This US-based company is “digitally transforming” (buzzword meter is flashing yellow again) the human capital management industry with a slate of cloud offerings serving 3,700 customers in 160 countries. No Fortune 500 ranking now, but watch this space.

I’ll do my best to provide you with some insights into their challenges, the range of options they considered, why they chose the Datera platform, and the outcomes so far. And per our customer study credo at Datera, I’ll avoid taking this portion of their IT operations into the land of IT Fantasies, where Datera cures all IT evils, or even beyond the context of IT into the land of Sob Stories, where Datera is not just solving IT problems but fundamentally changing the business or the planet.

Customer Challenges

Scale through scale-out model rather than pay the penalties – operational and capital – of running Pure Storage, NetApp All Flash FAS, or even the forgotten NetApp SolidFire offering. Needed to ensure delivery against multiple classes of service to a variety of applications in order to charge its end customers differently based on response times. Also needed to ensure performance while running inline and offline encryption, since handling employee and consumer data is under the greatest scrutiny (just ask Equifax). Wanted a solution that would span their prior VMware-driven environment and support their intended orchestrators, then OpenStack and now trending toward Kubernetes.

New Story

  • Size: Looked at them all, and Datera won (I know you were expecting a different result). 2.8 petabytes for the first implementation and continuing to grow across 57 x 48TB hybrid nodes and 3 x 20TB NVMe nodes.
  • Performance: 80,000 IOPS per node, which no competing SDS vendor could match including NetApp SolidFire (now no longer SDS, but merely an appliance and HCI?) or Dell EMC ScaleIO (now no longer SDS, but merely an appliance without a commitment to further development due to the soon-to-be clarified Trident effort?).
  • Automation: Differentiate services classes and chargeback for differing levels of service for customers without requiring separate clusters or, in NetApp’s case, boxes for different service levels.
  • Security: Use secure multi-tenancy capabilities that are the same level of security that the now kicked-out solution from NetApp provided.
  • Cost: Better than the alternatives by greater than 70% versus arrays, and about even versus Dell EMC —the difference being that the Datera platform worked.

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This is part of our customer blog series Case Study Consternation, Calamity, and Conquest.