Immediate Benefits

Immediate Benefits

Moonwalk makes it easy to manage complex data relationships across your total environment – interdepartmental, interoffice, Interstate or across the globe.

Better Governance

Enterprise managers may know what data is required to be kept to meet compliance with regulations pertaining to their particular industry but keeping it, and getting timely access, can be another matter. Furthermore, as legislation with regards to matters of governance evolves we are seeing a potential requirement for all data to be kept for a longer period of time. Moonwalk provides a means to articulate how files will be managed and to enforce those policies from a single point in the enterprise, safe in the knowledge that the data will be treated accordingly. Moonwalk is your internal compliance "insurance" policy.

With centrally managed policies, governance is drastically improved. Rapid data retrieval also makes it easier for companies to fulfill regulatory data storage obligations, which makes for greater peace of mind for CEOs and CIOs alike.

Greater Control

The ability to deploy centrally managed business rules throughout the Enterprise enables companies to determine a set of policies for file management, to quickly modify those rules to meet evolving business drivers, and be certain that those policies will be transparently enforced right to the edge of the network.

Moonwalk uses an IP-based interface that allows IT staff to manage their unstructured data files for the entire organization, from one central location. Also, by decreasing the time spent micromanaging servers and storage systems, Moonwalk gives your IT staff more control over the management of the network.

Greater Efficiency

Moonwalk is a non-disruptive technology operating transparently across the enterprise with no introduced points of failure. The data management is typically carried out by the data administrator from a single point with the rules for execution being deployed proactively throughout the network.

Distributed execution of migration tasks ensures that data is moved by the most direct route and avoids the reliance on a data management or funneling server.

More Value

The value of the data resident on storage is of much greater value to the business than the intrinsic value of the storage infrastructure. Ironically, the emphasis of effort and investment has largely been towards the management of storage and not the data.

Moonwalk provides management with a tool to assist in determining the true value of data and enforcing the day to day management of the data according to that value judgment. By developing a technology strategy synchronized with the data values, companies can control costs by allocating investment more according to protection of critical information and less towards lower value data.

More Money

Moonwalk saves money on storage infrastructure by allowing companies to migrate data from expensive platform-captive primary storage volumes to cheaper secondary tiers (SANs, HSMs, NAS, JBOD).

For too long the true cost of data acquisition has been swept under the carpet. Users often aren’t even aware of the issues they’re creating as they amass files. In most cases, they would have no idea of the human resources that have to be allocated to manage data or the infrastructure involved in accommodating increasingly large file volumes.

Tests across a number of different business environments have consistently shown that there was an immediate reduction of unstructured data on primary disk space – conservatively 40%, together with a significant reduction in time required to manage and store this data.

More Time

According to MetaGroup, IT personnel can spend at least 50% of their time shoveling data around. With Moonwalk, your staff is freed up from this tedious daily chore and has more time to focus on profitable activities within the business. They only need to decide how to value data and assign storage status, and their policies are executed throughout the network automatically.

Investment Protection

We can't use a crystal ball...but Moonwalk can underpin data management practices that will ensure your enterprise is well positioned to take full advantage of new and emerging storage technologies.

The powerful, centrally managed policy engine allows companies to respond dynamically and globally to changes in the business environment. By implementing a data management strategy embodying deliberate placement of data based upon value, the enterprise will be set on a continuum of best practice, efficiency and cost minimization.

Users don’t even know it’s there

Users are typically oblivious to the expansion of their data. In response, system administrators are continually demanding more storage resources. Once companies have introduced Moonwalk, it’s so transparent that users don’t even know it’s there.

Migrated files remain as available as ever, even though they’ve been moved elsewhere to protect primary disk space, and data is managed by the enterprise, not the individual.

Beyond HSM

Traditional Hierarchical Storage Management systems (HSMs) introduce a new layer of technology. Along with this layer, come the associated management headaches, extra costs and risks.

With Moonwalk there is no introduced layer of technology – and no introduced points of failure within the system. All data access occurs within the network, and if you remove the Moonwalk policy engine from the equation, 100% of data remains accessible.

HSM solutions traditionally have limited rule sets (i.e. file size & age of file) and are triggered by storage demands rather than data demands.

Moonwalk on the other hand, offers full flexibility in setting rules, allowing IT staff to build everything from simple to complex policies for data and allowing them to conveniently reuse these policies whenever necessary.

Moonwalk isn’t just a substitute for HSM – it’s an information lifecycle management (ILM) system with greater capabilities and intelligence all round.