Ecosystem Hub overview

Introduction

The Delphix Ecosystem Hub provides various offerings to connect your datasets using connectors, scale DevOps automation, and implement complex application solutions with the Delphix Platform.

Purpose

Organizations streamline manually intensive processes through automated workflows to ensure mission-critical applications are managed and run in a smooth, effective manner. However, complexities arise when it comes to using relevant and scoped testing data in a flexible and compliant way. This can be a daunting or impossible task without premade solutions or guidance.

Pairing Delphix's market-leading Masking and Virtualization capabilities with the Delphix Ecosystem's offerings can help organizations improve TDM practices and help practitioners implement them. The Ecosystem Hub proves that TDM practices can be implemented in even the most advanced app development and test scenarios.

Ecosystem Hub offerings

  • Connectors are a Continuous Data software component that continuously synchronizes and virtualizes production data across environments, enabling fast, automated, and space-efficient data delivery. View the Delphix Connectors list to learn how data sets can be synced with Delphix Engine.

  • Integrations incorporate the Delphix Platform into DevOps toolchains to supercharge pipelines. These offerings leverage the 3rd-party tool's native framework to incorporate seamlessly into an application team's workflow.

  • Solutions are product packages and best practices to implement TDM in specific application frameworks, such as Salesforce and SAP. These offerings contain multiple components, such as Connectors, Accelerators, and Templates, to offer a streamlined implementation experience.

Deployment

Delphix platform is distributed through a virtual software appliance. You can install Delphix platform 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 or Management Data Control Tower (DCT) UI, and extend further through APIs or CLI tooling. The installed appliance is also called the engine.

Connectors

A Delphix connector is an integration layer that enables the Delphix platform to interface with supported datasets. Connectors are categorized as follows:

  • Standard connectors (such as Oracle and SQL Server) are integrated and orchestrated directly by the Delphix Engine.

  • Select connectors (such as CockroachDB and Couchbase) are purchased as add-ons that are deployed on customer‑managed hosts, and act as a secure execution layer between Delphix Engine and the dataset.

For more information, read the Quick reference for datasets supported page.

Each connector encapsulates the specific logic required to discover, ingest, virtualize, and manage data, including configuration handling, connectivity, and operational workflows. Connectors allow Delphix to deliver a consistent data virtualization and management experience across databases, applications, and platforms, while maintaining compatibility with supported Delphix Engine versions and deployment models.

Connectors are important because they abstract complexity and ensure consistency.

Learn more about connectors in Continuous Data Connectors.

Environments

In addition to the Delphix Engine itself, Delphix requires additional available environments (or hosts) to manage data 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 frequently connects directly to staging environments, which allows administrators to maintain controlled connections to source environments and update staging environments as needed.

Learn more about environments in General architecture.

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.