StorCentric is the holding company that owns enterprise storage brands Nexsan and Vexata, and the SMB-focused Drobo and Retrospect, is releasing to GA the first solution under the StorCentric brand with the software Data Mobility.

Today, data management vendor StorCentric is announcing the general availability of their Data Mobility Suite [DMS], which provides seamless data migration, data replication, and data synchronization across heterogeneous, mixed media storage deployments.

StorCentric has released many products before – but none under that brand. StorCentric is a holding company that over the last two years has acquired longtime enterprise storage provider Nexsan, all-flash NVMe startup Vexata, SMB and prosumer-focused storage hardware maker Drobo, and Retrospect, which was once a brand of Dantz before being bought by EMC years ago. All these divisions have continued to release product under their own name.

Originally, the software that is now being released as DMS was intended to be a feature in the Q3 release of their Nexsan Unity unified storage solution.

“We decided to release it this way based on conversations with customers about pain points,” said Surya Varanasi, StorCentric’s CTO. “What we noticed during COVID was a lot more ransomware attacks, starting in March 2020. The DMS product was always an independent software project. Initially, we wanted to bundle a piece of it with the Nexsan Unity offering, but it was separate from Unity.”

Releasing the product separate of the Unity platform gives it a broader audience. That also led to the decision to brand DMS with the StorCentric brand, the first such branding by the company.

“Our strategy here became to bring it out as an all-software product,” Varanasi said. “It’s a broader market than Nexsan. It’s not about the storage any more. It’s  a complementary solution for anybody’s storage. We solve data management platform issues, and let the customer share and collaborate, across heterogeneous storage, clouds and protocols.

“We are not storage in this case,” Varanasi emphasized. “We are a data management platform.”

DMS is designed to support data migration, data replication, and data synchronization, and can be easily deployed on any non-proprietary server. DMS streamlines processes through policies, and protects data in transit to and from the cloud with SSL encryption. DMS also includes an object storage cloud connector supporting Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and IBM ICOS, and other public clouds, a total of 18 in all, that allows for the replication of data to, from or between these clouds and on-prem, thus enabling multiple on- and off-premises workflow processes to co-exist.

“Data migration is a basic service that we expect a lot of customers will see value in,” Varanasi indicated. “The replication’s strength is not just traditional replication, but the ability to set up a policy on data you want saved, and  replicate data from anywhere to anywhere, across heterogeneous storage systems on prem or in the cloud.”

The immediate plans on the road map are to beef up DMS with analytics, Varanasi indicated.

So how does a company that has been focused on hardware and depends entirely on channel partners take this software to market?

“The first thing that we are doing is talking to our existing Nexsan channel,” Varanasi said. “They are hardware partners, but it’s easier to download software on a server and ship the server. Retrospect has a different channel, so we will talk to them about selling enterprise as well.”

“We need to expand our reseller base more into enterprise software, and we plan to start with Retrospect and expand,” said Samina Subedar, Vice President of Marketing at StorCentric. “This is a vendor-agnostic product, and we think that some of them will be excited to roll this out.”