Cohesity & Pure Storage Partnership Announcement

On August 12, 2020, Cohesity has officially announced the partnership with Pure Storage for their joint solution called Pure FlashRecover – Powered by Cohesity which is the industry’s first jointly-engineered all-flash modern data protection solution for rapid recovery, ransomware protection, and reuse of data.

Pure and Cohesity have formed this partnership based on strong customer demand for an integrated all-flash data protection solution that empowers customers to easily, quickly, and reliably back up and recover their data at scale. The companies have also formed this partnership at a time when more customers are embracing cloud services and are seeking ransomware protection.

Pure FlashRecover, Powered by Cohesity delivers all-flash data backup and recovery capabilities that enterprises require for restoring data rapidly in the face of a disaster or a ransomware attack. It enables flash-to-flash-to-cloud data protection and allows rapid, independent scaling of processing, throughput, and storage capacity for the most efficient use of all resources.

The solution also empowers organizations to future-proof data center investments and realize new levels of performance to meet growing petabyte-level recovery requirements. In addition, the solution enables backup data to be reused for analytics and DevOps, allowing multiple applications to leverage data stores on the high-performance, unified fast file and object FlashBlade platform.

By combining Cohesity DataProtect software with Pure’s unified fast file and object FlashBlade platform, the integrated solution delivers:

  • Performance: up to 3x faster backup and restore throughput than disk-based alternatives, capable of recovering thousands of virtual machines and up to 1PB of data a day to meet large-scale disaster recovery needs.
  • Integration: single-point purchasing, deployment and support all delivered through Pure, eliminating the need for customers to go through two vendors. Pure is now a Cohesity Technology Partner and the companies have committed to joint innovation.
  • Scalability: disaggregated compute and storage to enable independent scaling for backup / recovery processing, throughput, and storage capacity for the most efficient use of resources.
  • Simplicity: ease of management provided by cloud integration that enables flash-to-flash-to-cloud backup and recovery, low-cost public cloud storage for long-term retention, and non-disruptive upgrades.

Availability
Pure FlashRecover, Powered by Cohesity is being tested by joint customers today and will be generally available in the United States in Q4 CY2020 and in countries outside the United States in the coming quarters.

For More Information
To find out how your organization can leverage the benefits of Pure FlashRecover, Powered by Cohesity, visit:

For the full announcement on the Cohesity Blog page, see the below link.

Announcement (Blog): https://www.cohesity.com/press/pure-storage-and-cohesity-forge-strategic-partnership-to-deliver-rapid-recovery-at-scale/

Cohesity Data Protection DEMO (Short)

Cohesity Data Protection DEMO (Short): https://youtu.be/PxT4zBS-L68

In this demo, I do a quick run through of the Cohesity 6.4.1 user interface related to the Data Protection use case specifically. This is not meant to be a complete demo of the entire interface and functionality, just a quick overview for the Data Protection use case only.

I start off by showing the types of sources you can connect to such as External Cloud Providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) as well as hypervisors, physical servers, databases, O365, Active Directory, NAS, etc.

Then I show how simple it is to create policies so that you can do local and long term retention, replication to other clusters, archive to the cloud, database logs, and much more.

The next step is to create a protection jobs for the various sources we mentioned above. We select the appropriate policy to associate to this protection job, and set various other settings such as QOA policy, SLA time frame, priority, etc.

If you would like to see a complete demo of the entire interface of our new 6.5.0 version, see my other video titled “Cohesity 6.5 User Interface Overview (DEMO)“…Click Here!

Cohesity 6.5 User Interface Overview (DEMO)

Cohesity 6.5 User Interface

Cohesity 6.5 User Interface Overview (DEMO): https://youtu.be/S-JfmpeUe7I

Want to know more about the new Cohesity 6.5 (UI) User Interface and all the core capabilities, watch the below video of the demo. Not all capabilities (old and new) are covered in this demo, it is meant to provide an overview of the core capabilities.

