Datrium goes multi-cloud upstacking with Automatrix, new name for HCI platform DVX

Analysis Datrium has relaunched its DVX product as Automatrix, a multicloud data platform with compute and five data services.

These are primary storage, backup, disaster recovery, encryption, and data mobility.

From its founding, Datrium took the middle ground between converged and hyperconverged systems with hyperconverged nodes running DVX storage controller software which linked them to a shared storage box.

This did not enable Datrium to emerge as a leading player alongside Nutanix and Dell EMC but it was successful enough to convince backers that its foundation DVX software and services were worth developing further.

CloudShift provides DRaaS by failing over from a failed DVX on-premises site to CloudDVX; an AWS cloud-native instance of DVX software running on the VMware Cloud on AWS, using EC2 and S3a. It orchestrates and instruments DRaaS for VMware Cloud on AWS. Changed on-premises DVX data is sent on a SaaS basis to CloudDVX using replication and global deduplication.

Now Datrium is building on this, with DVX subsumed into Automatrix.

We're told Automatrix will offer a suite of autonomous data management applications, built on SaaS application frameworks, with machine learning used to simplify and automate complicated IT tasks.

ControlShift

The first such app is ControlShift, the new name for CloudShift. It moves on from the DRaaS use case to become a general data mobility orchestrator with a claimed frictionless workload portability between clouds. The DRaaS facility is still present, and described as workflow automation for zero-RTO disaster recovery optimised for VMware Cloud DR.

ControlShift supports recovery from backup images directly with an RCO of 30 minutes, an RPO of five minutes for primary storage and instant RTO.

It will support VMware Cloud over time, along with DevOps, migration and bursting use cases. Datrium said there would be follow-on apps for analytics, compliance and search.

Automatrix can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, and either as software-defined HCI or split-provisioned storage.

Datrium's destination

Datrium will offer more data services on AWS within a year, including primary storage that augments the capacity in Datrium Cloud DVX. It will also port to Azure in 2020, becoming a proper multi-public cloud product.

It sees enterprises needing workload portability between public clouds and the on-premises world, and data needing to be stored in one logical silo where it is available for use by multiple workloads. That ensures the data can be governed, secured, protected, audited, analysed and searched.

Comment: The upstack move

CEO Page said: "In the future, data infrastructures have to converge, be offered as multicloud and become autonomous."

Datrium is looking to move up stack and converge primary and secondary data storage across the on-premises and public cloud worlds with uniform access and management. We think it is aiming to compete better with Dell EMC and Nutanix, the HCI players and SAN storage vendors, as well as the secondary storage convergers and data managers, such as Actifio, Cohesity, Druva and Rubrik.

The implied thinking is that there's no longer a future for Datrium, or other players, as point product suppliers. Instead the products have to be presented as enterprise services and converged into a platform. These services have to become autonomous, meaning intelligent, always-on with self-optimisation, self-protection, continuous data verification and compliance checks, and end-to-end encryption.

Page said in a canned quote: "Instead of bolting on missing storage services like other vendors attempt to do in the race to the data plane – for example, primary storage vendors adding backup after the fact or vice versa – we approached the problem holistically from the start by building in all five functions necessary to run applications fast, maintain uptime and keep data safe, on-premises or across multiple clouds."

All in all, Automatrix and multi-cloud autonomous data services are Page's big bet. Datrium has to go all the way on this or Page himself may become history.

Automatrix and ControlShift are available now from Datrium's VARs. ControlShift is priced per VM in the Datrium Forward subscription model, starting at $320/VM. ®