Data Services Platform - Cloud Infrastructure Management

Performance, Availability, and Efficiency: Pick 3

Data is at the center of the Data Center. Datera is revolutionary storage software that unifies data management around diverse workloads and ecosystems. Driven by cloud-like automation, agility, flexibility, and scale for on-prem and hybrid clouds.

"We tested many storage platforms and found the Datera delivered the best and most consistent cloud platform performance for our random differential workloads. This was critical for the general unknown workloads coming our way on a monthly basis."
Top 100 Telco, VP Infrastructure

"It took a matter of hours to deploy Datera in a Layer 3 environment where it took an entire year for its incumbent
competitive scale-out platform."
Top 100 Financial Services, Senior Director Storage Infrastructure

Agile Architecture

Built with a unique architecture that enables the rapid and flexible adoption of the latest industry-standard server and storage media technologies and autonomously delivers a cloud-like user experience and business model on-premises at enterprise scale, with linear performance, continuous availability, and strong efficiency.

Autonomous Control Plane

Storage Operations at scale are painful, time-consuming, and manual. Do they have to be? Datera has another way. Datera’s innovative autonomous control plane technology is the brains of this powerful scale-out architecture.

Learn more

Policy-Driven
Policies encode the application needs of storage media preference, data resiliency, data protection, and more allowing the system to understand intent and best optimize the response. These policies fully expose the flexibility of the Datera platform and can be modified on the fly as application needs change.

Application Templates
Sophisticated application templates can be used to precisely define and control storage policies. These re-usable templates simplify provisioning and configuration change management at the cloud-scale. A change to a single template can be efficiently and dynamically propagated to 1000’s of application instances.

Cloud-like Operations
An easy to use web-based GUI and powerful REST APIs enable multi-tenant self-service and reduce operational complexity. The same Datera management interfaces can be used to provision storage for bare-metal servers, databases, virtual machines, containers, and more. CSI plug-in fully supports Kubernetes Storage Classes to efficiently allocate resources to meet service level agreements.

Continuous Self-optimization
With Datera application behavior and storage, resources are continuously monitored and intelligently optimized without user intervention. This autonomous function combined with the efficiency of the dynamic data plane continuously optimizes the system without service disruption.

Dynamic Data Plane

Gone are the days of tedious and unreliable data migrations. Dynamic mobility frees applications from underlying technology allowing for transparent, online optimization of infrastructure. Data is fluid and moves easily to meet application requirements, resource availability or user-driven policy changes.

Learn more

Continuous Data Availability
Data availability is critical for enterprise applications. Datera incorporates a shared-nothing design to distribute data across nodes, racks, and sites for failure or disaster tolerance. Data resiliency is set in policies based on application needs — 2-5 volume copies and ensured with deep, continuous integrity checking. Full mesh rebuilds enable fast data recovery, server maintenance, and rolling OS updates.

Heterogeneous Media Management
Applications have a wide range of price/performance requirements which vary over time. What is really unique about Datera is that the data store for an individual application can access mixed media and server types. Combining high performance and data resiliency, the system is inherently “media aware” data is intelligently placed based on the media available.

Advanced-Data Services
Enterprises require a broad set of data services, and Datera delivers. Efficiency is a key business driver. Datara provides thin provisioning, clones with advanced inline data deduplication, compression, and encryption. Datera also supports snapshots with application consistency groups, failure domains, stretched clusters, and cloud backup for continuous availability and fast data recovery.

Optimized IO Stack

How do you build a commodity-based scale-out storage system with better latency than the best enterprise arrays? A maniacal focus and patented lockless coherency protocol are how. Combined with the dynamic data fabric and autonomous control plane datera can adapt to any business need.

Learn more

Native IO Performance
A bare metal form factor that extracts maximum performance from the hardware. The IO stack is directly executed on each node, eliminating the latency of virtualization layers and guest operating systems that can significantly reduce performance. Together with other optimizations, the system delivers linear performance (sub-200µS latencies) at scale along with other benefits like extending flash media endurance.

