Datrium rebrands hybrid cloud data platform as Automatrix

Broad data platform

Datrium started as a company very much focused on NVMe flash storage, but is now making a big deal of hybrid cloud and sees itself as a broad data platform.

Here, the firm is responding to a trend towards hybrid cloud and multicloud operations. Its core on-premise product is DVX, which sees NVMe flash storage on server compute nodes with bulk hard disk drive-based storage on data nodes. DVX provides flash storage performance of three to four times that of SCSI-connected flash.

“You see all the old array vendors trying to move their old cages nearer to the cloud and calling it a cloud strategy. SAN technology served a purpose, but we don’t believe it’s the way of the future”

Last year, Datrium added Cloud DVX, which runs in the AWS cloud as an adjunct to on-premise deployments.

Datrium executives make a big deal of pointing out that many of the functions it offers are usually split between different suppliers’ products and therefore siloed to some extent.

“Customers say they get inconsistent experiences with different virtualisation planes and different data planes,” said CEO Tim Page. “Customers also need several different products, and these are landlocked, with silos that can’t move together.”

It’s the same in the cloud, said Page, who gave the example of AWS, with S3, EBS and Glacier as different code bases in use there.

“You see all the old array vendors trying to move their old cages nearer to the cloud and calling it a cloud strategy. SAN technology served a purpose, but we don’t believe it’s the way of the future,” he said.

“With SANs, you have to create LUNs [logical unit numbers], configure multipathing and masking, deploy switching and map VMs to LUNs. But the business wants to deal with applications and VMs. We allow this with a guaranteed pool that is VM-centric, with a common code base between the different areas of functionality.”