This article is more than 1 year old

These snapshots are Purely Cohesity

Backup data streams and now snapshots flash between firms

After announcing an initial backup integration between Pure's all-flash array and Cohesity's converged secondary storage a year ago, the two have now gone further with snapshot-level integration.

Cohesity converges secondary data storage storage silos with its SW which runs on its own hardware or as a SW-only Virtual Edition on third-party HW. It will also run in the public cloud.

The companies say there is full end-to-end integration, with efficient tiering on Cohesity's arrays of Pure FlashArray snapshots, and pre and postscripts for app consistency. The March 2016 announcement talks of policy-based backup and replication from Pure's FlashArray to Cohesity storage. The February announcement talks of how Cohesity integrates natively with Pure Storage FlashArray//m to improve snapshot-based data protection.

Customers are better off if data protection copies are not stored on the primary array. The gen 1 Pure-Cohesity integration worked with backup software transferring data from the Pure array to a Cohesity one. Now the integration has been extended with Cohesity natively supporting the Pure array's snapshot facilities.

They say: "By using Pure Storage snapshots instead of traditional backup software, customers can provide much more frequent backups (faster RPOs) and faster recovery times (faster RTOs). [Snapshots] can be taken as frequently as every few minutes without impacting production apps."

Snapshots on the primary array don't protect against that array failing. "By tiering snapshots to Cohesity, customers benefit from a second level of protection. Even if the Pure array becomes unavailable, data can still be recovered from Cohesity secondary storage."

Their joint offering provides:

  • Tiering of snapshots between Pure Storage and Cohesity using array snapshot APIs
  • Automation across both Pure Storage and Cohesity using common policies created in Cohesity
  • Pre and postscripts to provide application-consistent data protection
  • Ability to restore snapshots from Cohesity to any Pure Storage array (primary storage or alternate Pure Storage array)

Pure's channel salespeople can say this helps Pure Storage have a stronger product offer relative to Dell, HPE and IBM by enabling it to sell its array with integrated secondary storage for data protection, test+dev, analytics and compliance. They can say the Pure-Cohesity combo gives you faster apps (Pure) and saves mucho secondary storage cost (Cohesity). On the other side of the partnership Cohesity's channel get to sell into Pure's customer base.

The Pure-Cohesity deal applies to Pure's FlashArray and not to its FlashBlade product, which stores particular kinds of secondary data for fast-access analytics.

We might envisage Cohesity talking to Kaminario about the same kind of arrangement, with K2 arrays squirting out backups and snapshots to a Cohesity array.

You can check out a solution brief PDF here. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like