Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 18. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Datera recently presented at Storage Field Day 18. You can see videos of their presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.
Enterprise Software-Defined Storage
Datera position themselves as delivering “Enterprise Software-Defined Storage”. But what does that really mean? Enterprise IT gives you:
- High Performance
- Enterprise Features
- QoS
- Fault Domains
- Stretched Cluster
- L3 Networking
- Deduplication
- Replication
- HA
- Resiliency
Software-defined storage gives you:
- Automation
- DC Awareness Agility
- Continuous Availability
- Targeted Data Placement
- Continuous Optimisation
- Rapid technology adoption
Combine both of these and you get Datera.
[image courtesy of Datera]
Why Datera?
There are some other features built in to the platform that differentiate Datera’s offering, including:
- L3 Networking – Datera brings standard protocols with modern networking to data centre storage. Resources are designed to float to allow for agility, availability, and scalability.
- Policy-based Operations – Datera was built from day 1 with policy controls and policy templates to easy operations at scale while maintaining agility and availability.
- Targeted Data Placement – ensure data is distributed correctly across the physical infrastructure to meet policies around perfromance, availability, data protection while controlling cost
Thoughts and Further Reading
I’ve waxed lyrical about Datera’s intent-based approach previously. I like the idea that they’re positioning themselves as “Enterprise SDS”. While my day job is now at a service provider, I spent a lot of time in enterprise shops getting crusty applications to keep on running, as best as they could, on equally crusty storage arrays. Something like Datera comes along with a cool hybrid storage approach and the enterprise guys get a little nervous. They want replication, they want resiliency, they want to apply QoS policies to it.
The software-defined data centre is the darling architecture of the private cloud world. Everyone wants to work with infrastructure that can be easily automated, highly available, and extremely scalable. Historically, some of these features have flown in the face of what the enterprise wants: stability, performance, resiliency. The enterprise guys aren’t super keen on updating platforms in the middle of the day. They want to buy multiples of infrastructure components. And they want multiple sets of infrastructure protecting applications. They aren’t that far away from those software-defined folks in any case.
The ability to combine continuous optimisation with high availability is a neat part of Datera’s value proposition. Like a number of software-defined storage solutions, the ability to rapidly iterate new features within the platform, while maintaining that “enterprise” feel in terms of stability and resiliency, is a pretty cool thing. Datera are working hard to bring the best of both worlds together, and managing to deliver the agility that enterprise wants, while maintaining the availability within the infrastructure that they crave.
I’ve spoken at length before about the brutally slow pace of working in some enterprise storage shops. Operations staff are constantly being handed steamers from under-resourced or inexperienced project delivery staff. Change management people are crippling the pace. And the CIO wants to know why you’ve not moved your SQL 2005 environment to AWS. There are some very good reasons why things work the way they do (and also some very bad ones), and innovation can be painfully hard to make happen in these environments. The private cloud kids, on the other hand, are all in on the fast paced, fail fast, software-defined life. They’ve theoretically got it all humming along without a whole lot of involvement on a daily basis. Sure, they’re living on the edge (do I sound old and curmudgeonly yet?). In my opinion, Datera are doing a pretty decent job of bringing these two worlds together. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do in the next 12 months to progress that endeavour.