Datrium Launching Automatrix Secure Multicloud Data Platform

Datrium, Inc. announced the Automatrix platform, a secure multicloud data platform for the resilient enterprise designed to deliver compute, primary storage, backup, DR, encryption and data mobility capabilities from the same software-defined converged infrastructure.

Automatrix will offer a suite of autonomous data management applications, built on its SaaS application framework, which leverages ML to simplify and automate complicated IT tasks.

The first available app, ControlShift (previously Project CloudShift), powers fast data mobility orchestration – including workflow automation for zero-RTO DR optimized for VMware Cloud DR and frictionless workload portability between clouds; it will be followed by apps for analytics, compliance and search.

The next gen technology in Automatrix completes the company’s platform, which can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud as software-defined HCI or split-provisioned storage. The firm also announced it increased capacity of its Cloud DVX solution by 38X to 1.15PB.

The company shared that it will offer more data services on Amazon Web Services (AWS) within one year, including primary storage that augments the capacity in Cloud DVX, and will port to Microsoft Azure in 2020.

“For all enterprises, the value is in their data. And regardless of where it lives, data requires several fundamental capabilities: it needs to be accessible with the performance you need when you need it, it needs to be protected, it has to be quickly recoverable, you need to be able to move it and it must be secure. However, we can’t do individual management of these functions across separate products anymore-IT has gotten too big,” said Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Datrium does it all on one platform. By providing a unified data management platform with native primary, backup, DR, mobility and encryption functionality built in, Datrium is not architecting around boxes, but around the data. This approach dramatically reduces IT complexity and makes it possible for enterprises to access their data where, when and as quickly as needed for their business, with a seamless, consistent experience across on-prem and clouds.“

Automatrix drives enterprise IT transformation
More than 87% of IT professionals in a recent study said they would spend more time on strategic initiatives if they were able to simplify and automate routine tasks. However, inadequate infrastructure frequently keeps this goal out of reach. By eliminating the traditional complexities of managing data across its lifecycle and by providing global data governance and a consistent experience across clouds, Automatrix platform provides a sure path to IT transformation for enterprises so that their IT organizations can become more strategic and meet the business requirement for instant user outcomes in the on-demand economy. In separate press release, the company announced its vision for IT transformation and findings from original research on the State of IT Transformation.

To manage data across its lifecycle, IT has to deal with five data services: primary storage, backup, DR, encryption and mobility. When these functions live in separate products, it slows everything down and adds operating friction, presenting core problems that inhibit digital transformation:

Product sprawl has negative effects on cost, SLAs, risk management and business agility.
Workload immobility hampers agility because each of these five legacy products are land-locked and unable to move easily to the cloud. Without converged data services that are consistent across clouds, multicloud workload portability is simply not practical.
Siloed data management (i.e., when data is in separate data service silos) makes data difficult to govern, secure, audit, analyze, search and makes it hard to plan for growth.

Automatrix incorporates five data services of computing workloads
in single unified data platform across clouds to deliver following key benefits:

Consistent experience on-premises or cloud: By unifying and automating data services with a multicloud platform, enterprises have a simpler and more efficient infrastructure to operate, and more fluid workload portability across clouds with a consistent experience. This is complemented by the Datrium Forward software subscription model, which enables the platform licensing itself to be portable.
Cost-efficient multicloud workload portability: Autonomous data services that are intelligent and always-on (self-optimization, self-protection, continuous data verification, continuous compliance checks, end-to-end encryption and more) minimize switching costs in moving workloads across clouds.
Liberation from overhead operating tasks: Automatrix’s cloud-first design enables the next level of consolidation of workloads and automation of day to day operating tasks by using SaaS and software-defined converged infrastructure to simplify operations.

