made even more attractive this week following the release of a major overhaul to the management stack that sets the systems apart. 

The second major iteration of DataGravity Discovery Series builds on the existing search capabilities of the platform with a new tagging system meant to help improve accessibility in large installations containing many different types of files. Information can be marked based on its importance or some other characteristic to allow for quick filtering.

That functionality allows administrators to enforce different access policies across files of varying sensitivity levels, granularity that is essential for customers in regulated industries that have strict data management requirements to meet. The tagging system could come even equally handy in large enterprises with multiple departments sharing the same infrastructure, suggesting DataGravity might be starting to look beyond the midmarket.

Another potential indicator of a strategic shift is the new profiling feature added in conjunction to help customers take advantage of the improved access in DataGravity Discovery Series V2. Administrators can now configure their systems to periodically check if files adhere to their pre-determined governance policies category and send out an alert if a violation is detected.

Although handy for any company that wishes to avoid the inevitable risk of something sensitive slipping through the cracks that comes with manual management, that kind of automation is especially useful in large enterprise settings with simply too much data to manage by hand. Monitoring becomes equally complicated at such scales, which is why DataGravity is also adding a new role-based auditing function as part of the update to let privileged users easily track activity.

Rounding out the release is integration with VMware Inc.’s vRealize Operations and Log Insight tools meant to help customers take advantage of their existing management investments. The new software is available with three models, the DG1100, DG2200 and DG2400, which pack between 18 and 96 terabytes of raw disk capacity on top of up to 4.8 terabytes of speedy flash.

Photo via DataGravity