Today, Pure Storage and Cohesity announced a strategic partnership and introduced Pure FlashRecover, powered by Cohesity. FlashRecover is a jointly-engineered data protection solution that is based on Pure’s FlashBlade scale-out object & file storage, and Cohesity DataProtect software.
According to the press release, Pure and Cohesity have “formed this partnership based on strong custmer 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”.
Rapid Data Recovery, Ransomware Protection
Most of the materials provided by Pure Storage put a strong emphasis on the solution’s ability to perform rapid data recovery at scale as well as ransomware protection. While this topic would be too long for such a news coverage article, Cohesity have published a solutions brief covering ransomware protection.
Obviously, backup and recovery activities on all flash arrays provide better performance than hybrid hyperconverged solutions. The architecture diagram below depicts Cohesity building blocks (not clear if these are C4000, C6000, or some custom blocks), but without any local storage capacity, mounting instead FlashBlade storage via NFS.
Beyond data protection, organizations benefit from this strategic partnership through Cohesity’s state-of-the-art data analytics and data management capabilities. Last but not least, thanks to the underlying FlashBlade storage, using Cohesity DataPlatform to create data copies for DevOps use cases becomes possible without incurring any performance penalty.
From a delivery & support perspective, the solution follows the “one throat to choke” model with support being delivered by Pure Storage. On the background, we can expect tight integration between both companies R&D / Engineering, and the Go-To-Market strategy also appears to be integrated, with joint selling and joint marketing programs.
Beta Availability is planned for early September 2020, with General Availabilty planned for early October 2020, all dates being of course provisional.
TECHunplugged’s Opinion
This is an exciting landmark announcement for both companies, although Cohesity and Pure Storage are not at their first try collaborating together: three years ago, both companies introduced FlashProtect (make sure to read the conclusion on Max’s old blog, as the comments on both companies positioning & strategy are still valid).
We foresee a lot of potential for partnerships & synergies between Pure Storage & Cohesity, both from a portfolio & target market perspective. We have been vocal and enthusiastic about it, not only in our written content, but also with some of the discussions we’ve had in the past with some executives.
Both companies are committed to innovation, heavily invest in R&D, and have to a certain extent disrupted their respective markets. It will be interesting to check back in a few months and get more feedback from both companies on the adoption rate of this solution.