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. 

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.