When you look at DH2i, they seem designed to avoid a lot of what causes hype in enterprise IT. They’re self-funded, so you don’t see flashy VC firms bandied about. They’re not based out of the Valley. And up to 2017, they’ve been focused on the Windows enterprise market. All of these are sound business decisions, but maybe don’t generate a lot of buzz.
It’s a Windows World…
To date, DH2i’s primary business has been around consolidating data center sprawl, making more efficient use of resources, and reducing overall licensing requirements as a result. DxEnterprise is their latest product designed around this goal. What is does is effectively containerize each workload on a Microsoft SQL Server. This decouples the dependency of the workload on the server, meaning you can move it around without downtime. This infrastructure independence allows for moving workloads to where they are most efficient, whether that be a physical, virtual or cloud environment. This not only allows for controlling the sprawl of OS’s over VMs, but allows for greater flexibility to account for compliance and address security concerns.
Enter Linux
DxEnterprise 17 is a major release for the company, because it changes their market at a very basic level. With the release, D2Hi brings their solution out of the Windows-only world, with support for Linux and stateful Docker containers (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, etc).
With DxEnterprise 17, D2Hi brings their idea of Smart Availability (which they contrast to High Availability) to both Windows and Linux environments. Aside from a fancy marketing word, this effectively means that they can dynamically move a containerized workload to the best execution venue (BEV) using their InstanceMobility technology. It gets a little muddled with buzzwords, but basically DxEnterprise is the solution. Smart Availability is the combination of InstanceMobility, aka the containerization of workloads, and BEV, the policy-backed framework to move them dynamically. Easy, right?
Previously this was limited to Windows environments, but now includes Linux and stateful Docker containers. Unlike simply high availability provisioning, which has a simple like for like failover, DxEnterprise essentially supports failover to any system that can support the workload. The secret to this is their BEV metric, which looks at total system resources, and through user-specified policy can either notify when a workload should be moved, or dynamically move it to remediate issues.
This availability agility is further enhanced with a unified management console. Built into this are performance, QoS, and overall health monitoring for your databases.
A Whole New Market
I said at the beginning that DH2i isn’t the type of company that gets a lot of hype in IT. But dig a little bit into their technology, and you begin to see that they’re often on the pulse of many technology trends. For a while, they’ve been offering orchestrated containerized workloads for databases. Up until now, these have been limited to the substantial, but decidedly unexciting, Windows market. By opening up with support for Linux and stateful Docker containers, it’s time to take a second look at the company.
