Datrium boosts VMware protection but won’t add more hypervisors

Datrium has announced the ability to protect and recover VMware virtual machines (VMs) running on any platform.

The company also said it doesn’t plan to support any other hypervisors in its disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) centrepiece, though Kubernetes support is forthcoming and cloud support will be extended to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Datrium started out focused on NVMe flash storage hardware, but has transformed its efforts towards hybrid cloud and provision of a broad data platform.

Its core on-premise product is DVX, which uses 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.

Last year, Datrium added Cloud DVX, which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud as an adjunct to on-premise deployments and can scale to more than 1PB. ControlShift is its disaster recovery (DR) orchestration platform, which also offers continuous testing of DR infrastructure.

It offers its DRaaS service using DVX on-site and in the cloud, with zero recovery time objective (RTO) and a five-minute recovery point objective (RPO).

The ability to failover to AWS at the push of a button in ControlShift – hence the “instant RTO” claim – sees workloads being immediately available.

This is facilitated by runbook automation in ControlShift, which is set up when the service is configured then continually checked.

Reddy said the service depends on VMs being able to run in a VMware SDDC on VMware Cloud in AWS.

That comes alongside the ability to protect VMware VMs on any platform where previously it was only possible on Datrium’s DVX.

Reddy was keen to point out the benefits of being able to run from the cloud in the event of a disaster when compared with use of a mainstream backup product.

“Backup products may be able to be stored in S3, but when you failover you have to copy data to a primary storage system. If you want to do that for Amazon, it’s going to take you two days to convert 100TB or two weeks for a petabyte,” said Reddy.

“What everyone wants to know from the IT team when a disaster strikes is, ‘Can I bring my workload up ASAP’?”

Currently, only the AWS cloud is supported, but use of Azure and GCP will be possible from “mid-next year” said chief technology officer Sazzala Reddy.

It is not planned to support any other virtualisation platforms, though the company plans to launch support for protection of Docker container orchestration platform.

“We will launch something soon,” said Reddy, who went on to say that it is unlikely Datrium will go beyond VMware and Kubernetes because they have “won the market”.

“VMware and Kubernetes are the dominant players in the space and in the cloud as well,” said Reddy. “And developers that develop Kubernetes don’t care about any other virtualisation platform. You can’t defeat these two.”