Data Backup Digest

We've heard a lot about elastic data storage as of late. IBM, EMC and even Amazon all offer their own form of elastic storage. However, these big names aren't alone in the race to provide consumers with a highly accessible, fully scalable and efficient method for data storage. In fact, a new startup company called Datera, which has only recently emerged out of stealth, has even thrown their hat into the mix with the introduction of their Elastic Data Fabric, or EDF, storage.

Datera's EDF storage was originally made available in February 2016. Meant specifically for developers who required cloud-based services such as API provisioning and multitenant segmentation, the platform is highly flexible and able to adapt to application-specific needs.

Marc Fleischmann, CEO of Datera, explained some of the direct benefits of the Elastic Data Fabric platform. He was quoted as saying: "We take the complexity out of storage operations. Users can simply define the goals they desire for their applications and let our intelligent software do the rest, instantly, automatically, and at any scale."

EDF is currently priced at a rate of $0.55 per gigabyte, with all clusters requiring a minimum of three nodes, each of which features 12 separate hard drives with 4 TB of capacity each as well as two Samsung 1725 NVMe drives of 1.6TB each. As such, each three-node cluster sports roughly 150 terabytes of usable storage space and, according to Datera, is capable of achieving 150,000 input / output operations per second (IOPS).

Datera's CEO continued by touting some of his company's past achievements while also talking about the future. He said: "We contributed our block storage stack LIO to Linux to make it an industry standard connector, behind which we can build an elastic data fabric to unify such a wide spectrum of use cases. We have more storage protocols on our roadmap, to make our data fabric very broadly usable. On top of it, we built a powerful policy-based management plane, to allow an equally broad spectrum of applications to automatically consume the data fabric, while we automatically configure all of its elements and continuously optimize them."

While Datera's EDF has plenty of features right from the start, the company is already planning on rolling out some upgrades and enhancements. This includes features such as deduplication, asynchronous replication and inline compression. While an exact timeline for the added functionality has not been announced at the time of this writing, Datera's is expecting to introduce the inline compression aspect at some point in 2016.

However, it's important to note that Datera is facing some stiff competition. Apart from the biggest and most obvious players in the game, some of which are mentioned at the beginning of this article, the team with Datera will also have to contend with SUSE, FalconStor, Nexenta and other, similar solutions. As far as the cloud goes, Datera will see additional competition from Pure Storage, NetApp, HDS and more.

To find out more information about Datera, including technical details regarding the Elastic Data Fabric platform, please visit their official website at datera.io.