The Unstructured Data Dilemma

In the modern enterprise, unstructured data accounts for over 80% of all information and is growing at an explosive rate. This data is often fragmented across disparate storage silos, creating a formidable challenge. The inability to effectively manage, classify, and understand this information introduces significant business obstacles, including unnecessary costs, compliance and security risks, and a massively underutilized asset. Without a unified, intelligent view, this vast data landscape remains a costly black box, and a primary bottleneck for critical analytics and AI initiatives that are essential for a competitive advantage.

The Solution: 

The Li9 Data Cataloging Pilot is a turnkey service designed to solve this challenge. We deploy and operationalize a complete, modern data cataloging platform, powered by the IBM Fusion HCI appliance. This container-native metadata management solution is engineered to provide deep data insight across exabyte-scale, heterogeneous storage environments.

Our expert-led engagement delivers a complete hardware and software stack that connects to your disparate data sources to rapidly ingest, consolidate, and index metadata for billions of files and objects. This creates a rich, searchable metadata layer that empowers your administrators, data stewards, and data scientists to efficiently manage, classify, and govern massive data stores from a single point of control.

A Cloud-Native, Service-Based Architecture

The platform we deliver is built on a robust, service-based architecture designed for enterprise scale and performance.

• IBM Fusion HCI System: The foundation is a pre-engineered appliance that provides the underlying Red Hat OpenShift cluster, high-performance storage, and redundant networking. This turnkey private cloud hosts the Data Cataloging service and ensures enterprise-grade reliability.
• Data Cataloging Service: A suite of containerized microservices running on OpenShift provides the tools for connecting to data sources, managing data policies, and visualizing metadata through an intuitive user interface.
• Active File Management (AFM) Nodes: The strategic value of this solution is significantly amplified by AFM nodes within the Fusion HCI appliance. These intelligent data gateways function as a bridge to your broader enterprise data landscape, including popular NFS filers and S3-compliant object stores. This allows the platform to index and catalog data in-place, without requiring disruptive, upfront data migrations.
• Metadata Processing Pipeline: When a data source is scanned, its metadata is ingested and processed in real-time. A powerful policy engine provides automated tagging and classification before the metadata is indexed and stored in a high-performance data warehouse, making it instantly searchable by your teams.

Deliverables

Upon completion of the Data Cataloging Pilot, you will receive:

• A Fully Deployed IBM Fusion HCI Appliance: A production-ready, enterprise-grade private cloud platform, professionally installed and configured in your data center.
• An Operational Data Cataloging Service: A validated and healthy installation of the Data Cataloging service, running on the Fusion HCI’s Red Hat OpenShift cluster.
• Connected Data Sources: The catalog will be connected to your key internal and external data sources, with initial metadata scans completed.
• Baseline Policies and Tags: A foundational set of custom policies and metadata tags, developed with your team, to begin automating data classification.
• Comprehensive Documentation: Detailed architectural diagrams, configuration guides, and operational runbooks for your new environment.
• Empowered Staff: Your team will receive hands-on knowledge transfer sessions, ensuring they are prepared to manage, use, and extend the data catalog.

The Business Value Proposition: Why Catalog Your Data?

This pilot delivers tangible business outcomes by turning your data from a liability into a strategic asset.

Optimize Storage and Reduce Costs

• Identify and eliminate Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (ROT) data that consumes expensive storage capacity, directly increasing storage efficiency and reducing backup windows.
• Use policies to automatically move “cold” or less-frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers, optimizing storage expenditures without manual intervention.
• By automating data discovery and management tasks, the platform reduces the manual effort required by storage administrators, freeing them for more strategic initiatives.

Accelerate Analytics and AI

• A primary bottleneck in AI and analytics projects is the time spent finding and preparing data. A centralized, searchable catalog allows data scientists to quickly pinpoint and activate the precise datasets they need, dramatically reducing data preparation time.
• For AI workloads, such as those using IBM watsonx, a well-curated catalog is essential for rapidly identifying relevant data for model training. The platform can integrate with enterprise catalogs and query engines to create a seamless data pipeline for AI projects.
• By indexing and classifying all data, the platform helps uncover hidden data value and makes previously unknown datasets available for analysis, driving new business insights.

Enhance Governance and Mitigate Risk

• The platform’s policy engine can be configured to automatically perform data inspection and classification, identifying and applying tags to sensitive data (e.g., PII, PHI) wherever it resides.
• Custom tags and policies help ensure that data is managed in compliance with internal and external governance mandates like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.
• By shining a light on massive, unmanaged data stores, the service helps reduce the inherent security and compliance risks associated with “dark data.”

Want to learn more?