Discover how a joint data storage solution from HPE and Cohesity eliminates secondary storage silos and restores sanity to application chaos.
Without question, secondary storage has become a critical issue for IT decision makers. A previous blog discusses how disjointed secondary storage can cause mass data fragmentation, which can slow down the business and potentially raise compliance risk.
A poor secondary data storage solution can certainly create inefficient workflows, but that’s just the beginning. Unmanaged secondary storage sprawl also results in:
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Increased costs due to loss of economies of scale
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Increased security risk, since you may not have a clear picture of what data assets you have and who has access to them
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Increased compliance risk if you’re holding regulated data without a crystal-clear understanding of what you have
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Increased risk of poor decision making, as copies of data can float around with no clear indication of which one is the most current or accurate
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Increased storage capacity utilization as various secondary storage silos lose the capability to bring aggregated data reduction technologies to bear on the ongoing capacity challenge
It’s clear that secondary storage has become a primary problem. What’s needed is a solution that can eliminate the need for so many of these silos.
Now, via a partnership between two enterprise IT firms—HPE and Cohesity, iPhone-like simplicity has come to handily solve the secondary storage dilemma, bringing with it some incredible outcomes.
A data storage solution for secondary storage
This solution: HPE Solutions for Cohesity DataPlaltform. Cohesity, a market-leading purveyor of a hyperconverged secondary storage software stack, provides software that runs atop HPE Apollo and ProLiant servers. This combination handily solves the mass data fragmentation problem. With Cohesity, your data is no longer massively siloed, copies of data are reduced or eliminated, and you reduce or halt the spread of data to every corner of your organization.
Why is this so important? In research performed by VansonBourne, 98 percent of respondents indicated that their secondary storage needs will grow in the next 18 months, with more than one-half saying that their storage needs will grow between 25 and 75 percent per year.
Fixing this without the right tools isn’t easy. In fact, 26 percent of respondents said that they would rather quit their jobs than be tasked with fixing their company’s secondary storage problems without the right tools in place.
Hyperconverged secondary storage
You may be wondering how this HPE/Cohesity mashup can help you solve the storage growth issue, since you’ll still have a lot of data to contend with. What Cohesity brings to the picture is a software solution that conglomerates all of an organization’s secondary storage assets under one managed umbrella, instantly imbuing visibility into what used to be something of a black box. Where the real magic comes in, however, is through Cohesity’s global deduplication, compression, and erasure coding features. These capabilities allow organizations to grow in a far more sustainable way than they can with a smattering of point solutions.
This transition to a converged secondary storage architecture can’t happen soon enough. Today, 48 percent of survey respondents say that their secondary storage sprawl means that their IT team spends 30-to-100 percent of their time cleaning up. Almost all respondents—98 percent—say that it’s getting worse.
The HPE Solutions for Cohesity DataPlatform are data storage solutions that provide a broad set of capabilities, including:
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The previously mentioned data reduction services, which slow your organization’s need to constantly procure storage for secondary needs. (Bear in mind that the HPE Cohesity System isn’t designed for primary workloads. For those, you should turn your attention to HPE Nimble Storage and HPE 3PAR solutions, which bring all-flash power to the storage equation.)
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Data protection capabilities for workloads that operate in the secondary arena.
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Full support for object file types. No longer do you need a separate solution to manage object-centric application needs. Cohesity can handle that for you as a part of its integrated software.
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Test/dev support. For many, test and development environments were just fragments sitting on their own. With Cohesity, all of your test and dev activities can be managed via the integrated platform and then easily promoted into production once you’re ready. This provides a seamless DevOps experience for your organization.
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Data indexing so that you always know what you have and where you have it.
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Encryption of your data both at rest and in flight.
If you’re looking for a solution that’s hyperconverged onto a single platform, the joint HPE and Cohesity solution is exactly what the CIO ordered. You can collapse a number of previously disparate secondary-centric services into one. And it’s not limited to an on-premises approach.
Instant hybrid cloud
The HPE Solutions for Cohesity DataPlatfrom also helps you accelerate your hybrid cloud journey. The Cohesity software optionally leverages the public cloud for myriad purposes, including as a backup target, a target for long-term data retention and archive, a storage tier, disaster recovery, and test/dev purposes.
All of the features described earlier, including data reduction, global indexing, and security, apply to the public cloud side of the Cohesity equation, too. The result is a seamless experience between your HPE-driven on-premises Cohesity solution and your favorite public cloud, whether that’s AWS, Azure, Google, or another Cohesity cloud partner.
Ensuring a solid hardware foundation
With great software comes a need for great hardware from a trusted partner. Cohesity is a hyperconverged solution, meaning that the underlying hardware
needs to work in concert with the solution—not as a hindrance. Even with a conglomeration of secondary data sources, secondary storage needs will still grow, and these data sources have and will continue to have importance to the organization. The only way that such a solution works is if it’s running on hardware that is stable, fast, easily managed, and scalable. HPE brings that in spades with HPE Solutions for Cohesity DataPlatfrom.
A solution is only as good as the support behind it. The HPE and Cohesity solution is a full member of HPE’s global supply chain, helping customers around the world reduce deployment risk and complexity and unlocking a fully optimized deployment and support experience. For those that are uncomfortable taking the plunge on their own, the HPE and Cohesity solution can be configured and deployed by HPE Pointnextconsulting services.
As you consider your secondary application needs, look no further than the hyperconverged secondary storage solution from HPE and Cohesity to allow you to simplify your environment by conglomerating workloads into a single, scalable hybrid environment.
Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Scott D. Lowe, CEO and Lead Analyst for ActualTech Media.
Since 1994, Scott has helped organizations of all stripes solve critical technology challenges. He has served in a variety of technical roles, spent ten years as a CIO, and has spent another ten as a strategic IT consultant in higher education. Today, his company helps educate IT pros and decision makers and brings IT consumers together with the right enterprise IT solutions to help them propel their businesses forward.
