Items Tagged: Glacier

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Cohesity Data Platform: Hyperconverged Secondary Storage

Primary storage is often defined as storage hosting mission-critical applications with tight SLAs, requiring high performance.  Secondary storage is where everything else typically ends up and, unfortunately, data stored there tends to accumulate without much oversight.  Most of the improvements within the overall storage space, most recently driven by the move to hyperconverged infrastructure, have flowed into primary storage.  By shifting the focus from individual hardware components to commoditized, clustered and virtualized storage, hyperconvergence has provided a highly-available virtual platform to run applications on, which has allowed IT to shift their focus from managing individual hardware components and onto running business applications, increasing productivity and reducing costs. 

Companies adopting this new class of products certainly enjoyed the benefits, but were still nagged by a set of problems that it didn’t address in a complete fashion.  On the secondary storage side of things, they were still left dealing with too many separate use cases with their own point solutions.  This led to too many products to manage, too much duplication and too much waste.  In truth, many hyperconvergence vendors have done a reasonable job at addressing primary storage use cases, , on their platforms, but there’s still more to be done there and more secondary storage use cases to address.

Now, however, a new category of storage has emerged. Hyperconverged Secondary Storage brings the same sort of distributed, scale-out file system to secondary storage that hyperconvergence brought to primary storage.  But, given the disparate use cases that are embedded in secondary storage and the massive amount of data that resides there, it’s an equally big problem to solve and it had to go further than just abstracting and scaling the underlying physical storage devices.  True Hyperconverged Secondary Storage also integrates the key secondary storage workflows - Data Protection, DR, Analytics and Test/Dev - as well as providing global deduplication for overall file storage efficiency, file indexing and searching services for more efficient storage management and hooks into the cloud for efficient archiving. 

Cohesity has taken this challenge head-on.

Before delving into the Cohesity Data Platform, the subject of this profile and one of the pioneering offerings in this new category, we’ll take a quick look at the state of secondary storage today and note how current products haven’t completely addressed these existing secondary storage problems, creating an opening for new competitors to step in.

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Companies Improve Data Protection and More with Cohesity

We talked to six companies that have implemented Cohesity DataProtect and/or the Cohesity DataPlatform. When these companies evaluated Cohesity, their highest priority was reducing storage costs and improving data protection. To truly modernize their secondary storage infrastructure, they also recognized the importance of having a scalable, all-in-one solution that could both consolidate and better manage their entire secondary data environment.

Prior to implementing Cohesity, many of the companies we interviewed had significant challenges with the high cost of their secondary storage. Several factors contributed to the high costs including the need to license multiple products, inadequate storage reduction, the need for professional services and extensive training, difficulty scaling and maintaining systems and adding capacity to expensive primary storage for lower-performance services, such as group file shares.

In addition to lower storage costs, all the companies we talked to also wanted a better data protection solution. Many companies were struggling with slow backup speeds, insufficient recovery times and cumbersome data archival methods. Solution complexity and high operational overhead was also a major issue. To address these issues, companies wanted a unified data protection solution that offered better backup performance, instant data recovery, simplified management, and seamless cloud integration for long-term data retention.

Companies also wanted to improve overall secondary storage management and they shared a common goal of combining secondary storage workloads under one roof. Depending on their environment and their operational needs, their objectives outside of data protection included providing self-service access to copies of production data for on-demand environments (such as test/dev), using secondary storage for file services and leveraging indexing and advanced search and analytics to find out-of-place confidential data and ensure data compliance.

Cohesity customers found that the key to addressing these challenges and needs is Cohesity’s Hyperconverged Secondary Storage. Cohesity is a pioneer of Hyperconverged Secondary Storage, a new category of secondary storage based on a webscale, distributed file system that scales linearly and provides global data deduplication and automatic indexing as well as advanced search and analytics and policy-based management of all secondary storage workloads. These capabilities combine to provide a single system that efficiently stores, manages, and understands all data copies and workflows residing in a secondary storage environment – whether the data is on-premises or in the cloud. There are no point products, therefore less complexity and lower licensing costs.

It’s a compelling value proposition, and importantly, every company we talked to stated that Cohesity has met and exceeded their expectations and has helped them rapidly evolve their data protection and overall secondary data management. To learn about each customer’s journey, we examined their business needs, their data center environment, their key challenges, the reasons they chose Cohesity, and the value they have derived. Read on to learn more about their experience.

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HPE Brings Multi-Cloud Storage to the Enterprise

Companies in every industry and from every corner of the world are increasingly adopting cloud storage, addressing use cases such as backup, archiving and disaster recovery. More than 96% of organizations we recently surveyed are housing at least some of their data in the cloud, up from just 65% five years before. Firms deploying storage in the cloud are looking to increase IT agility and workload scalability, while taking advantage of a more flexible, pay-as-you-go consumption model.

But for enterprises and mid-sized organizations alike, the cloud journey nearly always starts on premises. A large majority of organizations still run the core of their business-critical workloads in the data center, supported by significant and proven investments in on-premises hardware, workflows and business processes that support key business apps and ensure maximum value to users and other stakeholders. Not surprisingly, IT decision makers tread carefully when it comes to considering public cloud deployments for their critical apps or data.

To get the best of the cloud without compromising current IT investments, a growing majority of decision makers are now focusing on solutions with hybrid and multicloud capabilities. Hybrid cloud enables them to gain value from the cloud from day 1, while fully leveraging their on-prem infrastructure. Under a hybrid model, companies can deploy selected apps that make sense to run in the public cloud, but still run a majority of their core business workloads on-premises. They can also employ a dev-ops approach to begin to develop and run cloud-native apps.

Multicloud takes those benefits one step further, enabling portability of workloads between two or more clouds. Organizations we surveyed are now working with at least two major public cloud providers, on average, enabling them to avoid lock-in to a single provider and to choose the provider that best meets the needs of each app and use case. Together, hybrid and multicloud offer an attractive and measured approach for companies looking to deploy some of their workloads in the cloud.

In this piece we’ll examine the customer journey to cloud storage, including some important considerations companies should keep in mind as they decide what approach will work best for them. We’ll then describe HPE’s storage platforms, which are built for cloud and provide a powerful and unique approach to multicloud storage. Finally, we’ll look at the advantages that HPE storage delivers over other cloud storage deployment models, and show how these HPE platforms are helping enterprises to maximize the potential of their cloud storage initiatives.