Datrium: Boosting Performance, Management Ease for VMware VMs

“Commoditization of Flash and the way it is enabling servers to perform more storage activities is causing many companies to reconsider their approach toward storage,” begins Brian Biles, CEO, Datrium. Biles believes that most of the storage facilities today are not Virtual Machine (VM)- centric and this is causing difficulties for companies to manage the IO requirements of their VMs. Datrium fulfills this gap by providing an open convergence platform consisting of Datrium software on commodity servers and Flash, paired with a Datrium appliance for persistent capacity. “We are providing an architecture that enables virtualized infrastructure approaches to be simple and elastic,” he adds. The solution is designed for firms that are looking for high performance for VMware virtual machines, the simplicity of VM-centric management and analytics, and lower cost per gigabyte for Flash.

Datrium DVX platform converges storage and compute, modeled on public cloud IaaS versus traditional converged infrastructure or hyperconvergence. By separating on-host IO processing from an off-host persistent data repository, Datrium DVX provides elastic performance and elastic capacity that scale independently from each other.

The high performance of Datrium DVX comes in large part from the fact the solution maintains all application data in local flash on the server, so the majority of IO (reads) occur locally without ever going across the network. In addition, as users add servers the DVX gets faster.

DatriumDVX also provides sophisticated data reduction techniques to streamline economics. Clients cache data in the server-based solid-state drives (SSDs) and synchronously writes compressed and deduplicated data to relevant non-volatile RAM in the network-attached NetShelf data server. The system continuously stores the data on the DVX's nearline SAS hard disk drives. Once written to the data server, post-process global deduplication further reduces the VM data footprint.

Clients do not manage storage with the DVX. There are not storage elements to administer. Instead, datastore capacity is associated with VMs as they are provisioned through VMware vCenter, saving a significant amount of time especially compared with LUN-based environments.