Datera, ready for a new era

Datera, one of the Software-Defined Storage (SDS) emerging leader, enters a new era. The IT Press Tour crew has the privilege to meet the exec team during a superb session a few days ago.

Founded in 2013 with a product launch in Q2 2016, the company has raised $40M in one round. Since last capital investment received in 2016, the company didn't raise any other round so we expect it will be the case soon to accelerate this new era illustrated by the arrival of Chris Cummings as CMO. The team is pretty impressive, all having strong track records in various companies.

The company is leading a wave of new players delivering the promise of SDS and for Datera the flavor is a block interface. By promise, I mean transforming a rack of servers into a gigantic pool of storage. In just words, Datera replaces big block arrays from legacy players by an innovative storage software platform very rich in term of Data Services dedicated to Tier 1 applications and data. A key differentiator is the programmable aspect of the platform aligned with the devops and applications requirements, it is facilitated by a serie of templates delivered with the product. Well known in the OpenStack environment, Datera extends now its market footprint and targets enterprise and service providers around containers and bare metal needs. The company has more than 50 installations.

Datera just introduced the 3.2 release with us with several key features illustrated by the following slide. Object storage flavor is provided by Minio, one of the fastest growing and best object storage platform on the market, so an obvious choice. The other advantage is the performance delivered by the platform: 200K IOPS at 200ms latency per node and the Datera engine has proven its linearity so pretty easy to predict the configuration based on IOPS and latency needs. 6PB is the new capacity with high capacity nodes of 96TB, remember with speak here about primary storage.

The product supports active-active geo/stretched clusters based on data replication, erasure coding will arrive in the future. The team also confirmed that NFS will arrive in the fall to finally deliver a unified multi-protocol SDS solution, pretty unique on the market. The product is sold with a annual subscription based on capacity.

In term of business, Datera is really hardware agnostic and we understood that some partners agreement should be announced pretty soon, probably second half of they year and potentially aligned with VMworld end of august. So far, Cisco, Dell and HPE are 3 brands well pushed by Datera.

Packet, one customer invited at the session, confirmed the deployment of Datera on his 18 data centers aligned with 18 clusters with 1PB of storage.

Datera confirms that Data Services are fundamental. Storage platform with lack of such data services will have serious trouble in the future and I even predict they will disappear soon as value is very limited. I remember having pushing and promoting such developments but it was pretty difficult with people who didn't understand market trends and customers' needs.