Effortless, Efficient and Elastic Infrastructure for Private Cloud Datrium

“There are many converged infrastructure companies, but only one Datrium”

For most organizations the question is no longer whether it is appropriate to adopt cloud, but is when the right time and what services to move. As IT organizations face increasing pressure to become more agile while also meeting the needs of end-users accustomed to public cloud services, the costs and reality of deploying private clouds provide significant challenges. Datrium is the leader in Open Converged Infrastructure for private clouds, providing vastly simpler performance, scalability, mobility and protection.

The Fons et origo of Datrium

The founders of Datrium foresaw a fundamental shift coming in private cloud infrastructure, particularly as it related to convergence and simplicity. Realizing the opportunity, the company was founded in 2012 by the founders and early top architects of Data Domain and VMware. Datrium took on the challenges of infrastructure complexity for private cloud deployments, and in February 2016 launched its first product.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Datrium DVX combines compute nodes, flash-based servers for high performance VM consolidation, with data nodes, low cost secondary storage for durable data and copy data management. This separation of node types, unachievable with hyperconverged architectures, enables simple and efficient Google-or Facebook-style infrastructure for private cloud data centers.

Existing Market Outlook

The fundamental megatrend observed is the emergence of AWS as an alternative to traditional IT infrastructure. Its availability is proving to IT that infrastructure need not be hard to assemble and maintain. In response, there is a ‘race to simplicity’ in a couple of areas. First, the industry is experiencing a massive convergence of storage systems with compute infrastructure whereby storage is delivered as software on commodity x86 servers for deployment and management simplicity. With IT staffing pressures, the company is also observing role convergence, whereby one administrator or admin staff is forced to wear multiple hats. Not that long ago, there would have been discrete server, storage, network and backup Admins. Today, most virtualization Admins are being asked to handle all of these roles and more. The emergence of the public cloud, together with infrastructure and role convergence, has driven Datrium to create a product that is radically easier to operate for private cloud operators who want more control over their infrastructure and don’t want to outsource to AWS (because either the pricing, security or other aspects doesn’t work for them.)

Standing Tall Among Contenders

The following factors set Datrium apart from its competitors:

Breakthrough economics

• Bring Your Own Servers & Flash or Go Turnkey: Use existing servers with commodity flash or get turn-key systems with single point of support.
• Mix & match heterogeneous server-types: Run any server-type including blades and quad-sockets, from any vendor with any configuration.
• Capacity optimized for both hot and cold data: Get always-on erasure coding, even for hot data. Compression, global dedupe across all compute nodes.

Elastic scale

• Independently scale speed or capacity: Incrementally scale speed with additional compute nodes and scale capacity with new data nodes.
• Massive performance at sub-ms latency: Serve all reads locally, up to 5x faster than all flash arrays, while protecting all writes to mirrored NVRAM on data node.
• Mix and scale workloads massively: Achieve predictable mixed workload performance by eliminating compute node neighbor noise.

Zero-click admin

• Per-VM Admin Ends Storage Management: No LUNs, no zones—Provisioning capacity for a VM is as simple as creating a vDisk from vCenter.
• VM Analytics Speeds Troubleshooting: 6000+ metrics for VM or SSD IOPS, throughput or latency in real-time & historically. No more wondering what’s making a VM’s IO slow or how to fix it.
• One-Click Software & Firmware Upgrades: Simple online upgrades done in minutes.
• Config-free: No knobs—efficient protection and data reduction are always-on with no performance overheads to worry about.

Cloud data management built-in

• In-flight, at-rest encryption with full data reduction: 100% SW encryption of compressed, deduplicated data in-use at host flash, in-flight on network and at-rest on data node.
• Granular snapshots, clones & restores: Operate at VM/File granularity (e.g. vdisks, ISOs, templates) for high efficiency.
• Automated Protection Groups: Create dynamic, consistent policy-groups of VMs/Files and auto-add objects on the fly.

Why Datrium Has Esteemed Reputation In The Industry?  

Datrium is the only alternative for simple private cloud infrastructure at-scale, so occupies a unique position in a $33B industry. In just over a year-and-a-quarter since first shipping its flagship product, Datrium has enjoyed record adoption with leading companies in banking, cloud hosting, health care, public sector, manufacturing, media and entertainment.

Datrium’s Stupendous Products and Services

DVX Rackscale: DVX Rackscale combines DVX Data Nodes and from 1 to 32 DVX Compute Nodes for a turnkey, purpose-built solution that simplifies both VM consolidation and cloud data management. Mix and match DVX Compute Nodes with existing servers and blades for a seamless Open Converged system without silos. DVX integrates CPU and flash performance on ESXi hosts with VM-centric, efficient and scalable cloud data management tools (Data Cloud software) purpose-built for VM administrators. DVX separates on-host IO processing from off-host durable data, so speed and persistent capacity can each be provisioned incrementally. While it takes advantage of host CPU and local flash performance, compute node availability is independent of data availability. DVX combines BYO server and flash flexibility with always-on, erasure codong, end-to-end dedupe and compression for breakthrough economics.

Insane Mode: Insane Mode is an on-demand performance acceleration utility built into Datrium DVX. With Insane Mode, a user can dynamically increase the number of storage operations possible for a virtualized host with the touch of a console button. Typical results often deliver up to a 2-fold increase in virtual server application performance, translating to over 100,000 IOs per second (IOPS) per host and 3 Million IOPS per DVX system, without requiring a controller change of any kind.

Data Cloud Foundation: The Datrium Data Cloud Foundation provides customers ability to snapshot and operate on snapshots not only at a VM-level, but also at a vDisk level for simpler faster sharing and data recovery. Data Cloud Foundation also includes a massively scalable VM backup catalog and logical groupings of VMs called protection groups. Snapshot backup schedules, replication targets, etc. can be set for each protection group, and includes a powerful new feature called Dynamic Policy Binding which auto-includes new VMs into a protection group based on naming convention.

Elastic Replication: Unlike traditional arrays where the active array controller may become a bottleneck to replication performance, Datrium Elastic Replication leverages processing, networking and local flash resources from all the hosts within the cluster. All source hosts can send data concurrently from local flash increasing the overall replication bandwidth. Since most hosts have un-utilized CPU cycles and 100% of all data is normally cached locally, Elastic Replication has virtually no performance overhead on the I/O workload.

Blanket Encryption: Blanket Encryption is a 100% software-based solution that combines always-on efficient data reduction technology with high-speed encryption end-to-end, protecting data in-use at the host, in-flight across the network and at-rest on persistent storage. Most storage arrays and hyperconverged (HCI) offerings provide hardware-dependent, self-encrypting drive (SEDs) solutions, which can only protect data at-rest. Blanket Encryption is the only data security solution that offers an in-flight encryption that is fully data efficient throughout the data lifecycle. Data is reduced, compressed and then encrypted as soon as it is created in the host RAM before it’s written to the host flash or transmitted to the data server fully encrypted.

To Quote Happy Customers:

“Datrium’s open convergence platform provides us with the kind of elastic performance and capacity that our clients expect with their cloud-based, high-value applications. It is simpler to manage and takes up a lot less rack space and power. It’s saving our and our customers’ money and time.”

- Scott Weinberg, CEO, Neovera

“No other vendor we’ve tested has the deduplication and compression effectiveness that Datrium does… We keep throwing more data at the DVX and we barely consume additional capacity.”

- Benjamin Craig, CIO, Northrim Bank

“I was looking for a solution that was not only affordable for our business, but also delivered benefits right out of the gate. Scalability, stability and simplified management were all high on the list and Datrium delivered it all in a very elegant convergence solution.”

- Igor Zaika, IT Director, Sensiba San Filippo

Just Around the Corner

While Datrium has enjoyed a great start with VMware-based private cloud data centers, it will soon be making some big announcements related to Linux KVM- and Docker Container-based clouds.

Case Study: An Attestation of Success

Client: Blue LayerIT

Industry: Service Provider, Cloud

Background: Texas-based Blue Layer offers custom, comprehensive technology solutions for clients, providing managed services, outsourced IT, security, networking, and monitoring to diverse businesses, either hosted in its data center or on premise at client sites.

Challenges:

·         Unacceptable response times, especially considering the firm runs several mission-critical applications for clients.

·         IOPs limits victimizing VM performance.

·         Splitting workloads across three storage area networks (SANs), resulted in bottleneck on the node processing the largest capacity pool.

Results: Incredible results followed after the client started using Datrium’s services:

·         Agility Gains with Zero Storage Management

·         4X Faster VM Provisioning

·         1.7X data reduction

·         10X Performance Creates Revenue Upside

·         Latency down from as much as 1000ms to an average of 1-3ms

·         Ability to add capacity for new VMs using commodity SSDs (solid state disks) for its servers rather than premium-priced array-based SSDs.

“Datrium said to us, ‘You’re going to be getting nearly 10X more IOPS,’ and I thought ‘yeah, right.’ We tested it and kept testing it, including on the VM side, and we were surprised to actually get that kind of performance!”

 - Jeromy Mallory, CEO, Blue Layer IT

Greet the Five Founders

Brian Biles, CEO and Co-Founder: Biles was also co-founder and VP of Product and Bus Dev at Data Domain, a unicorn purchased by EMC in 2009

Hugo Patterson, CTO and Co-Founder: Patterson was an early employee and CTO at Data Domain with Biles.

Ganesh Venkitachalam, and Boris Weissman, Co-Founders: Venkitachalam and Weissman were early principal engineers for Diane Greene at VMware. Diane was the person who introduced Venkitachalam and Weissman to Biles and Patterson.

Sazzala Reddy, Co-Founder: Reddy came from Data Domain and was also part of the CTO office with Patterson.

“Behind the scenes our smart infrastructure ensures your cloud-based data remains entirely secure in-use, in-flight and at-rest without trading off network and capacity efficiency.”