Sometimes it’s really easy to have too much of good thing. In a hyperconverged, scaled-out backup system, there can be numerous motherboards, multiple persistence drives and hardware duplicates as far as the eye can see. That’s why Brian Biles (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Datrium Inc., looked for a storage solution that could bring order to the chaos, and in doing so he created something no one had quite seen before.

“We stripped it down so it’s way more cost efficient and, as it turns out, way more scalable,” Biles said. “We’re able to combine compute, primary and secondary storage in one scalable infrastructure. That’s never been done our way before.”

Biles told his story during a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the origin of Datrium’s technology solution and the company’s recent moves to support open-source platforms. (* Disclosure below.)

Before creating Datrium, Biles led Data Domain, a company that produced deduplication storage systems. And, he worked on backup recovery systems while at EMC. But as the hyperconvergence movement began to emerge in 2012, it became apparent that the IT industry was struggling with the limits of storage technology, Biles explained.

Solution to primary storage problem

“Doing a storage system that was good for [backup] on either disk or flash was something we knew how to do,” Biles said. “But the people who were purely doing that couldn’t figure out how to get it to work for primary storage.”

Datrium’s founders put together a different kind of framework, one that used host with flash as a primary store and a secondary set of chassis with hard drives for data persistence. “We can be as competitive as any data protection architecture, as well as being faster than the fastest all-flash array,” Biles stated.

Datrium has recently branched out of the VMware space to provide storage support on open-source platforms such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. The company’s technology also lets customers do container-level snapshots and then clone them immediately to another host.

“We’re kind of a data management company that also lets you go fast,” Biles said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Datrium Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE