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Datera: Enterprise Software-Defined Storage

At TechFieldDay 18 the Datera company give an awesome presentation. This is a company that presented at a coupe Field Days already, and they gave some great insights into their product, vision and innovation this time. In this post we’ll have a look at the first video (of four) that were created during #TFD18. I’ll put the Vimeo video up here as well, for the sole reason that this is only possible because of the awesome work the TechFieldDay crew provides to the IT industry.

The speaker in this first video is Hal Woods and he is the Datera CTO. In this video he’ll explain what the company means with Enterprise Software-Defined Storage as well as the Software-Defined Data Center means according Datera (yes, that is right, according to them as other companies might have another view on this :D)

What is a SDDC?

A good question to start the SDDC discussion is, what does a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) mean for Datera? In the video this is answered in 4 bullets:

  • The first is that a virtualized environment is implemented on industry standard hardware and is delivered to the customer as a service
  • Second is that the Data Center can be controlled in a fully automated fashion
  • The third is that both legacy as well as cloud-native applications are supported
  • And the last is that it should provide the customer a much lower cost than traditional data center.

As mentioned before, this is the Datera vision of the Software-Defined Data Center and for me it is one that describes an SDDC darn well. Although others might add more bullets (or less) it all comes to making sure a modern Data Center is capable of hosting both legacy and modern application architectures, providing the necessary resources for business growth. An SDDC with on-premises as well as multi-cloud possibilities , API-driven, fully automated and serving both legacy and cloud-native application at least gives you an opportunity to complete your buzzword bingo card.

The Five Datera pillars

During the video Hal explains the five pillars that Datera uses. The pillars mentioned in the presentation are:

  • Datera Orchestration: for Datera this means that data can be moved dynamically across all of the resources without impact on the application. On the storage level.
  • Enterprise performance: Delivering deduplication, compression and encryption as well as other storage services can introduce a big performance impact, Datera has some intellectual property that enables their customers to have all of these storage services and still have enterprise performance.
  • Future-Ready Choice: This would be the ability to adopt to new technology. Datera promises the ability to adopt these new technologies is not only available for the new workloads, but the legacy workloads will also benefit from this.
  • Data Center Awareness: Datera encourages their customers to implement their storage in a distributed version across the racks. This provides their customers the possibility to provide better fault resiliency as well as getting the data closer to the application.
  • Predictive Operations:  By constantly collecting telemetry information from the running workloads, Datera can monitor and predict the behavior of the workloads, making sure a customer can utilize the storage to the fullest.

Al these pillars are built into the Datera platform, and are available to the customer on wide variety of brands. This is important because most companies have their own preferred supplier and are not easily moved towards other suppliers. With the five pillars that will provide the opportunity to build a SDDC with the hardware supplier of choice and the ability to do so for legacy as well as cloud-native application environments Datera provides a very promising storage solutions.

Datera SDDC platform Key Use-Cases

For every company out there a couple of use cases stand out for the Datera SDDC platform. In a world where most of the companies are still serving legacy applications, and are using or moving towards cloud-native applications the Datera team determined that a good way to help these companies with key use cases to show the way:

  • DataBase as a Service (DBaaS): This is one of those things a lot of companies are struggling with. Datera provides the perfect storage for DataBase acceleration and providing a DataBase as a Service for their customers.
  • Digital First Enterprise: In a fast changing and mobile world, more and more companies (old and new) are taking a digital first approach. This means that their way of business provides the customer with experiencing and ordering the companies products through a digital way only. To help these companies monetize those business models, Datera provides an easy to use and scalable solution.
  • Cloud Service Providers (CSP): As with Digital First Companies, CSP’s are looking for solutions that help them provide the best services to their customers. Storage is one the key components in a CSP environment, and the Datera Storage solution can help the CSP’s to provide the best storage solution for their customers.
  • Storage as a Service: The world of IT is constantly changing, and solutions that are new today are old tomorrow, but providing a storage solution for your customers (users) is considered a Service these days. We are all talking about how low the price per GB can go, but we still want to have the Ferrari experience. Providing Storage as a Service to your customers and letting them pay for the provided service seems to be the way to go (at least for now) and Datera provides this solution to their customers by default.

Looking at my customers and the challenges they struggling with, Datera looks to have an answer for most of them. I think the use cases presented by Datera are what most companies are struggling with these days, and having an option to start servicing a certain use case can help to grow in to the Datera solution. Time will tell if the adoption of the Datera solution is what customers are looking for ,but one thing is for sure when a company is looking for a DBaaS solution or a Storage solution providing them the flexibility and features provided by Datera I will certainly point them to the Tech Field Day website, to have a look at the Datera videos :D.

Arjan’s view

This is just the first of four videos that were created during the Datera presentation at Tech Field Day 18 in Austin. I already learned about Datera at Storage Field Day 10 as well as Storage Field Day 12, and must say I’m still figuring out what the real strength of Datera is. I really like the way they provide a solution to their customers, I see some points where a lot of companies are struggling with, but I also see a lot of competitors in this market. It might be that the next couple of videos will change my opinion, so let’s focus on those first. Providing the ability to build a Software Defined Data Center for legacy as well as cloud-native applications is some great technology, and is worth further investigation.

A couple of posts were already written on the TFD18 Datera appearance and you can find them here:

TFD18 Prep: Datera by Justin Warren

Tech Field Day 18 – Day 1 with Datera, NetApp and VMware by Ed Horley

Further information on past and future events that Datera attended or will attend can found on the Tech Field Day website here:

Datera

Disclosure

Although I’ve not been to Tech Field Day 18, I have been invited to multiple events hosted by Gestalt IT in the past. In those cases, Gestalt IT covered expenses related to travel, accommodation and food during the event. I did not receive any compensation for participation in these events, and I am (and was) not asked to blog or produce any kind of content. Any tweets, blog articles or other content I may/have produce(d) are the exclusive product of my interest in technology and my will to share information. All this is purely my own point of view and analysis of the products and technologies I have seen  during these events.