Pure Storage and Cohesity announced a strategic partnership and a new joint solution today. I had the opportunity to speak with Amy Fowler and Biswajit Mishra from Pure Storage, along with Anand Nadathur and Chris Wiborg from Cohesity, and thought I’d share my notes here.

Friends In The Market

The announcement comes in two parts, with the first being that Pure Storage and Cohesity are forming a strategic partnership. The idea behind this is that, together, the companies will deliver “industry-leading storage innovations from Pure Storage with modern, flash-optimised backup from Cohesity”.  There are plenty of things in common between the companies, including the fact that they’re both, as Wiborg puts it, “keenly focused on doing the right thing for the customer”.

Pure FlashRecover Powered By Cohesity

Partnerships are exciting and all, but what was of more interest was the Pure FlashRecover announcement. What is it exactly? It’s basically Cohesity DataProtect running on Cohesity-certified compute nodes (the whitebox gear you might be familiar with if you’ve bought Cohesity tin previously), using Pure’s FlashBlades as the storage backend.

[image courtesy of Pure Storage]

FlashRecover has a targeted general availability for Q4 CY2020 (October). It will be released in the US initially, with other regions to follow. From a go to market perspective, Pure will handle level 1 and level 2 support, with Cohesity support being engaged for escalations. Cohesity DataProtect will be added to the Pure price list, and Pure becomes a Cohesity Technology Partner.

Thoughts

My first thought when I heard about this was why would you? I’ve traditionally associated scalable data protection and secondary storage with slower, high-capacity appliances. But as we talked through the use cases, it started to make sense. FlashBlades by themselves aren’t super high capacity devices, but neither are the individual nodes in Cohesity appliances. String a few together and you have enough capacity to do data protection and fast recovery in a predictable fashion. FlashBlade supports 75 nodes (I think) [Edit: it scales up to 150x 52TB nodes. Thanks for the clarification from Andrew Miller] and up to 1PB of data in a single namespace. Throw in some of the capabilities that Cohesity DataProtect brings to the table and you’ve got an interesting solution. The knock on some of the next-generation data protection solutions has been that recovery can still be quite time-consuming. The use of all-flash takes away a lot of that pain, especially when coupled with a solution like FlashBlade that delivers some pretty decent parallelism in terms of getting data recovered back to production quickly.

An evolving use case for protection data is data reuse. For years, application owners have been stuck with fairly clunky ways of getting test data into environments to use with application development and testing. Solutions like FlashRecover provide a compelling story around protection data being made available for reuse, not just recovery. Another cool thing is that when you invest in FlashBlade, you’re not locking yourself into a particular silo, you can use the FlashBlade solution for other things too.

I don’t work with Pure Storage and Cohesity on a daily basis anymore, but in my previous role I had the opportunity to kick the tyres extensively with both the Cohesity DataProtect solution and the Pure Storage FlashBlade. I’m an advocate of both of these companies because of the great support I received from both companies from pre-sales through to post-sales support. They are relentlessly customer focused, and that really translates in both the technology and the field experience. I can’t speak highly enough of the engagement I’ve experienced with both companies, from both a blogger’s experience, and as an end user.

FlashRecover isn’t going to be appropriate for every organisation. Most places, at the moment, can probably still get away with taking a little time to recover large amounts of data if required. But for industries where time is money, solutions like FlashRecover can absolutely make sense. If you’d like to know more, there’s a comprehensive blog post over at the Pure Storage website, and the solution brief can be found here.