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Datrium go GA

This week Datrium announced that their DVX system is now generally available. I met these guys at VMworld 2015, and wrote a closer look at Datrium here. If you want a deeper dive into their solution, please read that post. But in a nutshell, their solution uses a combination of host side flash devices to accelerate read I/O, while at the same time writing to the Datrium hardware storage appliance (called a NetShelf). The NetShelf provides “cheap, durable storage that is easy to manage”. The DVX architecture presents the combined local cache/flash devices and NetShelf as a single shared NFS v3 datastore to your ESXi hosts.

In the press release, some tentative performance figures were shared. It seems that they were able to achieve 30K IOPS per host, and 1 million IOPS on a 32 host configuration. I don’t have any details regarding the workload, I/O size, R/W ratio, or indeed the latency that comes with these figures. I’m sure these will be forthcoming over time.

The DVX supports both vSphere 5.5 and 6.0, which is nice to see, and is now listed on the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) for NAS.

The DVX is currently available for purchase in the US (it will be in EMEA later this year). The list price, as per the press release, is $125,000, and this includes a NetShelf D12X4 appliance and unlimited licenses for the DVX  software on vSphere hosts. If I remember correctly, up to 32 ESXi hosts can share a NetShelf, but this may have changed since I last spoke to the guys at Datrium. I’m sure they’ll correct me if I got the figure wrong, as I know they were looking to see if they could support more.

The NetShelf (D12X4) appliance comes with 48TB raw capacity, which Datrium state is approximately 60TB-180TB effective capacity when deduplication and compression rates are taken into account. These features usually provide consolidation savings of 2x – 6x.

The list price does not include the servers, nor does it include the SSDs (host flash devices), so these must be “purchased and supported independently”.

I have some very good friend over at Datrium. I wish them all the best in 2016 in what is a very competitive storage market. I think they may have something that is relatively unique in offering a solution that includes both server-side caching, as well as persistent storage. Again, you can read more detail about the product/solution on my previous blog.

You can learn more about Datrium and the DVX product at www.datrium.com.

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