This content is part of the Essential Guide: Best data storage products 2017: Products of the Year

Datrium DVX 3.0

Datrium impresses judges and wins top honors with its DVX storage architecture, designed to sidestep latency and deliver performance and speed at scale.

Gold winner in Storage magazine and SearchStorage's 2017 Products of the Year Storage Arrays category.

Datrium has been making steady enhancements to its DVX storage platform since launching it in 2015. This year, the startup accelerated DVX's emergence by earning the top spot among enterprise arrays in our Products of the Year competition.

Of the 15 judges who evaluated Datrium DVX, more than half gave it a first-place score in the storage arrays category.

Datrium DVX aims to unclog bottlenecks by splitting I/O compute and data on separate hardware nodes. The technique writes data exclusively to flash-based hosts. Data is then copied to nonvolatile RAM-based data nodes that house data services.

Datrium is built for performance, scale and speed. The way in which it sidesteps latency struck a chord with our judges.

DVX software runs on compute and storage nodes, but users manage the system via VMware vSphere. Processing and capacity scale independently. Datrium storage is available on a branded turnkey appliance.

The vendor claimed that Datrium DVX greatly reduces the price of an all-flash system because of its use of commodity compute and flash. A single system can scale to 128 compute nodes and 10 data nodes for 1.7 petabytes of usable storage and 18 million random read IOPS.

Each Datrium DVX server has access to all data on back-end storage. Data is read from flash hosts, with authoritative copies stored on data servers. Datrium recently added an all-flash data node; early generations of DVX only used HDDs as storage.

Datrium referred to its architecture as open convergence, and claimed it delivers four times the performance of the fastest all-flash arrays.

DVX replicates snapshots to any virtual machine, vDisk, ISO file or container volumes. It encrypts data at rest and in flight between compute and data nodes. Elastic Replication is a Secure Socket Layer-based feature in DVX that lets compute nodes transfer data from local flash using aggregated network bandwidth.

Datrium DVX architecture
Datrium stacks flash-enabled DVX compute nodes on top of all-flash DVX data nodes used for back-end storage.

Judges liked DVX's unique architecture. "This is an interesting deconstruction of the storage array and storage path. I will be watching this product," one judge wrote. Another judge commented on how Datrium DVX provides a "refreshingly new take on storage architectures."

"An innovative architecture that has clear advantages relative to both shared storage arrays and hyper-converged infrastructure," another judge said.

A fourth judge added: "Some interesting innovation here to divide up workloads by requirement and optimize traffic. Perhaps still a little complex to understand compared to other traditional solutions."

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