AutoVirt has the unnerving distinction of being one of the few products standing in the Windows file virtualization space: failed predecessors include Brocade StorageX, Rainfinity, and Attune.  On Tuesday a commenter on George Crump’s blog suggested that AutoVirt is doomed for a similar fate.  Here’s why he got it wrong.

Windows data is business-critical data

The commenter wrote, “And quite frankly, Windows-based files are viewed non mission-critical data.”

Huh?  Windows-based files are becoming more and more critical as data grows and compliance requirements increase.  The importance of Windows data has little to do with the failure of Brocade, Rainfinity, and Attune.

In the healthcare industry, MRIs, XRays and microscopes produce large, mission-critical images that have to get stored.  That data needs to be stored at very high resolution, with lossless compression, virtually forever.  And as the disks that house these images fill up with new images, the old ones need to be moved around, processed, and archived. We talk to customers all the time who manually move these images around – it’s a huge time sink and one that has tremendous room for operational improvement by using AutoVirt software.

If you manage a small or mid-sized manufacturer, there are tremendous amounts of data to be managed from specifications to CAD to quality assurance and testing. Interrupting the flow of the assembly line has a direct impact on the bottom line, and data is a critical part of that process. To keep your line running, you’ve got to automate the movement of data across systems and functions.

Many of the law firms we are talking to have multiple offices spread out geographically, and with cases that can drag on for years, document management is a critically important task. But over the years, as case documentation has expanded beyond notes to include online photographs, audio and video, the pressures for managing that data are beyond the scope of what an individual office can achieve. So in order for a limited central IT staff to be effective across these remote sites, they need new approaches to data management.

What’s the point of file virtualization, anyway? 

File virtualization is a cool technology, but it is only a means to an end.  For AutoVirt, that end is data management.  Brocade, Rainfinity, and Attune were file virtualization products, and we’ve been told that they were bulky, expensive, and difficult to install and use.  Once installed, they changed the storage infrastructure – but they were often too difficult to use routinely for storage management tasks. 

From the beginning, AutoVirt’s developers have prioritized ease-of-use and configurable automation.  We think of ourselves of a storage management product – not as a file virtualization product.

Where share management ends and data management begins

The commenter on Crump’s blog declared that “Windows files (shares, etc.) are a pain but [a] solution that just manages them is a ‘nice to have’ functionality that can be done by other applications or manually.”  

Share management – creating new shares, setting up permissions, and moving shares between filers – may be an approachable task.  But these shares need to be part of the overall storage strategy, and it is here that managing them individually (or finding a collection of different tools to manage them collectively) becomes inconvenient and risky.   Data is growing fast, and so are business requirements around disaster prevention, data protection, high availability, and data archiving.  For some businesses, replication and archiving tools are still nice-to-haves – but such businesses are growing increasingly rare.  AutoVirt simplifies share management, and also provides automated replication and archiving.