Data management is the at the core of data-centric enterprises focusing on sorting data siloes. Are there any platforms addressing this need?
1. Can you tell us more about yourself? How did you get into tech?
Ever since I was a little kid, I developed a passion for mathematics. For me, math theories are art in its purest form. They can be as beautiful as classical or modern paintings, sculptures, or architecture.
When I realized that computers can actually do something useful with that math, I decided to become a software engineer. Building innovative systems to solve real-world problems using clever algorithms is the most exciting job I could have ever imagined.
2. Can you give us a brief of your career before Datadobi?
My initial focus was on security and cryptography, but that quickly shifted to building large-scale distributed systems storing or manipulating data. Security, scalability, performance, and availability are important aspects of such systems.
I was an architect in the Centera group at EMC where we built the world’s first large-scale object storage system. After that, I worked in a start-up (Q-layer) where we built elastic computing cloud technology. Q-layer got acquired by Sun Microsystems. By 2009, smartphones became a big deal, and I ran my own mobile app start-up which was acquired a few years later.
Next, I joined Amplidata where we built a multi-datacenter object storage system using erasure coding. Amplidata was acquired by Western Digital. In 2019 I joined Datadobi to focus on the management, discovery, and optimization of really large unstructured data estates on NAS and object storage systems.
I have more than 25 patents in storage and distributed systems.
3. Could you tell us more about Datadobi and how has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
In 2022, our company transitioned from being known for our unstructured data migration and protection solutions to being recognized for our multi-vendor, multi-cloud unstructured data management platform StorageMAP. The platform was the culmination of our developments over the last few years in response to the growing unstructured data management market.
StorageMAP provides a single pane of glass for organizations looking to manage unstructured data across their complete data storage estate on-premises and in the cloud. Our platform helps IT leaders solve four of the major critical concerns for enterprises today including cost control, reduction of waste and carbon footprint, controlling risk, and maximizing the value of their data.
4. What’s your favorite part about working in this industry?
My engineering team surprises me every day with their ingenuity. They are dedicated to their craft and continue to forge the path to true innovation. Having smart colleagues makes the work very enjoyable and I keep learning every day.
5. What makes Datadobi unique to stand apart from the competition?
First and foremost, StorageMAP is one of the only multi-vendor, multi-cloud unstructured data management platforms on the market and is truly designed to handle our heterogeneous storage world. Secondly, our team members are truly experts in the unstructured data management field. Our entire team has been working closely with enterprise IT leaders and our partners over the past few years to zero in on the problems organizations are facing and develop the solutions to address them.
Moreover, Datadobi has a unique relationship with NAS and Object Storage vendors. Quite often we get early access to new releases and tell the vendors how well their implementations are compatible with NAS and Object protocol standards. Vendors quickly address those bugs as they do not want any barriers to migrating data to their platforms.
6. What are the products and solutions that Datadobi offers?
StorageMAP is our primary product and it is built to help enterprises harness the power of unstructured data and achieve data center and cloud optimization to reduce cost, carbon footprint, and risk to gain value from the data they have. With complete visibility, IT leaders can have the confidence to take the right actions on all of the unstructured data on their network.
7. Could you highlight some salient features of StorageMAP considering its role in data management?
StorageMAP is built upon Datadobi’s unstructured data mobility engine and provides the most advanced scanning technology available on the market. The highly advanced parallel scanning builds a master metadata index that is the foundation of analytics that provide much-needed visibility into what unstructured data is on a network, who owns it, and what its purpose is. With this insight, IT leaders can then ask questions such as, “How much waste do we have on our company storage systems?” “Should data be relocated, and if so, to where?” “How much is the data of this business unit costing in dollars and carbon emissions?” Depending on the answers, IT leaders can categorize data by age and size, geography, type, filer, group, and more and tag the appropriate actions on it such as migrating it, replicating it, archiving it, or deleting it.
This enables enterprises to:
- Cut costs with intelligent cloud adoption, move data to less costly on-premises or cloud storage, accelerate the decommissioning of inefficient storage, and delete Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (ROT) or “dark” data.
- Conform to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies via StorageMAP’s carbon accounting of unstructured data storage in the cloud and data center.
- Reduce risk by allowing IT leaders to understand the who, what, when, where, and why of unstructured data and take the appropriate action on it
- Get more value from unstructured data by moving it to the right place, at the right time, all of the time.
8. Could you tell us more about your work culture, and what makes Datadobi’s culture unique?
Our global team at Datadobi is small, focused, and passionate about what we do. We benefit from having a flat organizational structure with few levels between high-level management and the rest of the workforce, which allows for better communication and fast, efficient decision-making. We pride ourselves in our agile work environment, exciting technology, and overall empowered culture.
9. Recently, Datadobi won the 2022 Digital Innovator Award from Intellyx. What do you have to say about this recognition?
Receiving the Digital Innovator Award from Intellyx was an important validation of our approach and track record.
Our laser focus on technical excellence and global leadership in multi-vendor, multi-cloud unstructured data management allows enterprises worldwide to go beyond data stored to data managed both on-premises and in the cloud.It’s encouraging to see industry analysts such as Intellyx recognize our team’s efforts.
10. What are Datadobi’s plans for expansion and growth? Where do you see it in the coming years?
Datadobi is constantly evolving StorageMAP to meet customer feature requests in real time. In the coming years, we will continue to enhance StorageMAP to make it the most trusted unstructured data management vendor for end-users.
11. What movie/book has inspired you recently?
“The Social Dilemma” is a Netflix documentary that shows us both the power and the dangers of collecting and storing personal data all the time. It is clear that we need to think through what data ownership, data lifecycle, and data activation really means. How we handle data and privacy will impact what our future society looks like.
12. What motivates you to get up every morning? What do you take pride in when it comes to your company?
Technical progress and happy customers. That’s what excites me.
Every day our product becomes faster, better, and easier to use. Frequent software releases demonstrate our fast-paced progress. Our small team of very smart engineers shows clever algorithms to speed up data copying, shows mechanisms to recommend which data to move where, and shows a user interface allowing data owners to manipulate and optimize petabytes of data.
When we run our software against customer unstructured data sets, it is always amazing how customers initially react in disbelief to the findings. For example, when they see how much orphaned data is owned by employees no longer working with the company, or when they see what kind of data is on the corporate file server (TV series episodes, old mailboxes, …). Soon after, these companies come to us to get a complete view of their environment and use our software to clean up or optimize their unstructured data. In this process, they save costs and they make a step towards a greener planet.
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Carl D’Halluin
Chief Technology Officer, Datadobi
Carl has been building cloud and storage software for 20 years. He has made notable contributions on protecting and manipulating unstructured data, building highly scalable and secure storage systems, and enabling metadata-driven insights and automation. Each is a cornerstone of the Datadobi business and technology. Carl owns many patents in this domain. He was instrumental in the growth and acquisition of storage companies Amplidata and Q-layer. Carl also worked at EMC Centera, where he architected the world’s first commercial object storage system. Carl has a double Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering (KU Leuven, Belgium) and in Mathematics (UC Berkeley, California).
