Virtualization has become a mature platform with a mature ecosystem, and we now see it in every modern data center. With so many businesses heavily investing in hosting, developing and managing virtual workloads, there has also been an escalating difficulty in managing all the data in those virtual machines.
The DataGravity Discovery Series Manage VMs interface allows users to see each virtual machine, it’s status, consumption and protection level.
More VMs = bigger data challenges
When data center designs use virtual machines (VMs) as core workload building blocks, as more and more of them are doing, we also see more data housed in those VMs. And more data has meant more difficulty in finding what you need, when you need it.
To combat this problem, data centers need to bring data-awareness to their VMs. That means extending search, governance and protection capabilities to virtual machines so that IT and line-of-business users can analyze data based on content, people and time within each VM, when and where appropriate.
Drilling down into VMs
If your VMs hold virtualized file servers, virtual desktops and other assets, you can still gain data insights and surface information such as the most active users, the entire activity history and the performance details for each VM. The DataGravity Discovery Series enables you to take deeper dives wherever you need to. For example, you’ll need to remain aware not only about the activities related to each VM container, but also activity levels related to the data inside each container.
Data-awareness gives you that visibility. You can drill into individual files within your VMs to answer questions such as:
- When was the file created?
- Who created it?
- Who read the data?
- Which meta-tags are contained within the data?
You can ask all of these questions of the entire contents of the VM or by specific file type.
This capability is not a nice-to-have feature; in a modern datacenter with a virtualized foundation, data-awareness is a necessity. When you can easily navigate through VMs to unlock information in your files, shares, directories and data stores, you can answer the critical questions your IT and business users pose to you and to your companies’ stored data.
Data-aware storage solves many data management problems. Learn how in this DataGravity white paper.
Written by: Gabe Maentz
Systems Engineer for DataGravity
