ESG research recently uncovered that 66% of organizations view their IT environments as more or significantly more complex than they were two years ago. The complexity will most likely increase, since 46% of organizations anticipate their network infrastructure spending to exceed that of 2018 as they upgrade and expand their networks.

Large enterprise and service provider networks consist of multiple device types—routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers—with proprietary operating systems (OS) and different configuration rules. As organizations support more applications and users, their networks will grow and become more complex, making it more difficult to verify and manage correctly implemented policies across the entire network. Organizations have also begun to integrate public cloud services with their on-premises networks, adding further network complexity to manage end-to-end policies.

With increasing network complexity, organizations cannot easily confirm that their networks are operating as intended when they implement network and security policies. Moreover, when considering a fix to a service-impact issue or a network update, determining how it may impact other applications negatively or introduce service-affecting issues becomes difficult. To assess adherence to policies or the impact of any network change, organizations have typically relied on disparate tools and material—network topology diagrams, device inventories, vendor-dependent management systems, command line (CLI) commands, and utilities such as “ping” and “traceroute.” The combination of these tools cannot provide a reliable and holistic assessment of network behavior efficiently.

Organizations need a vendor-agnostic solution that enables network operations to automate the verification of network implementations against intended policies and requirements, regardless of the number and types of devices, operating systems, traffic rules, and policies that exist. The solution must represent the topology of the entire network or subsets of devices (e.g., in a region) quickly and efficiently. It should verify network implementations from prior points in time, as well as proposed network changes prior to implementation. Finally, the solution must also enable organizations to quickly detect issues that affect application delivery or violate compliance requirements.

DataCore’s new vFilO software shares important traits with its existing SANsymphony software-defined block storage platform. Both technologies are certainly enterprise class (highly agile, available, and performant). But each solution exhibits those traits in its own manner, taking the varying requirements for block, file, and object data into account. That’s important at a time when a lot of companies are maintaining hundreds to thousands of terabytes of unstructured data spread across many file servers, other NAS devices, and object storage repositories both onsite and in the cloud. The addition of vFilO to its product portfolio will allow DataCore to position itself in a different, even more compelling way now. DataCore is able to offer a “one-two punch”—namely, one of the best block storage SDS solutions in SANsymphony, and now one of the best next-generation SDS solutions for file and object data in vFilO. Together, vFilO and SANsymphony will put DataCore in a really strong position to support any IT organization looking for better ways to overcome end-users’ file-sharing/access difficulties, keep hardware costs low … and maximize the value of corporate data to achieve success in a digital age.

It’s time for a “Nirvana” between file and object: The marketplace has long been debating which of the two unstructured data type models is the “right one.” But data is data. If you remove the traditional constraints and challenges associated with those two particular technologies, it becomes possible to imagine a type of data service that supports both. That kind of solution would give an organization the benefits of a global multi-site namespace (i.e., object style), including the ability to address a piece of data regardless of where it is in a folder hierarchy, or what device it’s stored on. And it would offer the rich metadata that object storage is known for. This new kind of solution would also deliver the performance and ease of use that file systems are known for. DataCore says it is providing such a solution, called vFilO. To vFilO, data is just data, where metadata is decoupled but tightly aligned with the data, and data’s location is independent of data access needs or metadata location. It bridges both worlds by providing a system that has all the benefits of file and object—without any of the limitations. It is a next-generation system built on a different paradigm, promising to bridge the world of file and object. It just might be the answer IT departments need. No longer required to pick between two separate systems, IT organizations can find great value in a consolidated, global, unified storage system that can deliver on the business’s needs for unstructured data.