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, and increase the adoption of disruptive AI technologies. The DevOps Data Platform is composed of various products, such as Delphix Continuous Data, Continuous Compliance, Data Control Tower, Delphix Compliance Services, and various integrations.
What is Delphix Continuous Data?
Delphix Continuous Data is a data management solution that provides the ability to securely copy and share data. The solution will ingest from a data source, create data copies, and flexibly manage them based on the organization’s governance model. Delphix Continuous Data’s copies are full, read-write capable database instances. This enables all data consumers, such as application, artificial intelligence, or 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 that can be installed on a wide variety of hypervisor platforms, such as VMware, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services. Data copies are then served from a shared storage footprint called Delphix Storage. All of the day-to-day virtualization configuration and capabilities can be performed by logging in through the Administrator, Management, or Self-Service UI, and extended further through APIs or CLI tooling. The installed appliance is frequently referred to as the engine.
Environments
In addition to the engine itself, Delphix Continuous Data requires the availability of additional environments (or hosts) to manage the ingestion of a data source and provisioning of its copies. There are three primary environment types: Source, Target, and Staging.
The Source environment is the originating data source location.
The Target environment is where the data copies will be provisioned.
The Staging environment is an optional environment where the sourced data can be pre-processed to minimize any performance concerns.
Frequently, Delphix Continuous Data will connect directly to the Staging environment, which allows administrators to maintain a controlled connection to the Source environment and update the Staging environment as needed.
Deciding which environments are connected to Delphix Continuous Data and how many are required depends on the chosen data source ingestion architecture. Learn more on the General architecture page.
Data Source
Delphix Continuous Data ingests the data’s files and logs to maintain an internal, condensed, and authoritative copy of the linked data source. This copy, along with all incremental updates, is referred to as the dSource. The dSource is kept in sync based on the configured ingestion method and user-defined policy.
Once created, Delphix Continuous Data maintains a Timeflow of the dSource which is a record of changes to the data. These changes are recorded in increments called Snapshots. From any snapshot within that Timeflow, a virtual database (VDB) can be instantly created or updated. Learn more about data sources in the dSource management section.
Virtual Databases
Virtual Databases (VDBs) are the virtual copies of the data. VDBs are initially provisioned (aka created) from selecting a dSource’s snapshot. Once provisioned, a VDB is an independent, read-write database, and changes made to the VDB by users or applications are written to new, compressed blocks in Delphix storage. Then, as the VDB is updated, their state is recorded within the Timeflow via Snapshots like dSources. At any time, VDBs can be provisioned from other VDBs and the data within a VDB can be refreshed from its parent VDB or dSource. Learn more about virtual databases in the Virtual Databases management section.