A Winning Partnership – Pure Storage and Catalogic ECX

The team here at Catalogic Software we won’t settle for second place, winning is part of our DNA.

However winning is something that isn’t done by simply putting the fastest engine on the grid or fastest storage device in your datacentre. You need to ensure you have the complete package. In Formula One there are 3 core components to a championship winning car:

1. The Engine

2. The Aerodynamics &

3. Reliability 

All 3 of these areas are critical to the success or failure of a team. You could have the fastest engine in the world but with poor aerodynamics or reliability you will never win a race or championship. Something the Arrows A22 driven via Jos Verstappen pictured below definitely never managed! 

The third aero wing was quickly banned by the FIA after Arrows attempting to use in practice around Monaco.

If you look deeper into the history of F1 you will find a whole host of banned aerodynamic developments as the designers always try to bend the boundaries and rules to deliver a competitive advantage and ultimately reduce lap times. 

In the current day and age aerodynamics are arguably the most important factor in Formula One car performance. It has become the key to performance gain due to the often very marginal gains that can currently be made by engine changes or other mechanic component development.

Switching lanes back into the datacentre in here you again have 3 core components for a winning storage setup:

1. The Storage a.k.a the Engine

2. The Management, Orchestration and Automation a.k.a the Aerodynamics

3. Reliability

Here the management, orchestration and automation a.k.a the aerodynamics are in my opinion the most important factor in having a winning storage setup. 

This is because most storage vendors can deliver the speeds, feeds and data functions needed to run data as quickly as possible. However, lightening fast storage doesn’t mean optimal performance and utilisation. The management, orchestration and automation tools are what enable IT teams to deliver optimal data performance and utilisation.

This is the exact reason all Pure Storage customers need Catalogic ECX to enable a winning storage setup. Pure storage is a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant, and therefore undoubtedly have the engine capabilities. With Catalogic ECX you can enable optimal utilisation of Pure Storage environments. We deliver an efficient architecture to enable effective management, orchestration and automation within the Storage environment. Some of the key game changing benefits we deliver are:

Catalogic ECX and Pure Flash ahhhhhrrays saviour of the data management universe

The team including myself at Catalogic software love to make architects, administrators, developers and managers lives simpler. 

We know storage management can be a pain and more often than not the investment made in the storage isn’t being fully utilised because you can’t consume all of the cool features and functions without one of the team creating some complex scripts to get the most out of it. 

That’s the reason we believe all organisations running Pure Storage should have Catalogic ECX for snapshot automation and orchestration.  

The core focus for us with ECX is delivering a simple and efficient architecture to enable snapshot automation and orchestration. 

We do that for Pure Storage via integrating using the Pure Storage Rest API. This means you get all the goodness of Pure’s snapshot engine and we simply act as the brain cataloging the metadata, orchestrating the snapshots and enabling the instant recoveries back onto the FlashArrays. 

We do not store data on a separate dedicted proprietary storage appliance like some vendors do in this space. We disagree with this approach as we are software defined and requiring a separate dedicted proprietary storage appliance increases timescales to move data, increases complexity in terms of architecture and needs a bigger budget for additional external storage arrays and the cost to implement and manage these. 

With Catalogic ECX we deliver the following 5 key benefits for Pure Flash arrays:

1. Software only Copy Data Management capabilities that deliver additional value from your Pure investment that is deployed in minutes

2. Integration with leading hypervisors and applications such as VMware, Oracle, SAP HANA and SQL to provide data owners with instant data access

3. Instant data copies for value use cases such as Test/Dev, DR testing, Reporting, DevOps, Analytics and Patching

4. Increased ROI from Pure storage platform

5. Orchestration and automation of data between Pure devices - FlashArray, Cloud Block Store and FlashBlade

Whilst primary copy data management on Pure Flash Ahhhhhrays (sorry I will stop it now 😊) is our bread and butter we also have some strong use cases and benefits around offloading to FlashArray//C, Cloud Block Store and FlashBlade. 

Let's take a look at those in a bit more detail here. 

Destination Unknown

2021 is going to be a key year for many businesses attempting to recover from the tremendous impact COVID-19, political shifts and more had last year.
I don’t think many of us will look back on 2020 fondly and hopefully humanity can rise up and work together to get us back to normality.... or even better than before.

One of the key realisations of 2020 was that businesses that quickly shift to accommodate unexpected changes can continue to operate and even excel despite the unexpected and often challenging circumstances.

A lot of organisations had previously feared a negative productivity impact if most, or all of their employees worked from home, and had therefore never tried it. However, for most organisations this shift proved to be a success, with employees not spending unnecessary time, money and energy travelling. This has often resulted in employees having more time to focus in the comfort of their own home and for many a better work/life balance.
I still do miss a trip out at the moment though just for the comradery, face-to-face interaction and knowledge sharing.

Looking back on 2020, we had a very successful year here at Catalogic. One of the key reasons for this success is that we have the ability to quickly pivot and work in an agile manner, meaning we discuss customers’ requirements and develop solutions to deliver against them – solutions which are often specific and complex.

A key talking point many customers came to us with in 2020 was around how we can improve data visibility, management and orchestration.

Sound interesting? Let me talk to you about how we can enable you to have visibility in your environment via Catalogic ECX.

In every active environment data continues to grow. Data growth often causes a major data headache for IT administrators. The reason for this is growth results in more and more information and often it gets to a point where understanding what data sits where is a nearly impossible task.

