HPE and Cohesity: the power of partnership for simplifying secondary storage

StorageExperts · ‎12-16-2019

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

This old proverb is an appropriate metaphor for the power of partnerships, and it comes to mind when I think about how HPE and our partners are combining their respective strengths to deliver what is best for our joint customers.

At HPE, we believe collaboration is critical and is where success is defined by the right kind of partnership where collaborative people, empowering technology and transformative ideas, come together to carry joint customers further and faster. For our data protection portfolio we have built a robust partner ecosystem to ensure customers have the expertise, technology, and solutions needed to protect their businesses.

And that’s why a year ago we expanded our partnership with Cohesity, announcing a new OEM agreement which makes Cohesity software available directly from HPE and its channel partners. This enables a streamlined customer experience for the purchasing and deployment of a jointly validated solution from a single trusted partner. Since we introduced the first OEM SKUs in March of this year we’ve already seen significant customer demand for joint HPE-Cohesity solutions. We continue to see strong momentum in the field, as deals are closing and the pipeline is growing.

A key reason why the HPE-Cohesity solution is gaining market momentum is the fact that it addresses a common customer problem, namely the challenges of secondary data sprawl and infrastructure silos. Cohesity software on HPE Apollo/ProLiant servers simplifies secondary storage management for a wide range of enterprise secondary data including backups, archives, file shares, object stores, and data used for test/dev and analytics. The integrated HPE-Cohesity solution offers Cohesity’s secure, web-scale data management platform on certified HPE servers, spanning on-premises, cloud, and the edge, and empowers organizations to run apps on that platform, making data backups and insights easy. This best-of-breed solution combines the simplicity and efficiency of Cohesity software with the power and density of industry-leading, certified HPE Apollo and HPE ProLiant Gen 10 servers, along with HPE Pointnext advisory, professional, operational and financing services.

Enhanced Cohesity and Nimble Storage integration

HPE and Cohesity’s technology collaboration is advancing yet further this month with Cohesity’s announcement of native integration of Cohesity DataPlatform software with HPE Nimble Storage for virtualized environments. This enables more efficient tiering of snapshots between Nimble Storage and Cohesity, using array snapshot APIs. Customers can dynamically tier snapshots between Nimble primary storage and Cohesity secondary storage to provide comprehensive data protection. Storage of the most recent snaps on Nimble allows for faster recoveries, while moving long-term snaps to Cohesity for efficiency and scale.

Utilizing array-based snapshots to protect apps running on Nimble storage, instead of using hypervisor-level snapshots with VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection (VADP), lessens the impact on the production environment from backup activities. It reduces the VM stun time, which occurs when the hypervisor-based snapshot is taken and I/O is temporarily quiesced from the guest to ensure an application-consistent backup,and effectively improves application performance. As a result, customers can take more frequent snapshots for more granular recovery, thus reducing risk of downtime and improving workload availability for any application.

This new integration will be released with Cohesity Release 4.6.1. (to be generally available in December, 2019) and will support HPE Nimble Storage OS 5.0 or later.

Check out this Cohesity blog for a deeper dive on the native API integration of Cohesity DataPlatform software with HPE Nimble Storage for Virtual Machines (VMs).

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Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Simon Watkins, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager, HPE Storage.