Moonwalk for Windows
Moonwalk for Windows automates and intelligently manages the migration of unstructured data from Windows Servers and NTFS volumes to additional tiers within the storage infrastructure. Windows-captive files can be released for storage on Linux, UNIX, NFS or Netware, without affecting users and applications.
Moonwalk for Windows is fully integrated with the Moonwalk family of technology supporting interoperability with Netware, UNIX, Linux and NFS.
NTFS data can be optimized so that older or less-used files are automatically and transparently migrated to cheaper storage. Moonwalk moves the file content and ensures that the original file remains intact, preserving all file attributes and security information. Empowering Windows System and Storage Administrators to define, allocate and optimize storage using policies reduces the total cost of ownership while ensuring that data remains safe and immediately accessible.
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What is Moonwalk?
Moonwalk is an Enterprise Data Management system that allows companies to minimize storage expenditure while maximizing existing storage infrastructure.
Extending the capability of traditional HSM technology, Moonwalk places unstructured data into perspective by intelligently relocating files to and from various storage locations, depending on the value of that data.
This in turn, gives companies greater control of their datasets and optimum use of their storage infrastructure.
Common practice has seen companies simply buying more storage to accommodate data growth, creating even bigger headaches further down the track. With Moonwalk, companies can resolve many of these storage issues today, and maintain effective management of disk space on an ongoing basis.
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Are you managing your data effectively, or buying more storage to cope?
Many companies today are finding that the amount of data on their systems is simply unsustainable. Users are collecting more data every second, all the while expecting this data to be stored indefinitely and retrieved readily.
And of course, the information collected requires more storage and more processing power than ever.
IT departments are bearing the burden of this digital explosion. According to Gartner, unstructured data is growing at 125% a year, and up to 80% of this data remains inactive in production systems, severely impacting performance and clogging up primary disk space.
Moreover, IT personnel can spend up to 50% of their time shoveling data around and making continuous once-off decisions that amount to a series of band-aid solutions for the storage and management of their data.
As available storage is consumed, companies need to start thinking laterally and looking elsewhere for data storage solutions.
That’s where Moonwalk comes into the picture. Moonwalk is a proven solution that works on all major platforms, allowing companies to design and deploy rules for the management of unstructured data across the enterprise, from one central location.
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Moonwalk is designed for complete interoperability with Windows, UNIX, Netware and Linux, taking up only a small footprint in the operating Platform.
It serves as a single strategy to proactively manage the migration, copying and movement of data throughout the enterprise. It also allows for simulations to illustrate the impact of these actions so that companies can fine-tune rules to save maximum disk space and confirm that a policy will work as intended.
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Moonwalk works by allowing you to deploy a set of policies for classifying and migrating data, and it makes certain that these centrally configured policies will be distributed and enforced right to the edge of the network. It’s also network-aware and data-centric, so it allows for data management by project, location, user, group, size, name, time and other customer defined attributes, making complex datasets easier to express in simple data management policies.
It allows you to find data, allocate destinations, set rules and policies and run tasks – all from a single administrator interface that lets you manage your data from the inside, drilling down to information easily and swiftly.
Files can then be stored according to business value, and retrieved seamlessly whenever policies are issued. And by using Moonwalk, IT administrators can restructure their file systems transparently to the users, behind the scenes. They can also sweep their network for banned file types such as mp3 files, .WAV and .exe files, and take appropriate action.
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Moonwalk employs an IP-based interface allowing IT administrators to manage unstructured data for an entire organization from one application
Also, by decreasing the time spent micromanaging servers and storage systems; Moonwalk gives your IT staff more control over the management of the network.
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Users are typically oblivious to the expansion of their data. In response, system administrators are continually demanding more storage resources. When an organization introduces 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.
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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 provides a centralized management framework to assist in the determination of the true value of data. Moonwalk enforces the day to day management of the data according to that value judgment.
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Moonwalk’s unique architecture provides a scalability never before seen in hierarchical storage technologies. Without the burden of middleware and management servers, Moonwalk distributes data management tasks to the servers and devices responsible for those data.
This means no data funneling, no new single points of failure and no interrupts in the data access path.
Whether 5 or 500 servers, Moonwalk’s centralized policies and distributed execution guarantees a federated strategy for tiered storage management.
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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 extra layer of technology – and therefore, no additional 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 management 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.
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