Veritas, Pure Storage extend collaboration with new integrations

The new integrations, around primary storage, analytics and long-term data retention, further enhance a partnership that began a year ago.

Enterprise data protection provider Veritas and Pure Storage have extended their collaboration that began last year. The new integrations include one with Veritas InfoScale focused principally on primary storage, one with Veritas APTARE to extend analytics beyond Pure environments, and one with the Veritas Access Appliance Technologies for long-term retention. All require integration to deliver, and so are strong plays for high-end channel partners of both companies.

“Our channel strategy is a key to the success of our relationship with Pure Storage,” said Peter McNamara, vice president of global cloud and technology alliances, Veritas. “What Pure and Veritas are both trying to do in transforming storage from tape is provide insight into a good majority of that data. At Veritas, we can see about 100 exabytes of data globally that is touched by our technology in some way, shape, or form. Our customers want to know what the most optimal place to retain that data is – for cost optimization and transformation with the cloud. The great opportunity with Pure for our channel is that you can use the data where it belongs, and take customers from their current state to their desired state. We have some large global partners who have already endorsed this.”

The initial collaboration between Pure and Veritas was announced in October 2018, and involved the integration of Veritas’ NetBackup integrated snapshot-based protection with Pure Storage’s FlashArray, and the integration of the Pure Storage FlashBlade as a storage target to Veritas.

Customers have had access to the joint solution since the release of the 8.1 version of Veritas NetBackup in June.

“Interest has been pretty much where we expected it,” said Jim Brown, Global Alliance Director, Veritas. “Since the story with Pure around our integrations is very large-enterprise focused, it’s a longer sales cycle. We are not selling for a workload but for a whole data protection strategy.”

“What we have announced now are three additional integrations which extend the collaboration with Pure further across our entire Enterprise Data Services platform,” McNamara said.

One of these is an integration between Pure Storage FlashArray  and Veritas InfoScale, which provides application availability and software-defined storage in the hybrid data centre. The integration will provide mission-critical levels of performance and availability for primary applications.

“When we first launched with Pure, we were focused on rapid restore,” Brown said. “That’s important to our strategy with them and their target for DP. These integrations are more on the primary storage front, with InfoScale. They give us and them a leg up, and gets them up into the application layer with us.”

The second new integration is between Pure’s products and the APTARE analytics software that Veritas acquired earlier this year.

“Pure has fantastic tools for their own infrastructure, but for us, enterprise visibility is typically mixed,” Brown said. “APTARE provides enterprise-wide visibility of data insights.”

“These very deep multi-platform insights will allow the channel to leverage APTARE and show customers a path to transformation to desire cost-optimized state across multi-platforms,” McNamara added.

The third part of the announcement is that the Veritas Access Appliance provides a resilient and cost-effective solution for the preservation of FlashArray data snapshots for long-term retention.

“This is the opposite end of the spectrum, which now allows a long-term retention strategy for private cloud requirements,” Brown said.

“The cost optimization here is really the key component,” McNamara stressed.

All of the new integrations are available now.

“This is not a single SKU, but something that is integrated and delivered by key channel partners,” Brown stated.