Traditional data recovery models are delicate and hard to test, putting the information-technology department in an uncomfortable spotlight. When critical restore is required, everything rides on the button push that may (or may not) restore data.

“No customer I have ever met has said it’s amazing that DR works for them. Nobody’s ever said that,” stated Sazzala Reddy (pictured, right), co-founder and chief technology officer of Datrium Inc. “If you push the button one day and there’s a disaster, everybody’s watching the IT person actually do this. It’s very fragile. It’s very scary.”

Reddy and Igor Zaika (pictured, left), IT director at Sensiba San Filippo LLP, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed the issues with traditional data backup and recovery, as well as Datrium’s Automatrix DRaaS platform (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: Sensiba has been a Datrium customer since the very beginning. Tell us about your experience.

Zaika: [Sensiba is] one of the largest California north-based accounting firms. [Our technology] is VMware-based; we’re also [virtual desktop infrastructure]-based. So, everybody works from a digital workspace. Our strong focus has been to provide a robust and high-performance digital workspace for our employees so they can have peace of mind and work anytime they want.

We’ve been using Datrium for three years. Started with 1.0; we’re now on 5.3, I believe. It’s been really good. It’s been innovative, it’s been challenging … working towards the data transformation internally in order to get to cloud, but we’re almost there so we are pretty excited.

Vellante: Give us a before and after. What prompted you to go with Datrium? 

Zaika: The challenge of the VDI is we have to provide a very robust platform so people feel they work on their local machines. So, our challenges were provisioning VDI machines within the timeframe … deploying all the master images, deploying provisional services, and it was taking a very long period of time.

Datrium changed that … [from an hour and a half] to 15 minutes. That was a pretty dramatic moment of truth when we deployed Datrium and we started the imaging process, and it was finished, and, to be honest, I thought that it’s broken! It actually was that fast.

Vellante: I think people misunderstand Datrium. In the early days, it wasn’t clear that you are really changing the way in which people approach storage. Can you explain what is unique about Datrium?

Reddy: As you know, disaster recovery is really mostly a disaster for everybody. So, what we have done is that we are able to offer cloud disaster recovery as a service. [The] idea is that you can have backups in the cloud, on Amazon. And when you push a button, you can failover and bring up your VMware servers on demand. So you can run your workloads right away. And then you push a button, it will bring it down and bring data back to you on-prem. So we call it Cloud DR as a Service to VMware Cloud on Amazon.

The reason why [traditional] DR doesn’t work is because you end up with five different products. One is primary, one is backup, one is DR orchestration, and some other things like encryption, fine optimization. You buy all these products to manage your data in one data center, and then you replicate the same five things on your second data center. Now, if that’s not Murphy’s Law, I don’t know what it is. It’s very scary for a lot of people, which is why it doesn’t really work.

Vellante: And almost all customers say they can’t test DR because it’s too dangerous.

Zaika: Yes. You can’t actually fully test the DR. You have to put a lot of effort, a lot of thought, and develop a really strong game plan in order to execute DR flawlessly. So, [our goal] when we are journeying towards the Datrium DR solution is to actually have a solution that’s going to be baked in, that we can press a button and have our vision of DR and meet our objectives.

Vellante: How does Datrium do that? What tech is behind it?

Reddy: So the technology’s basically local flash, software and host, and that’s what gives you the low latency.

Vellante: The information-technology industry’s consolidating, but money keeps flowing into storage because it’s still a hard problem to solve. What are your thoughts about the direction the storage industry is going?

Reddy: We’re not a pure play storage company in the sense that we focus on data management as well. So it’s not just a pure play storage only. That’s just dumb storage; you’re not going to go anywhere. What you need to do is move a level up and provide customers [with] high-level functionality so that they can make their lives easier. Dumb storage doesn’t sell anymore.

What we are building is a platform, a multicloud data plane where we can run in any cloud you want to. If you put VMware and Kubernetes on top, and Datrium on the bottom, you can move to any cloud you want to, and you cannot tell the difference.

It’s also a software as a service model in the cloud. People want that kind of stuff. People don’t want to install. If you’re going to go to the cloud and do the same things you were doing before, that’s not how people want to operate anymore. People don’t have time and patience. We are liberating people from complexity.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Datrium Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Datrium nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE