Pure Storage and Cohesity Forge Partnership to Deliver Rapid Recovery at Scale

Pure FlashRecover, powered by Cohesity, all-flash modern data protection solution for rapid recovery, ransomware protection, and reuse of data

This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on August 12, 2020 at 2:26 pm

Jump right to comments

Pure Storage, Inc. and Cohesity, Inc. announced a strategic partnership that brings to market Pure FlashRecover, powered by Cohesity.

This offering is a modern, jointly-engineered solution designed to meet the most demanding business continuity requirements and enable new opportunities for data-driven organizations.

The two companies have formed this partnership based on customer demand for an integrated all-flash data protection solution that empowers customers to easily, quickly, and reliably back up and recover their data at scale. They have also formed this partnership at a time when more customers are embracing cloud services and are seeking ransomware protection.

Pure FlashRecover, powered by Cohesity, delivers all-flash data backup and recovery capabilities that enterprises require for restoring data rapidly in the face of a disaster or a ransomware attack. It enables flash-to-flash-to-cloud data protection and allows rapid, independent scaling of processing, throughput, and storage capacity for the most efficient use of all resources.

The solution also empowers organizations to future-proof data center investments and realize new levels of performance to meet growing petabyte-level recovery requirements. In addition, it enables backup data to be reused for analytics and DevOps, allowing multiple applications to leverage data stores on the high-performance, unified fast file and object FlashBlade platform.

“As today’s environment has made abundantly clear, business continuity is more than just surviving an event, it is about enabling your business to thrive in a crisis, no matter the circumstance,” said Charles Giancarlo, chairman and CEO, Pure. “We’re delighted to partner with Cohesity to deliver the first fully integrated solution that delivers rapid recovery, designed for the long-term success of any organization.”

“We are thrilled to partner with Pure in bringing to market a solution that integrates exceptional all-flash capabilities and cutting-edge data protection offerings that together unleash new opportunities for customers,” said Mohit Aron, Cohesity CEO and founder. “Partnering with Pure, we are enabling enterprises to future-proof their investments with performance, simplicity and scale — backed by a strong shared belief in customer obsession and support.”

By combining Cohesity DataProtect software with Pure’s unified fast file and object FlashBlade platform, the integrated solution delivers:

Performance: up to 3x faster backup and restore throughput than disk-based alternatives, the ability to recover thousands of virtual machines and up to 1PB of data a day to meet large-scale disaster recovery needs.
Integration: single-point purchasing, deployment and support all delivered through Pure, eliminating the need for customers to go through two vendors. Pure is now a Cohesity Technology Partner and the companies have committed to joint innovation.
Scalability: disaggregated compute and storage to enable independent scaling for backup/recovery processing, throughput, and storage capacity for the most efficient use of resources.
Simplicity: ease of management provided by cloud integration that enables flash-to-flash-to-cloud backup and recovery, low-cost public cloud storage for long-term retention, and non-disruptive upgrades.

Both firms share common core values in the areas of innovation and customer obsession, as evidenced by their high (top 1%) Net Promoter Scores (NPS) among B2B companies.

Availability
Pure FlashRecover, Powered by Cohesity, is being tested by joint customers today and will be available in USA in 4Q20 and in countries outside the United States in the coming quarters.

Comments

This strategic partnership represents a milestone for both companies. It means the capability for Cohesity to penetrate Pure accounts and potentially vice-versa even if this side of the deal is not immediately logical. In fact, when Cohesity is already deployed, storage is included and controlled by Cohesity.

Pure understood a few years ago the growing need for a modern data protection and jumped into that segment with the acquisition of StorReduce in summer 2018. The flash company unveiled its data protection solution early 2019 under the named ObjectEngine and coupled at that time FlashBlade with this data deduplication engine. Guest what, it hit a wall a few months later but it didn't stop Pure's initiative and market ambitions. This approach was still an intelligent backup target connected to backup or replication software. FlashBlade is used as a solid and secure backup images repository but nothing was really new except it was based on a full flash file server. De-dupe engine was known for quite some time, Pure wished to add a new area of growth.

This refreshed approach was pretty similar to an "old" model with the association of backup software and target devices. You find here Dell EMC Data Domain now PowerProtect, ExaGrid, NEC HYDRAstor, Quantum DXi, Spectra BackPearl or HPE StoreOnce to name a few. It gives lots of flexibility for users and vendors as many combinations are possible between software and storage entities. But any NAS or object storage can serve as a backup target, differences comes from data services at the source or target side such data reduction.

Now the Pure-Cohesity initiative shakes this and invites the flash storage vendor to join a second group of players with of course Cohesity itself but also Commvault with its Hyperscale (past and now based on Hedvig), Rubrik, StorageCraft, Kaseya Unitrends, Arcserve or Veritas, etc., and as you can see some of them morphed their offering during last few years to offer a modern approach. By modern here, we mean also various elements, among them integration between software and appliance without the need for external on the self backup software and full flash target appliance.

With this partnership, Pure markets FlashRecover, powered by Cohesity, as a bundle of Cohesity DataProtect and FlashBlade. This is spectacular as FlashBlade is also a primary storage solution exposing file and object interfaces, one of the top of the market and recognized in some vertical segments. This fast scalable unstructured data server with Cohesity software offers mechanisms for rapid recovery. The goal seems to be on the recover/restore side with the ability to put rapidly data back in place boosting 3 times backup/restore times with thousands of VMs recovered per day and 1PB of data movement.

This joint effort is a co-branded activity with all marketing actions associated with it. Immediately we see the Pure Storage continues to preach full flash for all tiers, it doesn't mean one flash product for all tiers in this case. The product is exclusive to Pure and its channel and gives the opportunity to Cohesity to grow its channel at the same time. Pure joins the Cohesity Technology Partner list and Cohesity DataProtect will appear on the Pure price list.

From a product perspective, FlashRecover is a logical union of Cohesity software running on separate machines and FlashBlade existing on the local network. This disaggregated model facilitates independent scalability between compute and storage layers. In fact, we can imagine 2 extremes with all combinations in between. The first extreme is long retention, large or multiplication of backup images with long retention meaning large storage capacity with potentially small number of backup server entities. The second one is just the opposite, large ingestion capability fueled by the horizontal scalability of DataProtect and potentially small storage footprint. Both layers are able to scale independently. Existing FlashBlade(s) on the local network are automatically discovered by the Cohesity engine and jointly trigger the configuration. Cloud is supported by default, no news here, same for upgrades.

So there is no special flavor from Cohesity or FlashBlade except the fact that when the file server exists on the network, Cohesity is able to consider it as new target it controls via a special NFS datastore integration. From the FlashBlade side, Cohesity DataProtect is just an other NFS client. This is the first time Cohesity accepts to control backup images stored on other storage, not theirs.

As said, the solution is a Pure one, sold and supported by Pure Storage, but the two vendors will jointly promote and market the solution with marketing programs and selling incentives. Both companies are channels oriented reinforcing their market footprint with this solution.