Three weeks into my new role as a Cohesity Sales Engineer it is time to summarize the experience so far. It has been busy three weeks with a lot of customer and partner meetings and at the same time ramp up on all things technical on the platform.
The conversations with customers and partners have had phenomenal feedback. There is definitely a gap in what they offer today and how Cohesity can help them. No one else is offering a true web-scale secondary storage platform that will help the customer with multiple use-cases. There are so many entry points into a customer with Cohesity. I have written other blogs about the Cohesity use-cases and I suggest you start here if you need to learn more.
One meeting with a large Scandinavian company was especially interesting. They have a graveyard project where they need to archive virtual servers up to 10 years and be able to restore them and retrieve data. File level restore is not enough, they need to be able to quickly spin up systems that consists of 10 virtual servers or more and access the complete system and get the data out. Once the data is retrieved they will shut down the servers and put them back in the archive. Of course with no changes to the data.
They are in the phase of figuring out how to handle this and they invited Cohesity to a meeting to present how we could solve this complex use-case.
We quickly realized that this would be a perfect fit for Cohesity. What we presented was the following:
- Start with a a 2U Cohesity block that consists of 4 Nodes with 96TB of disk capacity. Once they run out of capacity they simply add more nodes 1 by 1. There is no requirement to add 4 nodes at a time. The platform scales infinite.
- Once configured and installed register the vCenter server to the Cohesity platform.
- Create a policy that defines how long to save the data on the platform
- Run a 1-time projection job of the servers that need to go to the graveyard.
The great thing about this is that this is a platform without complexity. Storage and Backup software is all built into the box. The customer only needs to supply the platform with IP addresses and connect it to their 10Gb network infrastructure.
They could at the other end of the spectrum choose to use tape or just some JBOD disks. But a key requirement is the ability to easily access data. And this is where the magic happens.
Cohesity will help the customer achieve the following:
- All data backed up is fully indexed. Google-like search capabilities to find whatever they need
- File level restore available
- Full VM instant restore available
- Use the built in Test / Dev use case to pick as many VMs as they need to instantly spin up a clone of the machines that have been backed up as part of a graveyard project. The customer will be able to spin up an environment of 10 or more virtual machines in as little as 10 seconds! This will provide the customer with the ability to run a complex system at any time they want. They can also use this feature to verify that the systems they have put in the graveyard works as they want.
With these capabilities the customer saw that they were actually getting more than they asked for and the loved it. No longer was it project graveyard – now it was project walking dead
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