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. 

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?