An exciting day at Datera as we welcome Fujitsu, a well respected global brand, as a strategic partner to support enterprises who are rapidly adopting software-defined storage in order to achieve radically better business outcomes. As part of the relationship, Fujitsu will distribute Datera software under the Fujitsu storage brand with immediate availability in Japan and Europe. We are proud of the confidence that Fujitsu has placed in Datera’s technology, and for the technical rigor that Fujitsu has applied in evaluating our software platform.
Enterprises operating at scale have challenging decisions to make
We consistently see customers struggling to efficiently manage data at scale as they operate in a very dynamic and unpredictable environment. As data is critical to value creation and competitiveness, managing it at scale often creates complexity. Choosing the wrong technology can hinder business velocity and developer productivity, and cause missed opportunities and significant financial costs.
The world is no longer confined to just a set of well-known applications, where IT professionals could plan and select the right underlying storage technology to meet that specific set of requirements, and customers would be locked in the selected technology for several years..
The field is a lot broader and more dynamic than it was years ago. There are now more applications, more data, more diversity of requirements, and more storage media technologies available — plus IT data needs change faster than ever. And where is the best location for such data? Private, public or hybrid clouds? Yes, it is complicated!
In this paradigm, IT is challenged to make sense of all of the moving parts and serve the business with two basic goals:
- To deliver the right data at the right time
- Provide the data in the most cost effective and secure way all the time
Beyond CAPEX, businesses experience significant operational costs and time to evaluate, select, and manage storage products. Adding to the purchasing complexity, the actual value of the data data set changes over time. While being able to deliver data faster today, by using more expensive technology, could mean a competitive lead and/or create new revenue streams, that data may no longer need to be sitting on an expensive media class six months later.
So how can IT efficiently deal with managing 100s of TBs or PBs, operating at scale while dealing with a number of different point products, that each will lock them in for years, when their applications, requirements and the technology market are constantly evolving? This reality ultimately pushes customers to compromise, which in most cases results in higher costs.
Even though companies’ may have data with different values/requirements, that could benefit from different types of products, the trade off is always a balancing act between operational efforts and cost.. In many cases we see customers consolidating their workloads on the more expensive and performant products capable of accommodating their most demanding workloads. Others choose to optimize around elasticity and flexibility, opting for the public cloud.. Both options require compromises which end up being very expensive when operating at scale.
At Datera, our founders determined that there was a need for a completely new architectural paradigm to radically simplify the data infrastructure, and ultimately give customers unparalleled business agility, operational efficiency, and to radically lower overall costs.
How does Datera do it?
Software-defined storage solutions are dramatically different in spite of being categorized under the same product class. First generation software-defined storage aimed at delivering storage arrays with software running on servers. The concept provided some flexibility and cost savings. However, the performance was often short of expectations, and in most cases the solutions did not address the managerial shortcomings and rigidity of traditional storage products. As a result many first generation SDS solutions were deployed for Tier 2+ use cases.
Datera took a broader approach to the problem to deliver on customers’ expectations.
In the Datera paradigm, the storage infrastructure — composed of servers from multiple vendors with different classes of media that can all co-exist together — becomes invisible!
Everything is automated and orchestrated via APIs to eliminate all of the efforts associated with planning, selecting, deploying and managing storage. A key value in a Datera managerial platform is that customers can direct applications via policies to selected media classes to meet specific SLAs.
Imagine an application that is running on SATA flash, and the customer determined it would benefit from running on a NVMe or even Intel Optane flash technology to get better response times. All that a customer needs to do is to add a couple servers with the desired media to a running cluster, change one policy and data will start migrating live to the new nodes and customers will start seeing immediate performance improvements! If after a while, the customer determines looking at the insights, that the application would benefit to sit on lower cost media again, a simple policy change will move it back! Everything just happens live through advanced automation!
So effortlessly achieving the ability to deliver the right data at the right time at the right cost all the time, can really be possible!
The end result is unparalleled business agility, operational efficiency, and radically lower overall costs. The data infrastructure can now meaningfully raise the bar in supporting IT as a competitive advantage.
In summary, the Datera software defined block and object storage platform is:
- as easy, self service and elastic as the public cloud;
- as performant and feature-rich as enterprise class arrays;
- capable of handling multiple classes of servers and media technology in the same architecture, all orchestrated by policies to meet application intent with live migration between tiers;
- future proof for adopting any new media technology on the fly;
- everything fully AUTOMATED via APIs;
- and foundational for a robust, hybrid cloud world.
Bottom line
Markets, technologies, and requirements evolve. As software is now capable of delivering very high levels of performance, the battleground shifts to automation.
We are seeing software defined continue to mature rapidly, and it poised to become one of those major architectural paradigm shifts that created a lot of value for Enterprises. Similar transformational examples include the transition from mainframes to distributed servers, or from physical to virtualized environments, on prem to hybrid clouds, or even from traditional cell phones to smartphones. During these transitions, there were detractors and naysayers that believed that the status quo would have won in the end. In most cases the world moved on and as long as there was significant new value, customers helped lead that transition as they realized that status quo was not a viable winning strategy. This is one of those times.
At Datera our focus is on delivering the most performant, reliable and automated software-defined architecture for the hybrid cloud data center, eliminating all the complexities of managing storage and enabling customers with the most agile data infrastructure possible. And taking our technology to enterprises via some of the most recognized and trusted brands in the industry.