Panzura and GRAU DATA partnership 'transforms' data management

The announcement came at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024, held December 10-12 in Las Vegas. The announcement coincides with news today that Panzura has released the latest version of the Panzura Symphony platform, which includes a new Data Insights subscription tier designed with data stewards in mind.

Combining the data operations capabilities of Panzura Symphony with advanced metadata extraction from GRAU DATA’s MetadataHub, the novel integrated solution empowers data-intensive organizations and specialized teams to rapidly derive deep insights from their data, accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics initiatives, and optimize storage costs.

“Every company is now a data company. With AI advancing, hybrid clouds expanding, and rising cyber threats, the potential of unstructured data is more crucial than ever. Our partnership with GRAU DATA is setting the stage for future innovation and success by giving teams unparalleled data control and insights,” said Mike Harvey, Senior Vice President of Technology, Panzura.

The integration of Symphony with MetadataHub offers optimized data placement, transformation, and restructuring for AI and analytics workflows. Panzura Symphony enables exabyte-scale discovery and assessment, risk and compliance analysis, and data movement orchestration. MetadataHub is a solution from GRAU DATA that unlocks the potential of unstructured data by extracting and evaluating metadata tags from over 400 file formats.

Seamlessly capturing critical content and context from data files, the integration creates a rich metadata repository that serves as a "proxy" for the original file. Metadata is a fraction of the size of the file itself, so this proxy significantly reduces the need to transfer large files, optimizing network and storage resources.

The Symphony integration with MetadataHub also delivers comprehensive data visibility and insights that accelerate informed decision-making across departments, teams, and roles like data stewards and those responsible for compliance and security policies. For example, it enables on-demand access to data across an entire organization so storage operations, business analysts, data governance officers, and even AIOps can leverage high-quality data for more accurate analysis or to feed automated processes and pipelines.

Initial support is offered for On-Demand Data Provisioning and Policy-Driven Data Management usage scenarios.

On-Demand Data Provisioning: MetadataHub serves essential file information to users and processes, eliminating the need to access the original file which is often thousands of times larger, dramatically reducing storage and network demands.

Policy-Driven Data Management: Leveraging Symphony’s policy-enforcement capabilities, organizations can define rules based on captured metadata and contextual details such as usage patterns and relationships to optimize storage and automate workflows.

Optimizing data placement and tiering, the Symphony integration with MetadataHub reduces storage costs and maximizes resource utilization. It also enhances data accuracy and reliability through comprehensive metadata enrichment, ensuring data visibility, compliance and security. Granular control over data assets and automatic policy enforcement further strengthen adherence to regulatory mandates.

Moreover, the integration breaks down barriers to efficiency and productivity, making data more accessible and usable for collaboration and ensuring teams can work together regardless of location. It quickly identifies needed information with content-based search and feeds rich insights directly into analytics, reporting, and AI tools, enhancing their capabilities. This streamlined approach improves data governance and provenance and facilitates the creation of valuable new data products.

According to research, unstructured data accounts for 80% of all global data. However, a staggering 90% of unstructured data is never analyzed, despite its potential value, because traditional data management and analytics tools are not equipped to handle it.

“Unstructured data and its metadata hold keys to driving innovation. Bringing together the strengths of GRAU DATA and Panzura, we’re not just improving data accessibility and quality – we’re paving the way for the AI-powered enterprises of tomorrow,” said David Cerf, Chief Data Evangelist, GRAU DATA.

The solution is of particular interest to life sciences and research institutions looking to accelerate breakthroughs in areas such as genomics, drug discovery, clinical trials, and regulatory approvals. The healthcare and life sciences sectors, which generate an estimated 270 GB of unstructured data for every person in the world each year according to IDC, need data intelligence to speed up research and diagnostic processes, make data more searchable and actionable, and to improve data governance and compliance.

The Panzura and GRAU DATA partnership also has implications for finance and investment strategies, particularly in areas like environment, social and governance (ESG) investing, where AI analytics are key to managing extensive datasets. The same is true for sensor data and production logs in manufacturing, and large datasets from climate models and satellite imagery in environmental research.

For these and other data-intensive industries, intelligence often resides in metadata which contain hundreds of tags that capture critical content and context from data files. However, this metadata is much lighter compared to the actual files themselves, making this approach extremely fast and efficient, as it allows for quick access and processing of data without the overhead of handling large files.

Customers can take advantage of a comprehensive implementation and support process to ensure smooth deployment and ongoing success. This includes a detailed assessment with a tailored strategy, phased deployment, comprehensive training, and ongoing support and optimization services.