Datera has written several blogs, comparing, and contrasting the revolution that self-driving/autonomous/electric cars have wrought in the auto space, to the advantages we now see using autonomic storage systems. Engineers in the Silicon Valley often own a Tesla, and being fans of operational excellence, they quickly realize that NOT having to make manual driving adjustments to get to work, makes the overall aspects of driving, faster and more efficient. They can therefore focus on other critical details as they are conveyed to the office (back when we all met at an office!).
Our customers, the Global 2000, are using software defined storage (SDS), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), and dis-aggregated HCI (dHCI) to help their administrators, procurement teams and IT staff in general, get more done, with less hours spent, manually tuning complex IT structures. As a bonus, by removing human error, performing repetitive tasks is perfect for the types of AI and machine learning intelligence Datera has had from inception.
In this blog, we want to walk you through a few use-case examples, where our open APIs, advanced automation practices, and intelligent storage and L3 networking have converged to allow our customers to deploy, maintain and quickly scale workloads, applications, and new environments.
As with Self-Driving Cars, Automated, Policy Driven, Containerization is a Storage Game Changer
A handful of companies have been preparing for this eventuality. Google, for example, uses tens of millions of servers in its operations. To dynamically compose them for each application, Google created its own software, known as “Borg.” Borg has spawned another computing management innovation: its open-source variant “Kubernetes,” which is rapidly democratizing Google-style cloud computing.
Kubernetes allows the disaggregation of applications into scalable microservices, which it dynamically maps onto data center resources based on their respective requirements and capabilities. This way, compute can be composed and delivered as a “swarm” of services, resulting in game-changing operational flexibility, utilization, and economics.
Datera is to Data as Kubernetes is to Compute
Datera provides sophisticated data orchestration to complement Kubernetes’ compute orchestration. By leveraging rich machine intelligence, the Datera data services platform continuously reshapes itself to optimize performance, resilience, and cost. Very easily add heterogeneous media, servers, and make changes ON THE FLY, to compose your perfect system. No more monolithic, legacy architecture, no more vendor lock in!
Never migrate again, add capacity, performance, resilience and reduce recovery time simply by adding/changing server nodes.
Datera is the only data services platform that is driven by application service level objectives (“SLOs”), which makes it the ideal self-driving data foundation for any cloud infrastructure:
- NoOps: Application SLOs automatically drive the Datera data infrastructure instead of humans, thus providing the foundation for 24×7 self-driving infrastructure.
- Dynamic resource shaping: The Datera platform enables all its elements (data, exports, services, etc.) to float across it, so that SLOs can constantly reshape it, ultimately spanning private and public clouds.
- Native I/O performance: Datera built its own low latency log-structured data store with a lockless distributed coherence protocol to match the performance of high-end enterprise arrays, and thus allows replacing them with a modern, cloud-age data services platform.
- Future-proof extensibility: Datera supports live-insertion of new technologies, which offers a game-changing price/performance band that can accommodate a wide spectrum of applications and eliminates data migration forever.
- Role-based multi-tenancy: The Datera platform uses adaptive micro-segmentation to deliver security, resilience and network virtualization as a service.
Datera = Rack-Scale Infrastructure
Resource orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes and Datera, align well with highly configurable hardware architectures, such as rack-scale, which allows independent pooling and scaling of resources to compose application-defined, tailored data center services.
Some of the key tenets of rack-scale computing are:
- Commodity hardware: Commodity servers provide disaggregated resources that can independently be pooled and scaled, offering wide price/performance flexibility.
- High-speed fabrics: Fast networks significantly reduce communication overhead and latency between the disaggregated resources and make them practical.
- Composability: Intelligent software dynamically composes the disaggregated resources into a cohesive system.
- API-driven: A single, global REST API makes the resources easy to provision, consume, move and manage.
- NoOps: The resources are consumed automatically, driven by applications rather than operating systems, hypervisors or humans.
Flat Networks Allow Effective Resource Pooling. We will discuss L3 Networking and Datera in an upcoming blog. Many of the largest enterprises in the world are deploying Datera software defined storage, on highly virutalized L3 networks. Further automating their entire data center!
Driving it All Home…
As the world continues to accelerate toward self-driving cars and billions of connected compute devices, the ability to keep up with their demands requires data centers to become just as intelligent, autonomous and agile as they are.
Self-driving infrastructure continuously recomposes itself to adapt to fluctuating application demands, with fully autonomic operations, driven by applications – not by humans.
Rack-scale architecture aligns well with self-driving infrastructure, as it offers independently composable resource pools. Flat networks reduce latency to make resource pooling effective, and virtual L3 networks let applications and the data center network seamlessly co-adapt.
Datera uniquely blends all these elements seamlessly together for data, creating an operations-free data services platform that transforms infrastructure and obsoletes storage as we know it.
Just as machine intelligence is increasingly enriching everyday human experiences, self-driving infrastructure is transforming the way digital technology is developed, deployed, and delivered.
Datera’s self-driving data infrastructure delivers game-changing speed, scale, agility, and economics – to always navigate the best road ahead to any destination.
For more general Datera information, we recommend reading our white papers:
Built for Autonomous Operations
Built for Continuous Availability
For detailed discussions around Containers, Kubernetes, or automation, please reach us at sales@datera.io and share any specific capability you would like to learn more about. We look forward to the opportunity!