Datrium Design – Architecture Matters

Lame Joke: What do you get when you stick NVMe-based SSD onto an All-Flash Array or Hyper-Converged Node?

Genuine Answer: A Bottleneck of course!

As flash technologies advance and increase in performance, existing (and upcoming) network infrastructure cannot meet the demands of Next-Gen NAND technologies, such as 3DXPoint.
This chart compares saturation rates of 10GbE, 40GbE, and 100GbE with various flash offerings.

 

Datrium was founded by Ex-Founders and Principal Architects of Companies like Data Domain and VMware, so it’s safe to say they know a thing or two about architecture. Their approach to overcoming some of the shortcoming in Traditional Converged and HyperConverged (HCI) platforms boils down to the following shift in architecture design:

Move the I/O Processing to a stateless compute nodes

Architectural Overview
There are basically two components to Datrium’s Open Convergence architecture.

Compute Nodes
Computer Nodes are Servers of any brand the customer would like to use. The more RAM and Flash these servers have, the more powerful the overall architecture. Each Server Node get’s Datrium’s DVX software installed into the userspace on the hypervisor.
Every compute node is responsible for data services (Deduplication, Compression, Erasure Coding, and Encryption). These nodes pull copies of data from Data Nodes (the next component we will address shortly), and keep that data in a stateless fashion, before the data is sent to the Data Nodes.

Data Nodes
The DVX Data Nodes are Hybrid or All-Flash Disk Enclosures that are purchased from Datrium.  (You can’t use your own Data Nodes). Since all data is processed on the server nodes, there is no data processing happening at the data node layer. This allows the data nodes to keep data that is only accessed if the data copies are not available in flash/cache on the compute nodes. The data that resides on the data nodes is heavily protected for resiliency.

Open Convergence is Datrium’s marketing term for this improved architecture, but taking the marketing out of the discussion, here is how Datrium solves for business outcomes:

  1. Simpler than HyperConverged
    – Zero HCI Cluster configuration or cluster sprawl
    – Independently and Simply provision compute or storage
    – Flexibly support any mix of hosts or hypervisors
    – No vendor lock-in on compute resources. Use existing compute hardware
  2. Faster than All-Flash Arrays
    – Flash is on the server, where is performs much faster
    – No Controller Bottlenecks
    – Performance scales with each server
  3. No Backup Silos
    – One console for VM consolidation and data protection
    – Reduce Management time for Backup, DR, Copy Data Management
    – Eliminate dedicated backup devices

Image result for datrium architecture

If you need a lightning fast, resilient, scalable, cloud-enabled architecture, Datrium might be exactly what you need. Because in the end,  Architecture Matters.

 

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