Arcitecta Mediaflux goes multi-site, to the edge and bursts
Arcitecta has partnered with Dell to increase data transfer speeds across geographies, at the edge and during hours when compute resources are in demand.
Arcitecta is combining its data management software capabilities into Dell appliances to speed up data movement across multiple sites, including at the edge and during peak usage hours, making its services available in enterprise-ready hardware.
Through an expanded partnership with Dell Technologies, Arcitecta is releasing three new appliances focused on moving data faster for better employee collaboration among dispersed teams, and reducing downtime teams might experience with slow data transfers. The new appliances, Mediaflux Multi-Site, Mediaflux Edge and Mediaflux Brust, bring global data management to multiple sites, consolidates data at edge locations and can move data for burst computing to fully utilize compute resources.
These appliance releases offer similar capabilities as Mediaflux Livewire, which the company updated earlier this year, and achieve high-speed data transfers by breaking data into small chunks and moving the data in parallel for faster transfer even over unreliable networks. The appliances are available for order now.
The new appliances further simplify what Arcitecta does, according to Mitch Lewis, an analyst at Futurum Group. The software is integrated onto Dell appliances, bringing the breadth and reach of Dell to Arcitecta, potentially opening up the technology to new customers.
There are different customers from the HPC-crowd to enterprise. Enterprise customers probably just want to buy a box instead of doing all sorts of configurations.
Mitch LewisAnalyst, Futurum Group
"There are different customers from the HPC-crowd to enterprise," Lewis said. "Enterprise customers probably just want to buy a box instead of doing all sorts of configurations."
These appliances also bring Arcitecta in competition with other global file system and data management companies, including Hammerspace or Nasuni, Lewis said. Last month, Hammerspace released a data orchestration and management appliance.
Collaboration and consolidation
Organizations are increasingly dispersed, even globally, and at times need to collaborate with multiple sites at once, according to the vendor. Mediaflux Multi-Site enables users to share data in near real time by utilizing either a global file system, a distributed file system accessible from multiple locations that acts as a single global namespace; or a federated file system, which uses multiple independent namespaces separated by larger distances.
"Arcitecta has a handful of different flavorings, but they're all about distributed workforce and collaboration," Lewis said.
Customers can pick the offerings that best suit their needs and their latency tolerance, he said.
Mediaflux Edge caches data at edge locations to increase performance while utilizing a centralized repository to avoid maintaining multiple copies of data or more storage than needed at the edge.
The two offerings provide different ways of transferring data depending on what's needed, according to Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting. These transfer methods can be thought of like hub and spoke models, where network traffic is optimized from a central hub to a traffic spoke depending on needs.
"[Mediaflux] Multi-Site is going to be hub-to-hub; [Mediaflux] Edge is edge-to-hub," Staimer said.
Bursting
Mediaflux Burst, on the other hand, allocates resources during peak usage, or bursts. The appliance can move data to the required compute when needed, allowing for more efficient resources and allocation of capital, Lewis said.
"It's about not having to purchase more than you need if you're just bursting," he said. "It's about flexibility over over-purchasing."
Staimer agreed, stating this is a time-on-target use case, or a concentration of resources in a given time frame.
"[Arcitecta enables users] to take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud, without having to suffer egress fees later," Staimer said.
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.
