HCI or Not? Understand the Datrium solution in a 3 minutes read
As a newer market player that implements a game-changing architecture that accelerates applications, simplifies infrastructure management, and combine data protection in a single solution I am frequently asked what precisely Datrium does, and if Datrium is HCI or not.
Is Datrium HCI or Not? A duality dilemma.
If you view HCI as being the physical bundling of computing and storage, and sometimes networking (NFV) in a single box, maybe it's not. However, if you consider HCI as the seamless and delightful user experience to operate data centers that enact similarities with public clouds such as pay-as-you-go and simplicity, then yes.
The reality is that Gartner integrated systems Magic Quadrant doesn't exist anymore and they created a new one for HCI that encompasses all systems that behave like the public cloud. I am starting to use 'Legacy HCI' to designate the first HCI systems to hit the market and operate as a hardware building block, but are now seeing newcomers, not only Datrium, with modern architectures that provide comparable and better benefits.
This HCI or Convergence journey is only getting started, and we have entered the 2nd generation now. We call ourselves OCI (Open Convergence), but Gartner will still place us in the HCI bucket.
What does Datrium do?
The simplest way to describe the extensive range of services provided by the Datrium DVX is to follow the high-level architecture here.
1 - Datrium is a tier-1 AllFlash primary storage that leverages similar concepts of HCI, implementing flash close to the CPU bus and data locality, ensuring data used by an application is always located on the server where the app is running. Applications read and write IOs land on local flash, and all applications benefit from enterprise data services such as inline deduplication, compression, erasure coding, encryption, replication, and snapshots. This storage tier shoulders up to 18 Million IOPS (4kb) and 256 GB/s random-write throughput, scaling from 1 all the way up to 128 hosts.
1 - This tier-1 AllFlash primary storage provides the proper namespace that works cross-platform, providing a single namespace to be used by VMware, KVM, bare-metal Containers and bare-metal applications.
2 - Datrium empowers organizations to leverage their existing investments as part of the solution, allowing for both new or existing servers, rack or blade. The only primary requirement is that the hypervisor of choice supports the server.
3 - Datrium provides integrated scale-out data protection that is cost-optimized for data retention and where archived data is checked for data integrity four times a day. From an IO path perspective, all application writes completed on the AllFlash primary storage are copied and protected with erasure coding in this scale-out data pool. Inline deduplication is utilized to eliminate all duplicate data, and snapshot restores to the AllFlash primary storage are instantaneous. This data protection tier scales from 1 up to 10 nodes, allowing up to 1.7 petabytes of usable storage capacity.
4 - Datrium also provides native asynchronous replication to a 2nd site or data center. This replication is fully deduplicated and can be setup as site-to-site across multiple sources and destinations.
5 - Cloud DVX is a cloud-native solution that provides seamless data archiving from on-premise Datrium to AWS. Due to Datrium universal deduplication, all the data from multiple applications and sites are only stored once on AWS, and Datrium only uses incremental forever replication. This approach eliminates most AWS storage costs, but also the costly egress traffic for retrieving data back on-prem when required. Cloud DVX is also set to be the multi-site management user-interface and the native disaster recovery orchestrator and witness.
6 - Cloud DVX is further the source-repository that enables a fully orchestrated disaster recovery to VMware on AWS (VMC). The integrated solution also provides fully deduped and orchestrated replication from VMC back to Cloud DVX and then back on-prem. VMware has announced VMC for GCP, Azure, and AWS Gov, and Datrium customers automatically get to utilize the new cloud's services. {Demos at VMworld'18 and Availability later on}
7 - Not necessarily part of the product architecture, but with RedHat and Pivotal, Datrium allow customers to embrace kubernetes and containers across multiple virtualization platforms, bare-metal and also leveraging resources from the most prolific cloud services.
There are other product nuances that I could discuss in a deep dive, such as the unique end-to-end FIPS encryption, or the amazingly low price parts used to achieve performance that other vendors cannot achieve even using high-end NVMe and latest generation servers; but I'll leave that for a next chapter.
This article was first published by Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) at myvirtualcloud.net