Sophisticated Multi-tiered Caching
Datera exploits a thin layer of non-volatile memory as a cache in front of one or more types of storage media such as flash and/or disk, reducing latency and increasing throughput while optimizing the cost of capacity by storing data on less expensive media. This non-volatile cache allows fast write acknowledgment from low latency HDD media so that it does not become the bottleneck for a mixed media data store.

Lockless Coherency Protocol
The Achilles heel of most distributed storage architectures is the implementation of IO locking mechanisms for managing coherent access to data. This becomes a significant performance bottleneck as the system scales out. Datera is far more advanced, using a patented Lockless Coherency Protocol that is time-based and completely avoids this problem, improving latency for client IO access or intra-cluster data migration.

Industry Standard Hardware

How do you move away from proprietary hardware that forces forklift upgrades and technology lock-in? Build technology implemented around a principle of abstraction from the physical server and media resources. Datera is the only system with the agility and flexibility that provides for the optimization of Performance, Lifecycle/Procurement, and adaption of new technologies.

Learn more

Performance & Flexibility
With Datera, a cluster is not monolithic, as with legacy arrays, or other hardware-defined solutions. As newer CPU, media, or even ethernet networking technologies are advanced, Datera’s architecture allows for the fastest adoption in the industry. Each cluster inventories new nodes as added, and policies previously applied may be adjusted manually, or autonomically, to provide additional optimization or performance to existing or new workloads.

Never Migrate/Agile Procurement
We have customers today that have been adding nodes for 3-4 years, to the same cluster, with a consistent UUID. This not only removes the traditional and painful 3-5 year forklift migration cycles (disruptive and often expensive), it allows business buying groups to incrementally space out purchases, and the avoidance of over-provisioning, which dramatically reduces the efficiency of storage purchasing.

Rapid Technology Adoption
Our customers no longer need to wait for lengthy qualification cycles. For example, when 3D X-Point solutions were first introduced by Intel, Samsung, and Micron, Datera was ready within weeks to support them. Datera users often mix and match generations of servers within their clusters, and are also able to mix and match different firmware revs of media, to mitigate the risk of a media firmware endemic bug (happens too often, with a properly architected Datera cluster, downtime can easily be avoided).

Eco-Systems

For too long IT administrators have struggled to support diverse environments and workloads. With Datera’s flexibility and innate programmability, integration is simple. Whether connecting to legacy environments or rolling your own every function is available via REST API and through Eco-System native plugins.

Learn more
Our customers are sophisticated IT consumers, often running virtualization, private and hybrid cloud, and containers within common business groups and structures. They demand a platform with tight integration, including VMware, Kubernetes, OpenStack, and others. Datera includes and aggressively maintains plug-ins and best practices for these key, 3rd party solutions.

vSphere
- The Datera VCP Plug-In simplifies and integrates seamlessly with vSphere, allowing you to quickly provision storage instances, create snapshots and manage storage volumes from within your familiar vSphere UI.
Kubernetes
- Datera gives Kubernetes (K8s) enterprise customers the peace of mind of a future-proof data services platform that is ready for diverse and demanding workloads — as K8s continues to dominate the container orchestration arena, it is likely to containerize higher-end workloads, as well.
- The Datera CSI Volume Plugin uses Datera storage backend as distributed data storage for containers.
Hybrid Clouds
- Datera delivers highly-elastic block and object storage-as-a-service, with the enterprise-class performance and predictable low-latency needed to lift and consolidate Tier-1 and cloud-native workloads onto your private or hybrid cloud platform.
- Designed for clouds, Datera provides robust multi-tenancy, with per-tenant role-based access, QoS, comprehensive storage policies, and reusable application templates that make self-service a snap for developers without manual administration. Datera supports popular open cloud platforms and providers including OpenStack Cinder Driver and Apache CloudStack.