Datrium today announced the Automatrix platform, the secure multicloud data platform for the resilient enterprise designed from the ground up to deliver best-in-class compute, primary storage, backup, disaster recovery, 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 new SaaS application framework, which leverages machine learning to simplify and automate complicated IT tasks. The first generally available app, ControlShift (previously Project CloudShift), powers the world's easiest, fastest data mobility orchestration - including workflow automation for zero-RTO disaster recovery optimized for VMware Cloud DR and frictionless workload portability between clouds; it will be followed by apps for analytics, compliance and search. The next generation technology in Automatrix completes Datrium's platform, which can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud as software-defined HCI or split-provisioned storage. Datrium also announced it increased capacity of its Cloud DVX solution by 38X to 1.15 petabytes. The company shared that it will offer even more data services on Amazon Web Services (AWS) within one year, including primary storage that augments the capacity in Datrium 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 percent 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, Datrium's 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 releases today, Datrium 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.
  

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

• Consistent experience on-premises or cloud: By unifying and automating data services with a multicloud platform, enterprises have a much simpler and more efficient infrastructure to operate, and much 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 at 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."

New Data Management App, ControlShift, Powers Simple and Failproof DR

Disaster recovery (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 Datrium's first autonomous data management application. It makes DR simple and failproof, delivering an industry-leading recovery compliance objective (RCO) of 30 minutes, very low recovery point objectives (RPO) and instant recovery time objective (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.

As 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 failproof DR a reality."

Key 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, Datrium 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 at 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 Datrium Automatrix platform and ControlShift are available now from value added resellers. ControlShift is priced per VM in the Datrium Forward subscription model, starting as low as $320/VM.