Provider of network attached storage (NAS) migration software Datadobi has introduced
Datadobi Query Language (DQL).
DQL improves the file system assessment service in order to optimise and organise data lakes internally, Datadobi says. It is also a critical element of the company's vendor-neutral data mobility engine.
Datadobi's products, DobiMigrate and DobiProtect, were designed to scan large file systems containing billions of files to help companies harness the power of unstructured data. Each of these scans produces huge lists of file paths and their metadata in a proprietary format to allow storage-efficient handling, analysis, and comparison of the files, which in turn enhances unstructured data management.
Over the last two years as the pandemic drove digital transformation and increased the amount of unstructured data within networks, enterprises began asking the company for access to the scans in order to analyse and reorganise unstructured data lakes.
“In order for a customer to dissect the composition of the data, however, it requires some serious data reduction and aggregation in that set of billions of files,” the company said. “This created the need for a tool to query, aggregate, and reduce the amount of information about the data lake so it is consumable by the IT administrator.”
Now, DQL offers flexibility around how the software can interrogate the customer data sets and enables tremendous data reduction to make it manageable for the customers to handle multi-petabyte data lakes.
DQL is a query framework that can look for many aspects in a data lake such as identifying old data sets, or data that is infrequently accessed, as well as data sets owned by a specific user or group, such as by users who no longer work at the company. It can also identify shares, exports or directory trees that are homogeneous (cold, old, owner, file types) and can be handled as one data set, for example, to take specific lifecycle actions upon.
Datadobi says it created the file system assessment offering last year as a service for its customers that can be used before they plan a data migration or reorganisation.
“DQL is now an essential part of the file system assessment service because it enables assessments to be customisable,” the company explains. “Using the pre-migration service enhanced with DQL, customers can learn to understand what’s on their storage system, and based on the partitioning of their system in data sets, make a plan of what to migrate where.”
IDC predicted that by 2025, there will be about 175ZB of data globally, compared to 64.2ZB last year. Unsurprisingly, 95% of businesses say that managing unstructured data is a problem for them.
According to Datadobi, "IT administrators need a data management solution that can transform data into digestible material in order to allow curated decisions on storage options for migration and protection to be made."