Step forward Catalogic ECX.

With Catalogic ECX we can provide data visibility, management control and orchestration of NetApp, IBM Storage, Pure Storage, HPE Nimble, VMware vSphere, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP HANA and InterSystems Caché environments.

Because we inventorise all key data within these types of storage, hypervisors, virtual machines, physical servers and databases we can provide the ability for IT administrators to better navigate their environment. Think of it like a Sat-Nav that tells us where we would like to go (ECX tells us what resources you want to see to show the associated applications, servers and storage)

*Yes that is my sat nav!!

How does ECX reduce stress for IT teams?

In this day and age, every business generates and harvests data. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Nvidia, and Tesla are the kind of companies that are leaders of the data economy. They are harvesting data to its full extent and continue to find ways of growing their business via data. Worldwide data expected to hit 175 zettabytes by 2025, representing a 61 percent compound annual growth rate according to IDC

People often forget that a lot of this data is simply made up of copies of existing data. Why do copies of data exist? For multiple reasons, the most common reasons include: 

• Backup and Compliance
• Disaster Recovery
• Reporting
• Analytics
• Test & Development
• DevOps &
• Training

To put the scope of how much data is copy data in context, IDC has found that 60 percent of storage is dedicated to managing copies of data--at $55 billion per year collectively.

The most easily observable problem with copy data is there is too much of it. Data reduction capabilities, such as compression and deduplication, are helping reduce the burden of copies, copy data still causes many organizations unwanted stress and costs - the core reasons for these being:

• Storage growth
• Security vulnerabilities
• Compliance risks and 
• Shadow IT

So, what can companies do to manage and harvest data better to reduce the stress and costs associated with Copy Data? 

Free Data Protection and Recovery Review

Can you trust in your current data protection and recovery solution?

We appreciate, especially in the current climate, that all organizations want to ensure they have fully functional and cost-effective data protection and recovery solutions that when required can quickly and efficiently recover vital data. 

The data protection and recovery review from Catalogic provides a simple set of 12 questions that can be quickly answered to gauge the current state of your data protection environment.

From the questionnaire we will provide a defined output via a PDF report that can be utilized within the business to identify prioritized recommendations to determine the steps necessary to get your data protection environment fit for the future. 

Here at Catalogic we are different to the usual data protection players in the market. 

We offer a fully software-defined solution that enables us to support any block storage behind our backup repository, ‘vStor’, which has data reduction included as standard. 

vStor can also offload to tape and Cloud based S3 storage to ensure more cost-effective targets are available for longer term retention. 

We take a fully consultative approach and ensure customers’ needs are understood and solutions are built around those needs, because out of the box doesn’t fit everyone. 

Our team has been making exciting progress with DPX including the addition of backup and recovery support for SAP HANA databases in DPX 4.6.1. We are also in the process of fully re-defining the user experience within DPX, moving to a more modernized HTML user interface. It’s exciting times here as DPX continues to evolve. 

If you want to learn more about our Data Protection and Recovery Review, take the questionnaire and have us generate the free report or discuss more about Catalogic DPX feel free to get in touch via wbush@catalogicsoftware.com
Thanks for reading and take care. 

Snapshots are a Feature not a Solution - Part 2

In my previous post I discussed how snapshots are a feature and not a solution but how snapshots in conjunction with RestoreManager can enable NetApp users to turn snapshots into a valid data protection solution. 
In this post I’m going to discuss how snapshots are an important feature of the ability to recover data effectively and efficiently in the event of a ransomware attack. 

Sadly we live in a day and age whereby ransomware is the “go-to method of attack” for Cybercriminals. It’s estimated that every 14 seconds a business falls victim to a ransomware attack. We see details of the impact of attacks in the news on an almost daily basis and it’s severely impacting the ability of businesses to generate revenue and public services to function as expected. The damage of these attacks is costing billions globally with the estimated cost predicted to reach over $20 Billion by 2021. 

Due to this a question we are frequently asked at Catalogic is how can I ensure my content within my NetApp environment is fully protected from the threat of ransomware and more importantly enable the ability to only recover potentially infected files if ransomware hits?

Snapshots are a Feature not a Solution - Part 1

Snapshots are a thing of great beauty and utility. They have enabled data to be protected and reused quickly and efficiently. They now provide many organizations with the foundation of their data reuse and data protection solutions and have regularly saved organizations from major incidents and disasters via the enablement of quick recovery of data.

Storage snapshots are a feature offered via the vast majority of enterprise storage players NetApp, IBM, Pure Storage, Dell EMC and others. The key word in that sentence is FEATURE. Storage snapshots are only a feature and not a complete solution. 

vStor – The beating heart of our data protection solution

At the heart of every data protection solution is the repository where the data the data protection solution is protecting resides. The beating heart of Catalogic's data protection solution DPX is the vStor.

Our vStor backup repository is a flexible and scalable backup target that frees you from expensive backup appliances and vendor lock-in, unlike many of the current market players. 

Built on open source components, vStor can use any block based storage without restrictions. It supports data reduction in the form of both deduplication and compression for efficiency and provides point-to-point replication for DR or remote office support. 
vStor can be architected to meet your needs. We support physical severs and virtual servers and any form of block storage. 
If you are interested in a dedicated appliance we also offer 3 pre-built vStor appliances – 24TB, 48TB and 100TB. See more details on those here