Marc Fleischmann - OCP Summit 2016 - #OCPSummit16 - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 10/03/2016

Datera about to come out of stealth mode, provides operational teasers at OCP | #OCPSummit16

by Gabriel Pesek | Mar 10, 2016 

Among the many companies and enterprises in attendance at this year’s OCP U.S. Summit, some of the best innovation can be found in the startups looking to draw the attention of potential investors and early adopters.

Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, met with a representative of one of these start-ups, Marc Fleischmann, CEO of Datera, Inc., to get some ideas as to what the company’s motivations are, what solutions it’ll be providing and how it intends to address consumer needs.

Addressing evident issues

Datera as a company has not yet officially launched, Fleischmann told theCUBE. “We are a company funded and founded about two and a half years ago … We are getting very close to coming out of stealth mode,” he said, estimating that the emergence would arrive within a matter of weeks.

Datera’s focus will be on reworking and optimizing infrastructures in conceptual and practical forms, Fleischmann explained. “The basic business problem is that if you look at infrastructure as it moves forward, you basically want to flip it upside-down, so to speak,” he said, continuing, “Cloud providers have shown us that’s not how to build infrastructures.”

Citing examples from major industry leaders who have deployed new solutions for handling the changing demands on data and networking infrastructure, Fleischmann described intentions to “change the operational model and the usage model.”

Finding the unsolved problems

Being at OCP, open computing was naturally an issue considered, with Fleischmann feeling that it was a very promising environment at the moment. “I would actually say the open-source content in infrastructure is increasing pretty rapidly,” he commented. “Obviously, open-source might be great because the price model is pretty attractive,” he added, but there were a number of other appealing factors drawing it into usage by companies both large and small.

Currently, it seems as though the large enterprises are the ones setting the most prominent standards. “Self-optimizing, self-healing, all these autonomic attributes you look for [being the future of infrastructure] … Ultimately, these trends are now getting so powerful… that it’s clearly the name of the game right now.”

However, Fleischmann pointed out a number of issues and interface aspects that have not been adequately addressed yet. “The problem with hyperscale is that at a certain level of scale, it is not efficient anymore,” he noted, adding that composable and consumable frameworks are another less-solved problem. With aims to “unify existing classic infrastructure,” as well as providing “a platform to go forward and host these cloud-data applications,” Datera will be looking to solve some of these problems once it fully launches.

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