Hyperconverged infrastructure solved many issues associated with storage arrays, but they still give information technology teams headaches over high costs, neighbor noise, time delays, and potential data loss. Open-converged infrastructure is touted as a solution to these problems, and the performance claims can seem too good to be true.

“[When our back-up jobs] finished a third of the time faster, I said, ‘How is that even possible?’ … We actually had to go back and check because some of our backup jobs finished so fast, we thought it was an error,” said Datrium Inc. customer James Stock (pictured, right), vice president of information technology at Grow Financial Federal Credit Union.

Stock joined Craig Nunes (pictured, left), vice president of marketing at Datrium, for an interview with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed open-converged versus hyperconverged infrastructure and Grow Financial’s experience with switching to open-converge. (* Disclosure below.)

Reboot and recover in a flash

“We put together a system that really takes a tier-one approach to HCI, a full-on scale-out back-up system and a cloud disaster recovery approach built into one convert system,” Nunes said, describing Datrium DVX, a server flash storage system for enterprise that the company bills as “a new breed of convergence.”

The secret sauce is a split design that runs workloads, especially read-intensive workloads, on flash, on the host with Datrium software, Nunes explained. “All of your durable data does not live on those hosts. Those hosts are not stateful; they can fail at any time, and you still have data availability,” he stated.

The idea of returning data to a central network instead of spread across cluster hosts intrigued Stock, who was looking for a solution to replace Grow Financial’s existing storage array. A credit union based in the Southeastern United States, Grow Financial has $2.4 billion in assets and over 200,000 members, making secure back-up and disaster recovery a priority for the IT department.

One of the trademarks of open-converge is the ability to use any vendor hardware, a benefit that grabbed Stock’s attention. “I’m like, wait a minute, so you’re telling me I don’t have to buy enterprise flash drives. … I could just go down to Best Buy, or wherever local, grab something off the shelf, and throw it in there, as long as the server supported it?” he said.

Another benefit of Datrium DVX is fast disaster recovery. “A problem that we used to have, is if I failed over to our [disaster recovery] facility, well, now I’ve got to bring that data back. [But] with Datrium, when I go to bring that data back, it’s now doing a differential copy back, so I’m not sitting there for days and days and days, waiting to finish my DR testing anymore,” Stock said.

As an evangelical Datrium customer, Stock is willing to prove the claims he makes about how open-converged infrastructure performs: “I’ll screen share with them, if they want to see our numbers. I’ll show them,” he stated.

In its third major software release in less than a year, Datrium just released DVX 4.0. adding cloud-based capability and extended data security and resilience, and the company has more improvements in the pipeline. “You’re going to see us double down on the work,” Nunes said, “so stay tuned!”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE