On April 4, 2017, Datrium announced DVX Rackscale and DVX Cloud. The former is a hyperconverged-like architecture that is unique to Datrium, and combines its “open convergence server-powered storage” (SPS) paradigm with a hypervisor. The latter represents an upgrade to its core DVX Software offering, and includes an announcement to support Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the future to span both public and private clouds.
DVX Rackscale
DVX Rackscale is a unique approach to convergence that is focused around delivering simple high performance, data resilience and fault tolerance. Customers will have the choice of using their own preferred server vendor, or purchasing DVX Compute Nodes directly from Datrium. Each DVX Compute Node will include the Datrium Software, 16 or 28 cores of Intel Xeon processors, up to 768GB of RAM and 2-8 solid state disks (SSDs).
This approach gives Datrium customers convenience and investment protection. Up to 32 DVX nodes can be clustered together to deliver a turnkey compute and storage solution, with a single point of support.
This puts DVX Rackscale in direct competition against the likes of Nutanix and Dell EMC VxRAIL, with Datrium’s unique storage subsystem offering potentially superior performance, reliability and flexibility over its competitors.
Neuralytix believes this move by Datrium, which was not expected for this release, is a very positive one for Datrium, and allows them to open up their addressable market tremendously. That said, Datrium will still need to justify why its unique storage approach is superior, but customers are no longer just buying a storage solution, but a full private cloud datacenter solution. Neuralytix believes that this is consistent with the way customers prefer to acquire technology today. In fact, our research suggests that software defined datacenters (SDDCs) will be a $10B market by 2020.
DVX Cloud Software
The Datrium Software is also getting a major upgrade. At the heart of the upgrade are cloud integration, end-to-end data security with reduction, and policy driven management.
Datrium’s data security is truly end-to-end. Data is encrypted at the host, in-flight through the network, and at-rest on the Datrium Data Nodes. Cleverly, Datrium is leveraging the encryption capabilities found in modern CPUs, to accelerate the encryption in silicon, resulting in virtually no overhead. Datrium is also taking the opportunity on the host to reduce the data as well as encrypting the data. This efficiency brings not only security, but significant cost savings to the customer.
From the management perspective, Datrium has introduced group policies and search capabilities to its software, allowing administrators to manage the cluster in an app-centric fashion, with a minimal number of operators required.
Lastly, Datrium has announced replication between 2 or more Datrium systems and pre-announced future support for replication to AWS, allowing customers to do snap archives to public cloud. Since the data is encrypted already at the host, the intention is that snap archives will be transmitted securely in-flight, and at-rest at AWS. Along with the policy driven capabilities described above, the current and future capabilities enhances the ability for customers to extend policy-driven data placement both within a private cloud, into the public cloud, resulting in a truly hybrid experience.
Guidance
The announcement of the DVX Software was anticipated, but the DVX Rackscale was not. This surprise is a very welcome one, and Neuralytix believes that the combination of these announcements propels Datrium into new, maturing, but generous, markets.
Customers are looking to purchase datacenter solutions, and not piece-parts. DVX Rackscale enables customers to eliminate the friction that often accompanies the acquisition of compute, network, storage, and/or management from multiple vendors.
Ultimately, customers should care less about the mechanics of datacenter infrastructure, so that they can focus on turning data into innovation. Datrium’s unique approach to data storage has always been simple high performance with resilience. Now, with its data management ability, it extends performance and resilience, to cost effectiveness and convenience. Augmenting that with DVX Rackscale, and the entire solution becomes simple, high performance, resilient, cost effective, convenient, and complete.