Datrium to Embrace Data-Focused, Multicloud Environments

Datrium, a company that made its name with server-powered storage for virtual machines, has announced a new direction that supports the multicloud environment so many organizations are embracing. The goal is to offer not only primary storage, but also high-performance compute, backup, disaster recovery, encryption and mobility.

The idea of this secure, software-defined converged platform, called Automatrix, is to provide a way for all of these capabilities to remain with the data, whether it is on premise, in a cloud, or traveling between locations.

Although the Automatrix platform is just getting off the ground, it will eventually provide a suite of autonomous data management applications that use machine learning to simplify and automate complicated IT tasks. Goals include providing a more consistent experience on  premise or in the cloud, improving cost-efficiency, fostering multicloud workload portability and simplifying operations.

The first solution to run on the Automatrix platform is ControlShift, a disaster recovery-as-a-service application that promises a recovery compliance objective (RCO) of 30 minutes, a recovery point objective (RPO) of 5 minutes for primary storage, and instant recovery time objective (RTO). ControlShift supports VMware and Kubernetes, and will eventually support VMWare Cloud.

“Once you have this loaded, it becomes continuous data protection, where they are snapping all of the deltas and sending them to the cloud,” explains Scott Sinclair, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Because they have a very efficient way of using deduplication, it’s very fast, and you end up with a secondary copy that is nearly close or identical to the data at the primary site.”

If an organization uses VMWare Cloud on Amazon, for example, “it’s easy to spin the virtual machines up and get the data center running on Amazon instead of using VMotion, which is a more time-consuming activity,” he adds.

The Automatrix platform and ControlShift are available now, with other applications expected to follow