Pure Storage, Cohesity expand partnership with FlashBlade integration

The new integration between Pure and Cohesity follows up an integration around Pure’s FlashArray//M earlier this year.

Cohesity’s Rawlinson Rivera presenting at Pure Accelerate event

SAN FRANCISCO – Pure Storage has expanded its relationship with hyper-converged secondary storage vendor Cohesity. In February, the two companies announced an integration of Pure’s FlashArray//M and Cohesity DataPlatform to provide simple, snapshot-based data protection. They have now expanded their partnership, integrating Cohesity’s DataPlatform with Pure’s FlashBlade, which provides flash based flash-based fast access to unstructured data through a native object storage-based implementation.

“Our original relationship around FlashArray//M used a RESTful API to let you grab any snapshot and back it up to a Cohesity system,” said Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Head of Product Management and Marketing. “It allowed us to do backups of Pure snaphots while the Pure array was running. You could even then delete them on the Pure Array and use that more expensive storage for other purposes – especially since snapshots get bigger as they get older.”

FlashBlade, Pure’s new product for high-performance unstructured workloads in areas like genomics, machine learning, and Big Data analytics, entered general availability in January. While it had 8 and 52 TB blades out of the gate, Pure announced a new 17 TB blade here at the Accelerate event.

The new Cohesity integration means that files and objects stored on FlashBlade can be automatically protected to the Cohesity web-scale platform based on data protection policies, with users getting instantaneous, any-point-in-time access to their data on Cohesity.

Vendor partnerships are a critical part of Cohesity’s go to market strategy. Late last month they announced an important new relationship with HPE, as well as one with Microsoft around Azure and one with Lenovo that for now is limited to the China market. They have special synergies with Pure Storage however, which is a key reason for their presence at Pure’s Accelerate show.

“We do a lot of business with Pure customers,” Rogers said. “Customers likely to adopt Pure are looking for a better solution to adopt, and want best-in-class technology. If they want to do that in storage, they tend to be looking to do the same thing on the data protection side. They are open to change. Nimble and Nutanix have been big for us for the same reason.”

Cohesity tries to integrate with everyone, even companies like Dell EMC, with which they don’t have a working relationship.

“They have Data Domain and we displace Data Domain, so they perceive us more as competitors than as potential partners,” Rogers said.

Cohesity also found the Pure event a good one to talk with potential new partners.

“There are a lot of potential new partners here for us, cutting edge technology types, who would be less likely to have been at HPE Discover, where we were last week,” Rogers said. “They come here to view the new technology being discussed. That’s why we find this to be a great venue for us, with both the kind of partners and customers looking for innovation.”

Cohesity drew a strong reception at the Accelerate event, as measured by the traffic around their booth, and the attendance at their presentation [picture inset]. Attendance at vendor sessions generally – which was easy to assess since everything was visible in the open concept approach here – was extraordinarily good by the standard of these kind of events. Most not only had every seat filled, but had several dozen people watching from just outside the ‘room.’ That reflects good advance work by Pure, but also the logistical advantages of scheduling an event at a converted 19th century factory/warehouse on the San Francisco pier, well removed from the many amenities of the city’s better-known areas near the downtown. Sadly, this was the last event for the Pier 70 venue, which will shortly be demolished to put up higher-value improvements in San Francisco’s insane real estate market.

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