Pure Storage adds Cohesity Data Platform to FlashArray//M arrays

Secondary storage convergence product Cohesity has announced it will run natively on all-flash maker Pure Storage’s arrays.

That means Pure storage arrays will allow native functionality from Cohesity that includes data retention, search and analytics capabilities that replace backup and archive infrastructure.

The move will provide integration across Pure Storage FlashArray//M primary storage and Cohesity secondary storage, with, for example, Pure snapshots to the Cohesity platform.

Customers will be able to tier snapshots between primary and secondary storage, with, for example, their most recent snapshots on Pure Storage and long-term snapshots moved to Cohesity. The Cohesity user interface will also allow protection policies to be assigned to Pure Storage volumes.

The Cohesity Data Platform consolidates secondary storage platforms on a distributed storage system that can scale out. Its target market aims at replacing backup software and the backup target, such as EMC Avamar and Data Domain.

It is a software product that comes in qualified white box Intel servers with flash and spinning disk HDD storage capacity.

As data is ingested it is replicated and distributed, with two replicas taken on a two-factor basis. Cohesity plans to roll out erasure coding as a data protection method, although that would use more storage resources. Unlimited snapshots can be taken.

Cohesity storage connectivity is via Ethernet and the NFS and SMB file access protocols, but it is planned to add the block access (ie, SAN) protocol iSCSI as well as the emerging cloud de facto standard S3.

Virtualisation backup is native to VMware, with no agents and full integration with VMware VADP functionality. These are continuous incrementals with full backups of VMDK virtual disks using Change Block Tracking to update following changes.

Other hypervisors are not yet supported but it is planned to add native backup capability for Microsoft Hyper-V and the KVM hypervisor.

Late last year Cohesity announced integration with cloud services – Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and Glacier – as an extended repository for data on its platform.

On the roadmap for Cohesity is the launch of a software version that can run as a virtual machine in software and provide remote office capability.