Huawei and Veritas both announced new software-defined storage (SDS) products this week targeting enterprises’ growing volumes of unstructured data such as media and web content.

Huawei’s SDS integrates its cloud-based storage, called FusionStorage, and Veritas’ software-defined network-attached storage (NAS). FusionStorage provides an object storage pool and unified storage management for the unstructured data. Meanwhile Veritas’ SDS allows file and object storage, as well as two-way read and write access.

Providing both file and object storage benefits companies moving from traditional workloads (usually stored as files in NAS systems) and emerging applications that use unstructured data, which is better suited for object storage and typically used in the cloud.

Huawei calls the resulting product “hybrid cloud storage” and says it gives enterprises “cloud data portability, online data migration, and scale out capabilities to achieve elasticity and resilience.”

It also supports Amazon S3-based public clouds; has three-tiered storage capabilities; and automatic storage tiering of hot, warm, and cold data. This feature moves data as needed based on space, performance, and cost requirements.

The new SDS also integrates with third-party storage systems.

Also this week, Veritas announced Veritas Cloud Storage, its new SDS product geared toward unstructured data. It allows companies to apply analytics, machine learning, and classification technologies to stored data.

Veritas also announced the Veritas Access Appliance, an integrated SDS appliance that has long-term data storage with multi-cloud capabilities. Both of these will be available in the coming quarters.

Enterprises’ volumes of unstructured data — and storage needs — is exploding, due in large part to new apps and emerging big-data technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT).

Veritas 2017 Data Genomics Survey, which analyzed more than 31 billion anonymized files globally, found enterprise data repositories have grown 48.7 percent annually. To accommodate this data growth, many companies are choosing object storage for its scalable cloud benefits.

This makes it an attractive offering for vendors as well. Earlier this week, DigitalOcean added object storage to its SDS lineup. Traditional storage vendors like Dell EMC, IBM, and Hitachi have also made software-defined object storage plays over the past couple of years.