Architecture
Logical architecture
The logical layers of the Datamotive platform: management plane, data plane, source adapters, target adapters, and cloud-native storage.
- Product
- Datamotive Platform
- Version
- v1.0
- Documentation status
- Published
- Last updated
- Updated
- Reading time
- 1 min read
The Datamotive platform is organized into logical layers with clear boundaries between orchestration, data movement, source integration, target integration, and recovery storage.
Layer 1: Management plane
The management plane is the orchestration layer. It holds plan definitions, job schedules, metadata, inventory, user accounts, policies, monitoring, reporting, and audit logs. It exposes the Datamotive UI, CLI, and REST APIs.
The management plane coordinates work but does not directly move workload data. Data movement happens in the data plane.
Core component: Datamotive Management Server.
Responsibilities: UI, CLI, REST APIs, policy management, replication orchestration, recovery orchestration, scheduling, monitoring, alerting, reporting, inventory, metadata, and day-0 through day-N workflows.
Layer 2: Data plane
The data plane is where replication, recovery, and backup operations execute. It runs inside the customer environment and performs block replication, chunk streaming, cloud storage writes, recovery reads, and integrity validation.
Core component: Datamotive Replication Node.
Replication Nodes can operate at the protected site, recovery site, or cloud target depending on topology. They run the Replication Engine, which provides rolling-window transport, parallel chunk streaming, worker-driven flow control, and checkpoint finalization.
Layer 3: Source adapters
Source adapters are the integration points between the data plane and the source hypervisor or cloud API. Each adapter handles authentication, snapshot creation, changed-block queries, and block reads.
| Source platform | Adapter mechanism |
|---|---|
| VMware vSphere | VADP, vSphere APIs, and Changed Block Tracking. |
| Nutanix AHV | Nutanix Prism APIs and changed-region tracking. |
| Amazon EC2 | EBS Direct APIs and EC2 snapshot APIs. |
| Microsoft Azure | Azure Compute APIs and incremental snapshots. |
Layer 4: Target adapters
Target adapters write synchronized data to the recovery platform and manage target-side recovery resources such as snapshots, volumes, managed disks, datastores, VM definitions, and networks.
| Target platform | Adapter mechanism |
|---|---|
| AWS EC2 | EBS snapshots, EBS volumes, and EC2 instance APIs. |
| Azure VMs | Managed Disk APIs, snapshot APIs, and VM APIs. |
| VMware vSphere | vSphere APIs, datastore writes, and VM lifecycle operations. |
| Nutanix AHV | Nutanix APIs, AHV storage, and VM lifecycle operations. |
Layer 5: Recovery support
Recovery support components are activated when a workflow needs platform preparation or transfer optimization.
| Component | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Prep Node | Windows recovery preparation, boot remediation, file system checks, registry checks, and cross-platform recovery support. |
| DeDup Node | Optional chunk index and reuse service for reducing WAN transfer, cross-cloud transfer cost, and repeated data movement. |
Cross-layer communication
The management plane dispatches work and receives status. Replication Nodes perform data-plane operations and stream progress back to the control plane. This separation improves scalability, fault isolation, and independent expansion of management and replication workloads.
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