CloudSpin will be integrated as a free component within the Cohesity platform when it becomes available in 90-120 days.

Hyperconverged secondary storage provider Cohesity has announced a major new  capability for their Cohesity DataPlatform. CloudSpin gives users instant access to their backup data in the cloud for application testing and development, replacing manual processes that could take weeks. It thus lets users utilize their backups as something other than an insurance policy. In a related capability, Cohesity also announced the backup software’s native integration with public cloud providers’ APIs.

The new functionality extends Cohesity’s continued building out of their use cases, which started as hyperconverged backup, but began to move beyond that last year.

“We have one software platform with multiple use cases, such as long-term retention, storing tiering and replication,” said Sameer Nori, Director of Product Marketing at Cohesity. “We have moved to bringing together workloads on a single platform, and this continues to deliver upon that vision. It’s not just backup and recovery.”

Nori said that organizations’ test/dev process is typically slowed down by two significant challenges.

“One is that enterprises create multiple copies of data to make sets available to app developers, but these all have to be provisioned,” he said. “The other is a lack of application mobility between on-prem and cloud, with test/dev being impeded by manual backup processes.”

CloudSpin is designed to address both these issues.

“CloudSpin enables enterprises to accelerate application development in the cloud by leveraging the backup stored on the DataPlatform and using it as a virtual machine for test/dev,” Nori stated.

“Before CloudSpin, a user could have used the data in this fashion, but it was a lot more work,” he said. “They would need to manually do a number of different steps. They would have to copy to the cloud. There is also a format conversion process which is not trivial. CloudSpin automates the whole manual process, while natively protecting in the cloud. It delivers a one-click workflow from the time, they move data to the cloud, where it is then used for test/dev, and then moved back – all in a closed loop.”

CloudSpin converts the data to the appropriate cloud format, making it available for instant test/dev purposes. It eliminates the need to make and provision copies of the data for this purpose, provisions data for test/dev in the cloud, and returns it on-prem afterwards, using policy-based automation.

“Our existing backup software now also integrates natively with Snapshot APIs of public cloud providers to deliver automated data protection,” Nori added. “This accelerates the  test/dev while  ensuring data protection.”

This is a pre-announcement, meaning that CloudSpin will be available to customers within 90-120 days.