Cohesity announces snapshot integration around Pure Storage FlashBlade

While multiple backup vendors have snapshot integrations around Pure’s FlashArray//M array, integrations for the AI-focused Pure FlashBlade are rarer.

Cohesity booth at Pure Accelerate 2018

SAN FRANCISCO — Longtime strategic partners Pure Storage and Cohesity have expanded technology integrations around Pure’s FlashBlade offering. FlashBlade is designed for unstructured data, particularly around artificial intelligence use cases. The expanded relationship brings Cohesity’s snapshot protection capabilities to FlashBlade.

“Pure Storage’s FlashArray//M has had our snapshot integration previously, but the integration with FlashBlade is new for us,” said Lynn Lucas, Cohesity’s CMO. This was facilitated because since FlashBlade 2.0 was announced at last year’s Pure Accelerate event, they have released the APIs for it. FlashBlade 1.0 did not have functional RESTful APIs available to partners. It’s those APIs they make available that have enabled us to provide the first snapshot protection for FlashBlade. Snapshots allow you to freeze the system, so that you know exactly what you have backed up.

Point-in- time backup capability offered through snapshotting is especially critical in FlashBlade’s unstructured data environment.

“Those kinds of data sets are huge,” said Adaikkappan Arumugam, Technical Marketing Engineer at Cohesity. “FlashBlade is positioned for huge analytics workloads.  We granularly index these data sets at scale, and they can be comprised of billions of files. You can find a needle in a haystack with a Google-like search as a result. Our solution’s integration is agentless and proxyless, and leverages our Web-scale architecture.”

Cohesity and Pure brought a spokesperson from reference customer LendingClub to Pure Accelerate this year to speak at a session about the rearchitecting of their backup and recovery environment with Cohesity and Pure. LendingClub is an online credit marketplace which provides peer-to-peer borrowing and investing. The Cohesity-Pure integration displaced a Veritas NetBackup solution, which used Data Domain as the target device, and which had become unwieldy as backup demands scaled and became more complex, leading to slowness and failures.

“Lending Club was able to meet their SLAs by using Cohesity and Pure together, gaining the benefits of a more modern architecture,” Lucas said.

“Pure is a very important partnership to us, and we share a lot of joint channel partners,” Lucas added. “If a customer has decided to take the step to modernize their primary storage with Pure, we believe that they are much more likely to modernize their secondary storage as well, which works to our benefit.”