Aptare introduced a new enterprise storage resource management solution it calls Aptare StorageConsole File Analytics. The software leverages patented and patent-pending technology to sort through an organization’s data, allowing users to optimize IT resources by automating the process of identifying out-of-place files. This insight can be used to delete these files and move the ones not being regularly accessed to a different storage tier. This can also come handy in organization wide e-discovery, the company said.

“File Analytics’ ability to provide detailed profiling of unstructured data helps to ensure Aptare customers can amass meaningful and actionable information across NAS volumes and file-servers,” said Eric Sheppard, Research Director at IDC.

“This information can be used for policy enforcement, risk mitigation, storage tiering and reclamation, which positions Aptare to play an important role in helping organizations better understand, manage and optimize their storage environments.”

StorageConsole achieves these results by leveraging speedy agent-less data collectors with a small footprint that profiles the global storage environment, and feed metadata to a database specifically developed for this purpose. That metadata is then analyzed to provide an insight into file use trends, categorization, etc.

This architecture is where Aptare differentiates itself from the booming market around unstructured data management.  Central to it all is the data collector, which reaches out to storage servers and pulls the information needed.  That data’s stored in Aptare’s own offspring, the Bantam database, where it’s aggregated and shuffled into the StorageConsole Platform database.  This is where the end user accesses the data, configured nicely for the dashboard.  Aptare pays close attention to the user interface, with a penchant for HTML5.  What Aptare wants to sell you on is its ability to make data actionable from within this interface.

“We build business intelligence around data because of pure quantity and disparity of the information across an organization,” explains Aptare President and CEO Rick Clark in a soothing New Zealand accent.  “We’re unique in speed and our ability to capture information, and make it actionable.”

But there’s no shortage of approaches when it comes to analyzing and managing big data these days.  New models keep emerging as the startup space makes analytics a bountiful industry to explore, expanding its borders on a consistent basis. Hadoop plays an instrumental role in this regard, and Aptare attributes the industry-wide paradigm shift to this gaining platform.  Aptare hopes to initiate some thought-provoking shifts of its own, hearkening speed and aggregation processes to stand out from the crowd.

On its own, Hadoop’s open-source platform is gaining support from larger and larger players such as Microsoft, which – not long after partnering up with HortonWorks – finally announced it has pulled the plug on its own big data analytics framework. The news came the day after the Apache 0.23.0 release rolled out. Some of the major improvements include MapReduce 2, a rewritten version of the original, and the addition of federation that boosts scalability.

Contributors: Maria Deutscher