DataGravity Inc. yesterday announced the DataGravity Discovery Series, which the startup claims is the industry’s first “data-aware storage platform” that tracks data access and analyzes data as it is stored. As such, the DataGravity software architecture lets IT teams, as well as security, compliance and line-of-business users automatically analyze unstructured data as it is ingested.

According to the company, what makes the DataGravity Discovery Series unique is that it’s a storage appliance that integrates primary storage, data protection, data governance, search and discovery capabilities within one product—key capabilities that companies were forced to buy, in the past, as five different products to get the same benefits.

“Previously, companies had to pull all of this data from a number of different sources and solutions, causing management and complexity headaches because it was locked into both departmental and product silos,” Paula Long, co-founder and CEO of DataGravity, told SiliconANGLE. “By unifying previously disjointed functions, DataGravity has created a new benchmark for storage, where the storage can now answer the business questions about the data.”

DataGravity was co-founded by Long and President John Joseph. Long previously co-founded storage area networking company EqualLogic, Inc. (where Joseph was Vice President of Marketing). EqualLogic was acquired by Dell, Inc. for $1.4 billion in 2008. So far, DataGravity has raised $42 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst Partners.

Long said DataGravity’s competitors include Nimble Storage Inc. and Tintri Inc., whose products, she said, specialize in “managing storage and have some enhancements for managing storage in a VMware environment.” But, she added, “neither of these products look at the content or users of the data to surface insights. The DataGravity Discovery Series is a data-aware storage platform—the first ever—that tracks data access and analyzes data as it is stored to provide greater visibility, insight and value from a company’s information assets. Other storage vendors provide just that—only storage.”

Laura Dubois, Program Vice President of Storage at research firm IDC, said in a statement that “the DataGravity approach is transformational in an industry where innovation has been mostly incremental.” Peter Levine of investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a backer of DataGravity) echoed Dubois’ sentiments. “This [is] not some incremental system that everyone else [is] building, but an entirely new way of managing storage and information,” wrote Levine in a blog post.

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The DataGravity Discovery Series

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Currently in beta with plans to ship in October, the DataGravity Discovery Series uses an HTML5 user interface (UI) with authenticated, role-based access. The DataGravity Discovery Series allows users to track and record real-time, file-level user activity across the data being accessed on the system. “Some of the data is surfaced in real-time and other insights are computed at user-defined points in time,” Long clarified.

IT and business users can understand data usage patterns, restore content, gain insights into information relevant to their projects and initiatives, and identify subject matter experts and potential collaborators. Users can find, filter and visualize content by topic, file type, size, owner, and date range and user activity to unveil relevant data.

Powered by an enterprise-grade hardware platform and patent-pending software architecture, the DataGravity Discovery Series is a unified storage platform that offers intelligent insights whether the data is block or file. It supports Network File System (NFS), Common Internet File System (CIFS)/Server Message Block (SMB) and iSCSI LUNs, with the additional capability to manage virtual machines natively, the company said.

The company said the DataGravity Discovery Series will be available at a MSRP between $50,000 and $100,000. It will initially be offered in two models, the DG2200 and DG2400, with 48TB and 96TB capacity levels, respectively. It will be exclusively sold through the DataGravity Partner Network of resellers.

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DataGravity’s take on containers

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Containers are a popular technology right now, especially with VMworld 2014 coming up next week and Docker (a rival of DataGravity) on the rise. Long said she thinks containers are a “very interesting technology” and she does see them “taking a place” in how applications will be deployed and managed in the future. “Virtualized infrastructure will still have a huge footprint,” Long said. “[But] it’s not clear yet what the best practices will be and where they will be applied.”

“[But] the future of storage is about much more than just the data container,” Long emphasized. “It’s about delivering integrated technology that lets users hear what the data they’re storing has to say about their business.”

VMworld 2014

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Next week, VMworld 2014 attendees can see the DataGravity Discovery Series in action at the DataGravity booth, #1647, August 24 through 28 in San Francisco.

For a sneak preview of what else is going to be discussed at the upcoming VMworld conference, watch this special episode of #CUBEconversations here (or below). Listen as Wikibon analysts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman discuss the topics of discussion that are planned for theCUBE next week.

Also, click here to stay tuned to theCUBE next week for live coverage of the VMworld 2014 conference.

Photo credit: B Tal via photopin cc

Photo of Paula Long courtesy of DataGravity

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#CUBEconversations video courtesy of theCUBE