DataProtection 2.0 – Policy Driven with Cohesity

After a hectic #VMworld week it is good to be back in Copenhagen. At Cohesity we had a very busy week and we were doing live demos 3-days straight without any interruptions. The demos are interactive and we get asked a lot of questions such as:

• Do you support replication to another Cohesity cluster on a DR site?  YES
• Do you support Physical Windows and Linux? YES
• Do you support object level restore for MS SQL, SharePoint and Exchange? YES
• Do you support native archival to the cloud such as Azure, Amazon, Google? YES
• Do you support tape? YES

All of the basic requirements to replace the current backup solutions is already in place. We support the applications you have today.  Why are people considering moving away from what they have to something new? Let me sum it up

• Simplicity! – The backup software runs natively in a hyper-converged system platform that can scale to infinity
• Policy Driven! – All protection is policy based (more on this later)
• Test / Dev environment! – Do more with the backup data. Every backup is a fully-hydrated snapshot on the Cohesity platform. Example: You can spin up 20 virtual machines in as little as 10 seconds – no data need to be copied due to patented SnapTree technology.
• Analytics! – Let the backup data be more than insurance. Use it with built-in apps like “pattern search” and “password detector” to run analytics on copies of production data.

During the demo of Cohesity all of these things shines. PowerPoint presentations does not do the product justice. One of the features we demo is our Policy Driven approach to protection of data. 

Lets say we have a customer with the following data retention policy for their tier 1 data

• Daily backup kept for 30 days
• Monthly backup kept for 180 days
• Yearly backup kept for 3650 days
• Replicate daily backup to DR site and keep it for 1480 days
• Archive every monthly backup to the cloud and keep it for 3650 days (Azure, Amazon, Google, Openstack, Custom S3, Tape)

It will only take a few minutes to put the numbers in a policy. Below I have created the “Gold Protection Policy”. Once we have the policy we simply need to attach it to a VM / Folder / Cluster / DataCenter / TAG in vCenter. Then the VM will be protected with the policy.