MoonWalk Data Management Solutions

 

Organisations are facing an ever growing requirement to manage more effectively their data and storage requirements.  Not only have the volumes of data continued to grow but so too has the list of regulatory requirements that companies now face.  Legislation has enforced upon companies the need to manage their information smarter and more efficiently to provide easy access to this information as and when required.
However, although it is generally accepted that the value of an enterprise lies within its data, in many cases, the major investment and focus in organisations has been towards management of storage infrastructure and not the management of this data.  Common practice has seen IT administrators simply buying more storage to accommodate files, creating even bigger headaches further down the track.

MOONWALK:
Moonwalk has been designed to resolve many of these storage issues today, and maintain effective management of disk space on an ongoing basis.  Moonwalk automates and intelligently manages the migration, movement and copying of data from expensive primary storage to more cost effective secondary storage.  By enabling companies to migrate data from primary storage volumes to secondary tiers and beyond, Moonwalk helps reduce the total cost of ownership for data while ensuring it remains safe and immediately accessible.

Moonwalk works by allowing organisations to deploy a set of business rules and policies for categorising and migrating data.  The deployment of these centrally-managed business rules enables corporations to determine a single set of policies for data management - and be certain these policies will be enforced right to the edge of the network.
As a single tool, Moonwalk manages the moving / copying / migration of files to secondary tiers of storage, and in the case of migration, the transparent retrieval of those files upon user request.  Moonwalk will also manage data by project, location, user, group, size, name, time and customer defined attributes making complex datasets easier to express in simple business policies.
While increases in the disk capacity and substantial decreases in the cost per megabyte of disk storage systems have made the introduction of tiered storage cost effective and technologically smarter, organisations still need to have the right management tools.  A tiered storage infrastructure requires the right balance of software, hardware and data management policies that enable the intelligent and proactive movement of data to and from storage tiers, and Moonwalk is able to provide the management interface to achieve this.
Moonwalk combines centralized configuration with distributed execution thus avoiding network congestion and consumption of computing resources.  Moonwalk is the result of a significant research and development program and builds upon years of experience in data management gained from establishing and operating large-scale data centres.

MoonWalk Benefits

Moonwalk assists in gaining control of data within an organization and optimizing storage infrastructure providing a number of benefits including the following:

• Centralised control of data across the enterprise;
• Ability to implement discrete data governance policies that reflect and deliver the regulatory requirements affecting that data;
• Allows to simulate the impact of migrations so that administrators can fine-tune rules to save maximum disk space and confirm that the policy will work as intended;
• Ability to dynamically respond to issues relating to the governance of data;
• Scheduling control to balance the movement of data with operational demands of critical resources across the network;
• Significant savings in the ability to “re-use rules” from the library in the development of new policies;
• Reduced system administrator workload;
• Ability to assign data storage budgets to reflect the value of specific data sets;
• Expanded scope for choosing operating platforms and storage technology within the Netware environments; and
• Reduction in data storage costs.

Solution Overview

Moonwalk provides full compliance capability as well as transparent end user access to all archived files via their normal application interfaces.  It puts unstructured data into perspective by intelligently migrating data to and from various storage locations, depending on the value of that data (something that historically companies’ system administrators have been unable to do).  This in turn, gives system administrators greater control of their data and optimum use of their storage infrastructure.

MoonWalk Solution Architecture

The propagation of centrally managed business rules throughout an organisation’s network enables corporations to determine a single set of policies for data management - and be certain these policies will be enforced right to the edge of the network.
As a single tool, Moonwalk manages the moving / copying / migration of files to secondary tiers of storage, and in the case of migration, the transparent retrieval of those files upon user request.
The Eagle component provides the centralized data management and policy repository.  The execution of those policies is in turn delegated to an agent residing on the various servers on the network, thus avoiding network congestion and consumption of computing resources.



Rules AND Policies

Companies today are facing stricter and more precise regulatory requirements for the retention and protection of their corporate datasets and whilst corporate data management policies can be implemented on paper, the ability to deploy policies into the network is a different matter entirely.
The matter is further complicated by the fact that data management in most organisations is largely governed by the individuals responsible for the micro-management of servers and storage systems within the distributed network.

