Vion and Digital Reef Sign $5 Million OEM Agreement

ViON Corporation, in designing, delivering and maintaining storage and server solutions to enterprise data centers, announced ViON File Services, an offering designed to reduce the costs and time associated with storage migration.

With ViON File Services, customers will get a view into the files currently residing in their network attached storage (NAS) appliances and will be able to migrate massive collections of unstructured files.

Companies and agencies can now make informed decisions on what files to save, move or remove based on file-based storage policies in order to consolidate storage and save on resources. The ViON File Services offering, powered by the Digital Reef, Inc.‘s file governance platform, is a pre-configured appliance combining hardware, software and training/implementation services. By having the intelligence and management above the file and storage system level, businesses can overcome the limitations and challenges with performing large-scale NAS migrations.

"Our customers asked us to solve their arduous and costly NAS migration challenges," said Tom Frana, President and CEO of ViON Corporation."ViON was in a position, because of our deep storage expertise, to understand the problems and design a first of its kind solution using high performance and highly scalable technology from Digital Reef. We are providing a solution that does not currently exist; a means of easily migrating files from any NAS platform to any NAS platform."

Many companies and government agencies are faced with costly NAS migrations but have no visibility into what is being stored on their NAS appliances. Without knowing what files are not being used, which are duplicates or which contain personal or confidential information, IT cannot make intelligent, actionable policy decisions on what to move or delete. Current technologies are very slow and require numerous resources to move data between file shares. ViON File Services solves this problem and is a fast, intelligent way to move files between heterogeneous file resources. The ability to move files at unmatched speeds, and to do so intelligently. With this solution, IT can cut the time and costs currently associated with NAS migrations enabling customers to better manage the growth of unstructured data.

"Everyone else is looking at the problem from the wrong vantage point," said Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst and Founder of the INI Group. "ViON and Digital Reef provide intelligence above the filer and, therefore, are not tethered by the proprietary nature of different file and storage systems. Additionally, the two companies understand both content management and Enterprise infrastructure, and this combination is essential to providing a truly valuable file services solution. This changes the rules of the game in the NAS market – something that is long overdue."

ViON File Services approaches NAS migrations using three processes: file discovery, file management and file migration.

During the discovery phase, companies can see what files are stored, their type, when they’ve been accessed and if there are duplicates. The process of file management involves analyzing, classifying and prioritizing files and preparing for the ultimate process – file migration. File migration is possible between heterogeneous NAS systems and now that the files are optimized, makes for smarter consolidations. Unlike many patchwork systems being used today, ViON is helping companies solve these issues.

This offering will be generally available in early-January.

Features of the offering include:

• Data verification to ensure that what is migrated is the same at both source and target
• A policy-driven engine to provide scheduling, bandwidth throttling, workflows, and the support of multiple migrations concurrently
• Support for any vendor’s NAS storage and file servers as well as being able to perform migrations for SharePoint, Documentum and other CMS systems
• Scalability to support any size environment with hundreds of terabytes and petabytes of file storage.

Digital Reef’s file governance platform is for eDiscovery and File Governance applications. It is a file discovery and analytical engine and a policy orchestration and control platform which can be delivered on premise, on-demand or via a portable collections model. The platform allows for ViON file services to change the way migrations will be done.

"ViON is in a unique position, based on its history of expertise in storage systems, to really understand what businesses need as it looks to optimize its storage and better understand and manage its data and assets," said Bob Lentz, CEO, Digital Reef, Inc. "Our partnership and OEM agreement highlight a true synergy between our businesses and show how our new file governance platform can support high value applications."