“In a world that’s always on, enterprises struggle to meet their IT transformation objectives with solutions that lack the performance to run demanding modern workloads. They need automation to lighten the burden IT managers face with managing unprecedented data growth and data center complexity,” said Tim Page, CEO, Datrium. “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. Automatrix is the culmination of our work to develop the first autonomous, multicloud data platform. It consolidates data, automates data management and brings the services to the data, instead of bringing the data to the services, creating new levels of efficiency and data availability that help enterprises to simplify and transform their IT.“

Data Management App, ControlShift, Powers Simple and Failproof DR
DR is a major business risk and companies are not prepared. DR is complex, not reliable and is difficult to test and prove readiness. Attempting to coordinate DR across all five data services is an exercise in futility because each silo is changing independently of each other and at different rates. For example, the automation software involved in the DR process must be maintained and updated independently, exacerbating the complexity. Internal data center issues like power outages hide individual system alerts. Copying all of this complexity into multiple clouds has forbidding challenges.

A SaaS extension of the Automatrix platform, ControlShift is the company’s first autonomous data management application. It makes DR simple and failproof, delivering an industry recovery compliance objective (RCO) of 30 minutes, low recovery point objectives (RPO) and instant RTO. It is not possible to achieve these performance levels without autonomous and converged data services. DR orchestration services are otherwise very tricky to test, or they don’t fully integrate primary storage, backup, encryption, data efficiency and policy management.

Page explained: “In the future, data infrastructures have to converge, be offered as multicloud and become autonomous. Datrium is first. You can’t control DR recovery compliance objectives with a Frankenstein datacenter of multiple types of storage and orchestration. By orchestrating data movement across a unified data plane, ControlShift makes fail proof DR a reality.“

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Benefits of ControlShift include:

VMware and Kubernetes-centric: Eliminating the risk of VM conversions, ControlShift will support VMware Cloud over time.
SaaS-based for ease of compliance: Change management is the enemy of compliance, and because ControlShift is SaaS, even for prem-to-prem failover/failback, the company maintains the software. SaaS also allows external compliance probes, so if a data center network is down, for example, the software can still alert an operator.
Supports recovery from ransomware: The average time to detect a cybercrime attack is 170 days, so recovery from older data may need to be automated. ControlShift supports recovery from backup images directly with an RCO of 30 minutes, because of Automatrix data service convergence, an RPO of 5 minutes for primary storage and instant RTO.

“To truly leverage the flexibility and cost benefits of a multi-cloud approach to data requires a unified model for ensuring performance, data protection, mobility and security that’s consistent; regardless of the cloud environment on which your data physically resides,” said Steven Hill, senior storage analyst, 451 Research. “The key to success in multi-cloud data placement, workload mobility and DR orchestration is taking a modern approach like Datrium’s ControlShift SaaS offering, the newest segment in Datrium’s evolving Automatrix management platform that looks to combine automated, instant and pay-per-use recovery from outage events in the public cloud with single-pane-of-glass control.“

ControlShift data mobility is automation focused on the DR use case today and will support other DevOps, migration and bursting use cases in the future.

Pricing and availability:
The Automatrix platform and ControlShift are available from VARs. ControlShift is priced per VM in the Datrium Forward subscription model, starting at $320/VM.

“We’re confident in Datrium’s innovative technology, strong roadmap execution and product quality. We use the Datrium DVX across our private cloud today and have instantly benefited from the converged primary and backup as well as simple quarterly DR compliance testing-we receive double the performance, ten times faster recovery and zero storage admin time,” said Bryan Bond, director, IT infrastructure, eMeter, a Siemens Business.”We plan to expand our use of the Datrium Automatrix platform with Cloud DVX and ControlShift to support our multicloud infrastructure and improve our cloud DR infrastructure.”