Moonwalk delivers an intelligent and high performance software solution for deploying those corporate data management policies within companies’ IT environments.  The following demonstrates a very simple application of policy based file management




Control

By combining centralised management and control of policies with distributed execution of these policies, Moonwalk ensures minimal network congestion and computing resource consumption.
The following illustrates the power of Moonwalk in managing what can quickly become a very complex set of data relationships, bearing in mind that this is a relatively simple model with only four locations.




Beyond HSM

Traditionally, Hierarchical Storage Management systems (HSMs) introduced a new layer of technology.  This generally brought with it associated management headaches, extra costs and risks.  With Moonwalk there is no introduced layer of technology – and no points of failure within the system.  All data access occurs within the network, and if you remove the Moonwalk policy engine from the equation people can still access their files as normal.

HSM solutions 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 system with greater capabilities and intelligence all round.  Moonwalk can send data to your HSM system, whereas an HSM system on its own never has this seamless data management capacity.

OverView

Moonwalk licensing is made up of two components; an annual user licence and, where applicable, a once off API licence.  The API licence is only applicable where an organisation has a requirement to integrate with a proprietary WORM device e.g. EMC’s Centera.
The annual “per user” subscription licence includes both the licence for using the software and any upgrades or updates to the software which are released whilst the licence is current.  A user is defined as any employee or contractor who accesses an organisation’s network.

Moonwalk System
Basic Features	Centralized management, distributed execution Enterprise File level Data Management / ILM Live system-wide task status Proactive Migration (archiving, near-line storage) Copy, replication Move Migrated Netware files seen as Offline files in Windows Explorer Prevents needless demigrations Backup and Anti-virus software friendly Meta-data preservation Secure data transport (TLS) Secure Policy Engine/Management server
Enterprise Class Design	Highly scalable Robust loose server coupling Reliable and robust stateless server design Platform independent system architecture No single point of failure No funneling (no middleware server bottleneck) Extensible plugin architecture; and Third-party development for storage devices
User Experience	Fully Transparent Demigration Windows Explorer Offline file indicator
High Data Availability	Demigration process keyed solely on stub file No database required Independent of Policy Engine/Management server Disaster Recovery (DR) capability Stub recreation from archive

Moonwalk Columbia Agent - Backend Agent
Basic Features	Distributed execution model Handles Demigrations independently of Policy Engine Executes operations delegated from management console
Operating Systems	Novell Netware 6.0 Service Pack 5 Novell Netware 6.5 Service Packs 2 and 3 Novell Netware 5.1 Service Pack 7 (no migration) Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (no migration) Windows XP Service Pack 2 (no migration) Windows 2003 Server (no migration) Windows 2008 Suse Linux (SLES 9 and SLES 10
Storage Devices	Storage devices capable of NFS v3 (see RFC1813) Storage devices capable of NFS v4 (in v3 mode) EMC Centera support option (see www.emc.com/products/systems/centera.jsp ) NTFS volumes Storage devices capable of being mounted on a Netware server Storage devices capable of being mounted on a Windows server Third-party developed storage support via Moonwalk plugin architecture Leverage existing HSM technology Opens up the Netware environment
Requirements	Required Hard Drive Space: ~1MB + Space for log files (configurable) Required RAM: 4MB
Novell Netware Configurations	Novell YES CERTIFIED (see http://developer.novell.com/yes/81830.htm) Supports Novell Cluster Services Cluster aware - all Clustered environments eDirectory support NSS volume support Direct 64-bit zAPI file access Migrate/Offline flag support in Windows and Netware environments
Windows Configurations	Migrated Netware files seen as Offline files in Explorer ANSI based file access

Moonwalk Eagle - Administration Console and System Frontend
Basic Features	Centralized Web-enabled management Policy Driven Optimising Task Scheduler Minimize server load High Configuration Reusability for Consistency and Rapid Deployment Flexible XML Configuration
Operating Systems	Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (recommended) Windows XP Service Pack 2 (recommended) Windows 2003 Server (recommended) Windows 2008 Unix, Linux, Solaris, Any OS capable of Apache Tomcat (requires additional configuration of a Netware or Windows server) Suse ( SLES 9 and SLES 10)
Requirements	Apache Tomcat 4 or 5 Required Hard Drive Space: ~4MB + Space for log files (configurable) Required RAM: 256MB