Waze absolutely rules!

Yes, I am a Wazer, as Google calls the users of its most popular community-based navigation app, and I’m better for it. By planning your departure, route, arrival and to some extent, your life, it optimizes your transport in the most valuable units imaginable – your time. How else could I get my youngest daughter at the right place, at the right time and then to her next destination on time with any chance of success? Sure, like many, I have a rough map, speed limits (which I occasionally observe), timeframe, traffic suppositions and the day’s appointments and demands in my head, but my human brain is not running multivariate analyses with much accuracy these days, so instead I have an app do it for me every single day. Waze rules because it has become indispensable to my daily life. Yup, I’m a Wazer. And when I’m not busy serving as chauffer-in-chief, I dedicate my time to making sure your data is being transported with an even higher degree of intelligence and precision using the Datera software platform. At Datera, “it grieves us to see you in such pain” struggling with your current approach, and like Waze, we’re here to help you take a modern and efficient route toward your ultimate destination.

Just hop on the bus, Gus….

Datera is to enterprise storage as Waze is to transportation. In the world of the software defined data center, Datera does some of the same things and more for enterprise data, that Waze does for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. That is to say, Datera minimizes the time it takes to get data from one place to another, keeping applications humming so that users are best served.

A data route can start from the initial write of data from the application, over the network with its pre-determined performance or speed limits, to the physical location, aisle, rack, node and individual flash or spinning drive. Or, it could be the read of that data, traversing the opposite direction to serve the user’s, in this case the application’s, request. Time remains the ultimate measure of success, and Datera uses micrsoseconds (millionths of a second) for units. Write or read, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the precise orchestration of that data to minimize the time to the destination. That’s what a navigation system is all about for drivers, and that’s what Datera is all about for the data serving your applications. By placing data intelligently and freeing up the storage administrator’s time, the Datera platform reduces overall infrastructure costs and delivers the best performance at the lowest cost.

You don’t need to discuss much…

Whether you are transporting data or people, minimizing transport time is almost always the primary goal. You want to reduce delays, or as us IT folks would say, minimize latency. Datera’s Data Services Platform uses topological maps to plot and quickly assimilate potential routes for consideration. It then uses real-time data gleaned from many sources to project aggregate transport times, select the optimal route, and provide this information to the application. This is quite similar to the process a navigation app uses to bring information to drivers. Focusing on lower latency sounds straightforward but it won’t be enough to steer clear of the likelihood that you or your data will be stuck in traffic.

Just drop off the key, Lee …

Datera ensures that the route data takes remains the best route. With its 100% software-driven data services approach for high performance applications, Datera provides the speed and agility needed to quickly provision, move and scale IT services across network segments, data centers, and into the cloud. All of this happens transparently and independent of the physical infrastructure underneath. In order to optimize the data path, Datera continuously assesses the traffic that it sees across the data center topology, from application usage to compute intensity, and from network latencies to storage media performance, using machine learning. When a bottleneck challenges transport time, Datera re-routes the request using any variable to minimize the time needed for that request. The bigger the base, the better the results. The greater the number of travelers, the better the information and the better the routing by Datera and Waze alike.

You don’t need to be coy, Roy…..

In this case, more is better. The success of an application often relies on the network effect, or the positive effect that an additional user has on the value of a product. The more people who use it, the better it gets.

Datera provides a high-performance, scale-out, server-based storage with our software platform driving standard servers purchased from vendors like HPE, Fujitsu, Cisco, and DellEMC, and without the hyper-congestion, err hyperconvergence. Our Datera platform supports bare-metal, virtualized and containerized applications and provides them with data services.

When Google bought Waze, they recognized the power of the “network effects” of the application and instead of simply turning Google Maps into a Waze version 2, they kept them separate and allowed them to grow their respective user base. Datera, in the same way, supports all of the major server vendors so that all of our customers can select their server of choice to drive adoption.

Make a new plan, Stan…

IT folks are often the most demanding users and toughest critics because we understand something about the way the apps work and see logical next steps. We also know that complacency – feeling comfortable with the present – is the pathway to mediocrity and ultimately death. So what’s up next? As a super-user of a navigation app, I believe the next logical next is to incorporate more information into the system to yield better outcomes for us – a faster path to the destination. Incorporating real-time data is already being done, but what about offline data that can augment planned projections?

Here’s an example from my daily life: Like many of us, I commute nearly every workday to and from my office, and I coincidentally head past the Googleplex and Shoreline Amphitheatre along Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, as I have for nearly 20 years. During the nice, rain free evenings of spring, summer and early fall, Shoreline hosts large music concerts which generate a good deal of extra traffic at the peak of the evening commute. With that in mind, why doesn’t my navigation app examine Shoreline’s calendar, project the additional anticipated traffic, and re-route my typical commute away from it? Seems entirely logical and entirely doable. But not every show is a sell out, so such a projection would inevitably be an average based on the specific act, day of the week, and weather. Meh…. So why can’t the app execute a dynamic lookup into the Shoreline, StubHub or LiveNation ticket databases, determine the expected attendance, control for carpooling, more accurately project my expected evening commute, and re-route me. Come on, I’m just asking for some enhanced foresight based on new data. Whether from data storage at work or the navigation app in my car, I need to get some data game on and take it to the next level so I can get to my middle daughter’s dance performance or youngest daughter’s volleyball game already.

And get yourself free…

The good news is that Datera is already delivering what’s next…now. Our data platform already executes this type of analysis across the entire, distributed storage environment of our cohort of customers and takes actions to optimize for future data travels. We refer to this as Predictive Operations. That is, we use machine learning to assess the data from the past, assess pending events and take pro-active action to improve the future of the data operation. A simple example is the assessment of data usage patterns to determine the most-used data – the top acts if you will – and the execution of changes to prepare that hot data for the next onslaught of requests. All without an admin having to touch a button. Depending on the findings, Datera may take any number of steps, from physically moving the data from one data center to another, from one server to another, from slower media to faster media, or even to make a copy or two, to improve future performance. That’s what Predictive Operations is all about – using the greatest amount of information to make assessments, predict future needs, execute on the present, and optimize for the future.

Datera works a lot like a navigation app for enterprise data systems. It is all about efficiency and optimizing data storage for the modern data center through relentless real-time and machine learning-based automation. And Waze, thanks for looking out for my commute but please take the steps that Datera already has to make your app that much better. And dear readers, we’d “like to help you with your struggle to be free,” get your game on and “make you smile again,” just like G. Love & Special Sauce and Phish did with their blog-inspiring renditions of Paul Simon’s classic, “There Must Be 50 Waze (sic.) to Leave Your Lover.” Oh, and Legacy Storage, Godspeed to you as well on the trip to your final destination – the digital junkyard.

Ready to achieve high-performance with continuous availability on commodity hardware and reduce your storage infrastructure total-cost-of-ownership by as much as 70%? Contact us to get a free consultation