Overview

What is Delphix?

Delphix is the organization behind the Delphix DevOps Data Platform, which combines enterprise-wide data coverage with data compliance to:

  • Enable modern CI/CD workflows

  • Accelerate the journey to the cloud

  • Transform user experiences

  • Increase the adoption of disruptive AI technologies

The DevOps Data Platform is composed of multiple products, including:

  • Delphix Continuous Data

  • Delphix Continuous Compliance

  • Delphix Data Control Tower

  • Delphix Compliance Services

  • Various integrations

What is Delphix Continuous Data?

Delphix Continuous Data is a data management solution that allows you to securely copy and share data. The solution ingests data from a source, creates data copies, and flexibly manages them based on your organization’s governance model. Copies you create with Delphix Continuous Data are full read-write capable database instances. This enables all data consumers, including application, artificial intelligence, and machine learning teams, to create and manage previously expensive databases at a fraction of the total time, effort, and cost. These capabilities are often summarized as virtualization.

Deployment

Delphix Continuous Data is distributed through a virtual software appliance. You can install Delphix Continuous Data on a wide variety of hypervisor platforms, such as:

  • VMware

  • Azure

  • Google Cloud Platform

  • Amazon Web Services

After installation, a shared storage footprint called Delphix Storage serves your Data copies. You can perform all your day-to-day virtualization configuration and capabilities by logging in through the Administrator, Management, or Self-Service UI, and extend further through APIs or CLI tooling. The installed appliance is also called the engine.

Environments

In addition to the engine itself, Delphix Continuous Data requires additional available environments (or hosts) to manage data source ingestion and provisioning data copies.

There are three standard environment types:

  • Source environments are your original data source locations.

  • Target environments are where you provision data copies.

  • Staging environments are optional environments for processing source data while minimizing performance concerns.

Delphix Continuous Data frequently connects directly to staging environments, which allows administrators to maintain controlled connections to source environments and update staging environments as needed.

The environments you connect to Delphix Continuous Data and how many environments you need depend on your chosen data source ingestion architecture.

Learn more about environments in General architecture.

Data Source

Delphix Continuous Data ingests your source files and logs to maintain an internal, condensed, and authoritative copy of your linked data source. This copy, along with all incremental updates, is called a dSource. Your dSource syncs with your source data based on your ingestion configuration and user-defined policies.

Once created, Delphix Continuous Data maintains a timeflow of your dSource, which is a record of dSource data changes. These data changes are recorded in increments called snapshots. From any snapshot in a timeflow, you can instantly create or update a virtual database (VDB).

Learn more about data sources in dSource management.

Virtual Databases

Virtual Databases (VDBs) are virtual copies of your data. You provision (create) VDBs from dSource snapshots. Once provisioned, your VDBs are independent, read-write databases. All changes your users or applications make on VDBs write to new compressed blocks in Delphix storage. As your VDBs update with new data, their states are recorded in timeflows using snapshots, just like your dSources. You can provision VDBs at any time from other VDBs, and you can refresh VDB data from parent VDBs or dSources.

Learn more about virtual databases in Virtual Databases management.