Blog
December 16, 2024
What is Delphix?
Perforce Delphix is a DevOps data platform that helps companies accelerate development speed, deliver software quality, and ensure data compliance and security.
Who is Delphix as a Company?
Delphix is now part of Perforce Software.
Enterprises around the world choose Delphix to automate compliant data for DevOps.
Businesses need to innovate quickly but struggle to balance speed with quality and compliance. The Delphix DevOps Data Platform provides integrated data masking and database virtualization to rapidly deploy compliant data into non-production environments across private, public, and hybrid clouds.
With Delphix, customers automate test data management and CI/CD, create pipelines for AI, and swiftly recover from downtime events such as ransomware, while ensuring data privacy and governance.
Perforce Software is the DevOps company for global teams requiring speed, quality, security, and compliance at scale along the development lifecycle. Perforce acquired Delphix in early 2024.
What Does Delphix Do?
The Delphix DevOps Data Platform helps IT operations, application development, quality assurance, and analytics teams automate data management.
Key Use Cases
Database Virtualization
Delphix enables your company to clone databases in minutes regardless of the size — without duplicating storage. This reduces data footprints by 10x and accelerates provisioning by 100x. The result? Faster development speed.
To learn more about this use case, explore Delphix Continuous Data >>
Data Masking & Compliance
Delphix enables your company to mask sensitive data from production databases and deploy it to lower environments quickly. This eliminates sensitive data risks and ensures compliance with regulations — without sacrificing speed or quality.
To learn more about this use case, explore Delphix Continuous Compliance >>
Test Data Management
Delphix provisions test data efficiently, enabling your company to test often and early with realistic, compliant test data. The result? Increase project velocity by 2x and improve software quality.
To learn more about this use case, explore Delphix Test Data Management >>
IDC: The Business Value of Delphix
Find out how customers achieve 408% 3-year ROI.
Key Delphix Capabilities
Delphix enables you to make fully read-writeable clones of your production database in lower environments in minutes using virtually no storage for each additional copy.
Delphix also has the industry's most sophisticated data masking solution so you can easily discover and mask any sensitive data, replacing it with fictitious data. This enables you to have full lookalike copies of your production database in your lower environments in a fraction of the time it normally takes to copy production down to non-production — and at a fraction of the cost of normal database copies.
Connect Data
Delphix allows you to connect with your key data sources, such as:
- Traditional databases like Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Postgres, DB2, etc.
- No SQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, Cockroach, etc.
- Analytical sources like Snowflake or Databricks.
- Cloud sources like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
- And many more.
Virtualize Databases and Mask Data for Compliance
Delphix virtualizes full databases and masks sensitive data like personal identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) in compliance with data privacy regulations. These include General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Deploy Quality Data Fast
Masked data can then be quickly deployed to downstream development and testing teams. These teams are then able to use production-like data in non-production environments. The quality of data is assured because masking results in realistic data preserving referential integrity across tables and databases. And the teams using the data can do so without introducing security or compliance risks.
How Does Delphix Work?
1. Install Delphix Components
Delphix has two main components: database virtualization and data masking.
These components can be installed independently or together. You can either download the components as VM images or deploy them to your cloud provider as a machine image from the cloud provider’s marketplace.
The Delphix virtualization appliance is a virtual appliance that lives between your database management system (DBMS) instances and the storage layer.
2. Connect Your Databases
Getting production data into the Delphix virtualization appliance requires either:
- A connection to the production database where we ingest the data from using the database’s native backup process (for example by using RMAN or Microsoft SQL native backups).
- Via a third-party backup restore process where a backup is restored to a staging server attached to the Delphix appliance.
Once the backups are replayed into the Delphix appliance, Delphix creates a continual flow of changes from the production instance — using incremental or full backups in an automated fashion.
3. Save on Database Sizes Fast
Once a database is ingested into Delphix – it is typically compressed to a third of the original size. Once ingested, users can then mount virtual databases (VDBs) to target DBMS in your lower environment.
Delphix will orchestrate a network connection to the target DBMS and mount a set of data files representing the desired database at any desired point in the database's timeline. This allows users to provision a new copy of a database in a few minutes regardless of the size of the database.
We have customers with databases that are over 1 PB that create a fully independent, read-/writeable copy in lower environments in under 5 minutes!
4. Empower Developers and Testers
In addition to significantly increased speed in provisioning the database, Delphix also provides a significant advantage in the way of self-service controls. Developers and testers can self-administer the virtual database to refresh it to the latest image, rewind it to a previous version, or bookmark and share a virtual database with another user.
5. Automate Compliant Data in DevOps Pipelines
Delphix is built API-first, and all the functions are available as simple commands. This enables teams to easily embed database functions into your DevOps build pipelines. Customers can provision databases into ephemeral environments in minutes as part of a pipeline job. They can re-baseline their database — picking up database changes that have been checked into a build and deploying them to the latest clone of the production database — simulating a production deployment as part of a unit test.
Delphix enables you to get to true CI/CD with all your databases — without the wait and waste typically required to back up and restore full copies. There is no better way to embed data quality and database development functions into automation pipelines.
Who Uses Delphix?
The world’s largest enterprises trust Delphix to innovate, accelerate, and comply. But don’t take our word for it — take theirs.
Worldpay from FIS
Worldpay from FIS, a financial services organization, uses Delphix to accelerate test cycles, improve quality, and mask sensitive data. By choosing Delphix, they were able to deliver:
- 7x faster test environment refreshes.
- 75-80% reduced test data storage.
Delta Dental
Delta Dental, an insurance provider, uses Delphix to speed up time-to-market and accelerate database migration timelines by 20%. Before Delphix, it would take 8 weeks to extract data, and it was difficult to protect data for compliance. With Delphix, they can easily deliver virtual data copies to a team of 200 developers in minutes.
Mattel
Mattel, a consumer goods company, uses Delphix to virtualize and modernize. With Delphix, they’ve reduced:
- Database refresh time from 5 days to 48 hours.
- Database size by 8 TB.
- Human hours by 600%.
Sky Italia
Sky Italia, a telecom company, uses Delphix to achieve regulatory compliance while improving security and test data management procedures.
By choosing Delphix, they:
- Achieved GDPR compliance in 5 months.
- Reduced infrastructure footprint by 90%.
- Reduced operational costs by 30%.
Choice Hotels
Choice Hotels, in the hospitality industry, uses Delphix to accelerate application building and automated testing while masking data. As a result, they’re able to virtualize databases in minutes-to-hours rather than weeks and reduce database storage spend.
Get Started with Delphix
With Delphix, there are no trade-offs necessary. Your company can have it all: compliance, quality, and speed.
Request a Delphix Demo
Request a no-pressure demo of Delphix. One of our specialists will walk you through Delphix for your key use cases.
This post was originally published on November 7, 2013 by Kyle Hailey. It has since been significantly revised and enhanced by Matthew Yeh and Aaron Jensen.