DataStax: what is a ‘progressive’ cloud strategy?
With its roots and foundations in the open source Apache Cassandra database, Santa Clara headquartered DataStax insists that it likes to keep things open.
As such, the company is opening a wider aperture on its collaboration with VMware by now offering DataStax production support on VMware vSAN, now in hybrid and multi-cloud configurations.
For the record, VMware vSAN (the artist formerly known as Virtual SAN) is a hyper-converged software-defined storage (SDS) technology that ‘pools’ direct-attached storage devices across a VMware vSphere cluster to create a distributed, shared data store.
So, think about it… DataStax is known for its ability to provide an always-on distributed hybrid cloud database for real-time applications at scale — and, VMware is known (at least with vSAN) for its ability to coalesce distributed storage resources.
Consistent infrastructure
The end result of the two technologies combined should, in theory, if not in practice, deliver a more consistent infrastructure and data/application management experience across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud applications.
The software engineering here is hybrid and multi-cloud-ready with capabilities to deliver operational and deployment consistency. There is built-in enterprise-grade availability here too.
The firms claim that customers can avoid cloud lock-in with unified operations between environments and across clouds with a single interface for end-to-end security and infrastructure management.
Progressive cloud: defined
So then, what is a ‘progressive’ cloud strategy?
A progressive cloud strategy (in the context of this discussion at least) is one that seeks to run essentially distributed database resources (plural) uniformly from development to production across the essentially distributed multi-cloud world of the hybrid cloud — and across different departmental zones, digital workflows, world regions, datacentres and device endpoints…
… and this (as above) is what the two firms here are seeking to achieve.
“For enterprises with a progressive cloud strategy, our expanded collaboration enables them to prevent cloud vendor lock-in, improve developer productivity by being able to easily test use cases in minutes, and ultimately, rely on DataStax for enterprise data management and VMware as the platform for modern applications,” said Kathryn Erickson, senior director of strategic partnerships at DataStax.
Erickson insists that DataStax is focused on making it easy for developers to use and manage DataStax by expanding VMware vSAN’s footprint to show that distributed systems do not need special treatment in their software stack.
DataStax Enterprise and DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra now spans anywhere VMware is deployed — on-premises data centers and public cloud.
As a result, customers can deploy VMware-hosted applications on-premises or on public clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud.