Valley Proteins Chooses Cohesity Web-Scale, Hyperconverged Secondary Storage Solution

Cohesity, Inc. announced that Valley Proteins Inc., in creating renewable resources for the development of quality animal and pet feed ingredients, uses Cohesity for easier management, greater scalability, and lower costs for its secondary storage systems.

Valley Proteins wanted to adopt a software-defined data centre architecture that would allow the IT team to better address the company’s growing and evolving needs. Its modern workflows required scalable and flexible solutions, and it would have been difficult and cost prohibitive for the team to continue using the existing EMC solution for primary and secondary storage.

The team deployed flash-based Pure Storage for their primary data workloads and wanted similar benefits of scalability, ease of use, and manageability from their secondary storage platform. With their Dell EMC Data Domain appliance reaching capacity and an upcoming renewal required for Dell EMC Avamar, the team started to evaluate other available options that offered three key benefits: scale-out architecture, lower TCO, and simplified ease of use and management. To adopt a scalable architecture, the team decided to replace the existing system with Cohesity DataProtect to achieve hyperconverged backup and recovery.

Cohesity enabled Valley Proteins to consolidate its backup software and target storage onto one solution. The close integration of Cohesity DataProtect with Pure Storage FlashArray//M offered the team automated tier snapshots and long-term retention capabilities of the virtual and physical servers and MS SQL databases.

By leveraging parallelised data ingestion and storing each backup as a fully hydrated copy on Cohesity DataPlatform, the team reduced its recovery points to under five minutes and achieved near-instantaneous recovery. In fact, Valley Proteins experienced a server fail during the proof of concept, and with Cohesity, the team was able to recover and operationalise the node four times faster than the incumbent solution.

“Cohesity’s scale-out, hyperconverged secondary storage platform allowed us to build a true software-defined data centre,” said Bradley Wilton, IT director, Valley Proteins. “With Cohesity’s DataPlatform and DataProtect, we pulled the intelligence in the software layer and were able to simplify our overall IT operations.“

Using Cohesity, Valley Proteins achieved ease of use and simplified management, scalability, and lower TCO.

Here’s how the company realised each benefit: 

• Ease of use and simplified management: The Cohesity solution comes with a simple interface and dashboard, eliminating the need to manage multiple data silos. By converging backup software, replication, and target storage in one unified solution, Valley Proteins’ IT team simplified secondary data management.
• Scalability: Designed on Cohesity’s web-scale architecture, Valley Proteins can scale-out mixed hardware configurations and generations without complications.
• Lower TCO: The IT team lowered capital expenses by leveraging a hyperconverged platform that is optimised for current storage needs rather than future demands. Cohesity’s simplified management also eliminated the need to invest time and money into specialised training. A simplified user interface helped the team to increase the operator-to-device ratio.

Case study