Topics covered in this demo:

  • Registering Sources
  • Registering External Sources
  • Creating Policies
  • Creating Protection Jobs
  • Restores (File & Virtual Machine)
  • Clone Virtual Machine
  • Creating Views/Shares (SMB/NFS/S3)
  • Cohesity Marketplace Apps
  • Reporting
  • System Information

What’s New in 6.5:

  • Comprehensive Protection for Kubernetes Namespaces
  • (CDP) Continuous Data Protection for Mission-Critical Virtual Machines
  • Heterogenous Cluster Support
  • ROBO Appliance Availability
  • Dramatically Faster SQL Database Migration
  • Higher Data Resiliency
  • Runbook Automation for VMware Failover (DR)
  • Helios Mobile App

For more detailed information on what’s new in Cohesity 6.5, see the below link.
https://www.cohesity.com/blog/cohesity-pegasus-6-5-innovation-doesnt-have-to-be-zero-sum-game/

Cohesity Public Website: https://www.cohesity.com/

Backing Up & Restoring Active Directory With Cohesity 6.5

Backing Up & Restoring Active Directory With Cohesity 6.5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azFuXXZpW68

In this video, I quickly run through how to connect to (AD) Active Directory as a source and register it as an Active Directory server using our latest software version 6.5. Then I show a Active Directory protection job I had already ran previously. And finally, I show how easy it is to perform a Active Directory restore of a user account in which I deleted at the beginning of the video.

Cohesity has an agent install that allows us to do granular backups and recoveries of Microsoft’s Active Directory objects. Anyone that has had to do an “Authoritative AD Restore” in their day knows how painful that can be after someone has deleted an entire (OU) Organizational Unit from Active Directory!

With Cohesity, you are able to backup the entire Active Directory database. Then do a granular restore of a single or multiple AD objects. The user interface presents you a comparison screen to show what AD objects are missing compared to a previous backup snapshot making it easy to see what has been deleted.

If you have enabled the AD Recycle Bin feature, we will restore it from there to ensure all the properties of the AD object are restored with it. If you do not have AD Recycling Bin enabled, we will restore the object but may be missing some properties in the same way it would with an Authoritative Restore after the Tombstone period has passed.

So system administrators can celebrate…no more are the days of doing an “Authoritative Restore” on your Domain Controllers! It is now quick and easy to restore an object.

Cohesity Public Website: https://www.cohesity.com/

Cohesity Documentation (Active Directory): https://docs.cohesity.com/6_5/Web/UserGuide/Content/Doc/ActiveDirectory.htm?tocpath=MS%20Active%20Directory%7C_____0

Backing Up, Restoring, & Cloning SQL Databases With Cohesity (v6.4.1)

Backing Up, Restoring, & Cloning SQL Databases With Cohesity (v6.4.1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUfYxIuWhD8

In this video, I will show you how to register SQL servers as a source in the Cohesity version 6.4.1 user interface. Then I show how to create two protection jobs, one for a stand-alone SQL server and another for a SQL AAG.

Then we walk through how to recover the SQL (AAG) Always on Availability Groups database to the stand-alone SQL server as well as clone it. The we wrap up by taking a quick look at the SQL Dashboard.

Cohesity has an agent install that allows us to do more granular backups and restores to SQL databases. You can protect stand-alone, clustered and (AAG) Always on Availability Groups SQL servers. You can use our “Auto-Protect” feature so that when a new SQL server has been added to a SQL cluster or AAG, it automatically gets backed up as they are added. The agent also allows you to selectively pick which databases you want to protect.

Cohesity Public Website: https://www.cohesity.com/

Cohesity Documentation (SQL): https://docs.cohesity.com/6_4_1/Web/UserGuide/Content/MSSQL/SQLRequirements.htm?tocpath=MS%20SQL%7C_____1

Running ClamAV App on the Cohesity Platform 6.5

Running ClamAV App on the Cohesity Platform 6.5.0a: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXGJVCdIseY

In this video, I walk you through enabling the use of apps on the Cohesity platform, installing, configuring and running the Clam AV app to protect file shares located on the Cohesity platform.

The Cohesity platform can act as a File/Object store (NAS) to replace your existing NAS or Windows File Shares. We also run Cohesity and 3rd party applications as containers on our platform. See our Marketplace for a full list of the available apps.

ClamAV App Description:

Protecting data on your file storage against viruses is important but relying on antivirus sitting outside of your NAS environment is inefficient. Moving data over the network for antivirus scans outside of your NAS servers adds unnecessary overhead and makes data vulnerable.

Now, with the integrated Clam AV app offered by Cohesity, users can scan the files stored in the Cohesity DataPlatform directly, without sending the files to an external scanner.

Cohesity Marketplace: https://marketplace.cohesity.com/app-details/clamav

Cohesity Public Website: https://www.cohesity.com/