SUNNYVALE, Calif. and
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, July 28, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Benjamin
Craig, EVP & CIO of Northrim Bank in Alaska, knew he had a storage problem. He also
knew how he wanted to fix it, but until now the solution didn't
exist.
Northrim, one of three publicly traded/publicly held companies
based in Alaska, has had to master
business continuity to deal with both extreme distance and
nature. In 2012, the bank experienced two Level-1 disaster
events, forcing them to enact contingency strategies only four
months after the completion of its newly commissioned virtual
infrastructure. Thanks in large part to VMware vSphere and
shared storage, they were able to successfully resume production
operations in less than five minutes at their secondary datacenter
350 miles away.
Northrim's hybrid SAN arrays have been part of that success, but
as needs grew, those arrays could only scale by purchasing
expensive controller and cache upgrades. And because
many of the bank's virtual servers and desktops have very different
performance and capacity needs, they had to purchase
workload-specific SANs, as their only alternative was to pay a
heavy price for overprovisioning. This path was leading
to too many arrays, and too much administrative burden, at too high
a price.
Before investing in yet another SAN, the bank investigated
emerging server-side caching vendors to offload the SAN and
optimize speed within host clusters. "While beneficial in
some ways, they ultimately created yet another independent layer to
manage and troubleshoot," Mr. Craig said. The team also
evaluated hyperconverged solutions that scaled storage performance
and capacity within server computing resources, but "the
proportional scale of storage and compute resources often didn't
fit well, and the cost of hyper-convergence was significantly
higher" than traditional server and storage infrastructure.
"Datrium represents the right kind of next step, and we haven't
seen it from anyone else," he continued. "In short, Datrium
leverages the power of both VMware host hardware and shared storage
together to simplify scaling. The result is blisteringly fast
IO that can be dynamically upgraded by simply adding more commodity
solid-state drives and assigning more vSphere logical processor
cores, at minimal additional cost. We can run completely
from flash before traversing the network for half the price of a
hybrid array.
"Moreover, Datrium is VM-centric; it allows us to set individual
protection and performance metrics per virtual machine, aggregating
shared storage into a single Datastore rather than requiring
management of LUNs or other array artifacts. While this
technology is still being developed, it represents a bold and
necessary paradigm change in shared storage."
Datrium, founded by expatriate senior product leadership from
VMware and Data Domain / EMC, is an emerging Silicon Valley storage
company just coming out of stealth mode. Its DVX product is
currently in field testing at selected sites.
"When we started Datrium, we felt there had to be a better
storage model for on-premise virtual infrastructure," said
Brian Biles, CEO and Founder of
Datrium, formerly a Founder of Data Domain. "What we ended up
talking about didn't look like any existing product
categories."
Unlike a SAN array, the Datrium model puts all the storage speed
elements – software for RAID, clones, dedupe and other data
services, and flash for in-use data – on stateless ESX hosts, using
customer-provided bring your own (BYO) commodity servers and
SSDs.
Unlike hyperconverged servers, Datrium storage is designed
around a highly-available network drive-enclosure appliance for
at-rest data. This ensures all persistent data is off-host,
so speed can be provisioned independently of capacity. Unlike
server-side caching vendors, administration is VM-centric,
centralized and integrated. And with Datrium, servers don't
write to other servers; they operate locally and are isolated from
most neighbor noise.
For more information on Datrium, see www.datrium.com to find
product details and a video of Ben
Craig's discussion. Datrium will be demonstrating the
DVX at VMworld San Francisco in Booth 1747 the week of August
30. The Datrium DVX is currently in limited test release and
is not yet for sale.
For more information on Northrim Bank, see www.northrim.com.
ABOUT DATRIUM
Datrium™ (@DatriumStorage) delivers the first server flash
storage system with the Datrium DVX. Unlike rigid and
expensive Arrays or Hyperconverged servers, DVX storage gets its
speed from commodity, Bring Your Own (BYO) compute and SSDs on
stateless servers, so storage for VMs is simpler to scale, more
efficient, and more dynamic. The DVX will be ideal for
enterprise applications, including VDI, test and development, and
server VM consolidation. For more information please visit
www.datrium.com
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SOURCE Datrium