“Datrium autonomous data services drastically simplifies our virtualized infrastructure and enables us to really consolidate and transform our data center. We process 12-15 billion security events per day and performance increased substantially after we virtualized on the Automatrix platform. Our resilience improved as well, from built-in backup that gives us no-impact snapshots and instant recovery, plus there’s also future potential for us to deploy cloud backup and DR to the cloud,” said Bill Crimmel, director, technology, Security on Demand. “We chose Datrium because it frees us from complexity and will scale with us as our storage and processing needs grow.“

“We chose Datrium and deployed its multicloud Automatrix platform because of its simplicity and cost effectiveness. Datrium delivered scalability, stability and simplicity of management right out of the gate in a very elegant software-defined convergence solution. Since we installed Datrium, the performance gains we are seeing are absolutely having an impact on our firm’s bottom line,” said Igor Zaika, director, IT, Sensiba San Filippo LLP. “Datrium Cloud DVX has brought the same benefits to our BC infrastructure and we plan to implement ControlShift to automate our DR failover. Datrium Automatrix platform has delivered simple, efficient autonomous data services across our primary storage, backup and DR infrastructure.“

“In Datrium we found a company that could deliver strong support and increase performance so we can shift our focus to more strategic initiatives. Since we’ve deployed Datrium, data-intensive computations that took four to five hours now take just one hour. What took minutes for applications to re-render graphics on virtual desktops now takess so our engineers can complete designs more quickly, leading to quicker product delivery and happier customers. We also use Cloud DVX today to protect our data by sending it off site to AWS,” said Kevin Smith, manager, information systems, Transcore. “We look forward to automating our DR orchestration with ControlShift to further improve our resiliency and BC plans. The Datrium Automatrix platform has really delivered autonomous data services that free me up to focus on my business priorities.“

“The Datrium business case made sense. Our move to the Automatrix platform simultaneously delivered 80 times higher performance, twice the usable capacity, simpler management, better data security in-flight and at rest, and a robust BC strategy-all at a significant cost savings. We could get the benefits of hyperconvergence, and more, but leverage our existing equipment and we got a fully robust DR solution,” said Darrin Moorer, CIO, Lead Bank. “We love the fact that we no longer have to understand storage or be storage managers thanks to Automatrix autonomous data services.“

“Centre never stops looking for the ideal IT infrastructure so we were excited when we discovered Datrium Automatrix, a software-defined converged infrastructure optimized for speed, scalability, efficiency, security and manageability. Both our enterprise customers and our C-Stack infrastructure demand best-of-breed results and Datrium Automatrix autonomous data services have delivered optimized IT investments with agility and minimum business risk,” said Chris Pace, CEO, Centre Technologies. “In our relentless pursuit of innovation, Centre Technologies is already moving ahead to offer groundbreaking DR services based on Datrium ControlShift to help our customers achieve 100% compliant DR failover/failback with faster recovery than available from any other solution today.“

“The Automatrix platform is the best software defined converged infrastructure on the market today, so Eagle has invested heavily to become experts in Datrium’s autonomous data services so we can develop IT solutions to meet our customers’ business needs. Our enterprise customers have achieved optimal results from DVX and Cloud DVX including leading application performance, improved IT agility from built-in backup with instant RTO and reduced risk from Blanket Encryption,” said Dave Hiechel, CEO, Eagle Technologies. “Eagle is constantly looking for new innovative applications to help our customers make data more accessible to users, so we plan to extend our future services around Datrium ControlShift to deliver breakthrough DR services with failproof DR and instant RTO.“

“ThinkOn delivers always-on infrastructure to support critical applications, data analytics and information asset protection solutions. ThinkOn enables organizations to accelerate the adoption of hybrid infrastructure through its ability to support combinations of cloud, dedicated and customer owned assets not available from others. We believe that liberating IT from complexity by delivering secure multicloud IaaS offerings combined with true hybrid cloud portability is a key differentiator,” said Craig McLellan, founder, ThinkOn, Inc. “Datrium’s ControlShift solution, which is part of the Automatrix family of capabilities, provides orchestrated workload mobility, makes delivering DRaaS a much more reliable and automated process. ThinkOn is excited to work with Datrium to bring these offerings to market.“

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Video: Datrium ControlShift: Automated DR Orchestration for the Modern Data Center