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?