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.

We empower clients with the ability to simply accelerate and scale their VM workloads with existing server models

“We empower clients with the ability to simply manage performance and capacity of their VM workloads with existing server models, and do so right within vCenter,” explains Biles.

The core competencies of the company are attributable to the pedigree of the founders, along with the team they subsequently recruited to launch the company. Intimate knowledge of server virtualization and storage principles empowers the organization to practice a unique approach: separating server-powered speed from appliance-based durable capacity. This is unlike other storage providers who merge the two, rather than separate them. “This approach allows us to scale differently with more precision on service levels,”points out Biles.

A number of organizations have benefitted from the company’s breakthrough abilities to scale performance of hosts, cost-effectively. For instance, Neovera, a provider of cybersecurity services and enterprise cloud solutions, was seeking a cost-efficient solution for maintaining high performance for its clients, especially those with high volume transactions. With Datrium DVX, Neovera was able to speed up data warehouse read and write performance. The solution allowed the customer to manage storage at the VM level in vCenter, leading to faster provisioning. This resulted in enhanced capacity and faster time to revenue.

The company is strategically poised with its plans to expand geographically, and also bring in larger designs for private clouds. Further,as a VMware Technology Alliance Partner, Datrium will continue to develop and deliver complimentary solutions by providing tools and resources to test,integrate, and package joint products.