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This blog is co-authored by: Kyle Grossmiller, Solutions Architect – Pure Storage, and Damien Philip, Principal Solutions Architect, Cohesity

FlashStack™ is a flexible, all-flash converged infrastructure solution that brings the flash revolution to your data center, faster. It combines the latest in compute, network, storage hardware, and virtualization software into a single, integrated architecture that speeds time to deployment, lowers overall IT costs, and reduces deployment risk.

Highly efficient components coupled with simple, intelligent software reduce the costs associated with power, cooling, and data center space. Based on 100 percent primary flash storage, FlashStack provides the performance and reliability that business-critical applications demand.

What are Storage Admins Biggest Challenges?

Every day in our work as Solutions Architects, we encounter administrators who are frustrated over seemingly constant challenges that require superhuman efforts to keep production workloads online and available. Issues such as

  • lower-than-expected legacy storage performance
  • abysmal backup/disaster recovery RPOs/RTOs can at most be triaged but never be truly resolved
  • legacy technology debt
  • unnecessary complexity
  • silos throughout the data center

Most IT infrastructure solutions today have a narrow field of vision when it comes to designing for robust long-term data protection, and managing the exponential data growth expected in modern datacenters. This forces customers to deal with these absolutely business critical issues in an ad-hoc manner, most often when they are already actively running production environments.

FlashStack with Cohesity: Robust Data Protection for FlashStack

Pure Storage® has partnered with Cohesity® to deliver a high-performance, robust data protection and data management solution for FlashStack. FlashStack with Cohesity enables organizations to fully leverage the cloud for datasets that ’belong’ to the cloud, i.e., archives and cold data. All this is managed and orchestrated with a simple single pane of glass.

Due to a recent, well-publicized debacle with the “public-cloud” that left businesses reeling from a human error, we have been re-invigorated to educate our customers about the benefits of hybrid-cloud designs. Our goal is to help them build performant, resilient and end-to-end protected infrastructures with the ability to recover nearly instantaneously from failures, while also providing security around data to eliminate the threat of ransomware attacks. As this example showed, the reality is that a massive outage can happen anywhere. The difference between a business staying online versus experiencing an outage, comes down to the robustness of your data protection and disaster recovery plans.

Simplifying Storage for Administrators

Next generation storage and secondary storage from Pure and Cohesity, respectively, have dramatically simplified and altered the management paradigm for administrators. This shift up the stack goes away from struggling with minutiae and instead focuses on relevant technologies like orchestration and protection that make the business more agile and secure.

Our joint solution describes in detail how to integrate FlashStack with Cohesity to protect VMware® Horizon. We selected VDI as our primary example workload as it demands sub-millisecond storage performance provided by Pure, includes several common workloads found in the datacenter (e.g. Microsoft® SQL, VSI, virtual desktops) and expects full-scale data protection and recoverability from something as small as individual user files to potentially the entire environment.

Our goal with this data management solution is simple: Provide a best-of-breed solution that emphasizes ease of use, resiliency, performance and data protection. By focusing on these four pillars, it frees our joint customers from being weighed down tuning and turning knobs and in its place allows them to focus instead on current industry trends and technologies to better the overall business.