Pure Storage FlashBlade//E Certified with Commvault Platform

By Marc Mombourquette, senior marketing manager, Pure Storage, Inc.

Pure Storage, Inc. and Commvault Systems, Inc. have certified the FlashBlade//E platform with Commvault software.

When we look at a cross section of the data created by a typical business – of any size, in any vertical, over the course of any time – we see there are certain facts that become universal:

• Data growth exploding: We all have more data. Today’s organizations are using and creating more data from applications, databases, sensors, as well as other sources. 
• We are data dependent: The business environment has become data-centric. Nearly every aspect of the business world relies on data to operate. In many cases, we see that the data created by the company is the most important asset that the company owns.
• Not all data is equal: When a disaster strikes, there are certain sets of data and applications the business needs to get back up and running. Those data sets need to be recovered as soon as possible. Everything else, while important, can wait till the lights are back on.

These universal facts play into why Pure Storage developed the FlashBlade//E line of products.

About FlashBlade//E
FlashBlade//E is a new all-flash capacity-optimized unified file and object storage platform. It was designed to tackle unstructured data repository workloads that remained on disk-based storage systems until now. This storage platform delivers an experience without compromise: simple manageability, massive scalability, density, and environmental sustainability – all at an acquisition price comparable to disk-based solutions with a significantly lower long-term cost of ownership.

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By delivering a more reliable platform that consumes less space, power, and cooling resources, FlashBlade//E delivers lower operational spend, reduces the need for additional administrative resources, and helps shrink your data center footprint. This results in up to 40% lower TCO over 6 years in contrast to comparable disk-based systems.

Why is this important?

Commvault is leader in this space and great partner
It is redefining data protection. It offers a single, unified platform built to secure, defend, and recover data wherever it lives – on-prem, in the cloud, or spread across a hybrid environment. 

Pure Storage and Commvault provide integrated data protection solutions to help your business achieve the future readiness you need, delivering performance, reliability, and scalability. With the 2 companies, user can expect lower TCO and reduced risk through proactive threat detection, integrated security, and native governance and compliance capabilities. Pure Storage all-flash storage arrays paired with Commvault backup and recovery software provide fast data transfer rates, low latency, and recovery outcomes across the broadest set of workloads in the industry. These versatile solutions go beyond just backup and recovery, making your data management more efficient and reducing business risks.

The 2 companies have been partnering together for more than a decade, building high-performance, all-flash data protection solutions together with integrations that deliver protection, performance, and results across the thousands of AFAs of our mutual customers.

Together, they continue to innovate, integrate, and work together to provide the market with better ways to secure, defend, and recover a customer’s most important asset – their data.

Right tool for right application
By using a tiered resiliency backup schema with FlashBlade//S and FlashBlade//E, Commvault customers can create backup policies based on how important their data is – sending their most important data and workloads (things your business can’t operate without) to the performant FlashBlade//S, which delivers near-instant fast recovery speeds.

For all the non-critical data (things that are important enough to back up but aren’t needed to recover the business back to an operational state), you can use the economically FlashBlade//E as a backup repository. And since FlashBlade//E is all-flash, diskless storage, customers can expect better backup and recovery performance than disk, a smaller footprint, lower energy consumption costs, and higher reliability than disk. 

This strategy means a company can invest in the right storage for the right performance that the business needs to recognize better ROI and TCO for their data protection solution. 

Here’s an analogy to illustrate value for this scenario:

• You could move furniture using a 2-seat sports car, but it may make more sense to use a pickup truck instead because it can carry more and doesn’t have a high-performance race car engine. You could use that pickup truck in a race at the racetrack, but the little sports car is going to be the better option since it can go faster, more efficiently than the truck.
• The sports car was designed to go fast and not carry a load of furniture. The pickup truck was designed to carry loads, and while not as fast as the sports car, it’s still plenty fast – just not as fast as the sports car.

FlashBlade//S and FlashBlade//E are similar. The first one delivers performance and near-instant recoveries. The second one can store petabytes of backup data and still recover faster than disk. Used together, customers can create tiered resiliency plans to deliver the optimal uptime, storage economics, and achievable recovery objectives that the business needs.

Additional protection vs. data encryption and destruction
Backup and recovery is all about being able to recover after an outage. 

FlashBlade//E has the ability to create SafeMode Snapshots of the backup data.

Backups protect critical data vs. common problems such as disasters, data corruption, and accidental deletions. But the latest threat facing corporate data is the threat of ransomware and encryption. When an attack occurs, the best and quickest way to recover from an attack is to recover your backups. Protecting those backups from encryption or destruction is essential to being able to recover after an attack.

FlashBlade features SafeMode Snapshots, which are uniquely designed to protect backup metadata. They allow administrators to periodically create read-only snapshots of backup data as immutable secure copies that cannot be deleted by an attacker or administrator. The backup data can be instantly rolled back to any snapshot, preventing malicious or accidental deletion of backup data to enable fast recovery from ransomware attacks and similar events.

Adding SafeMode immutable snapshots to Commvault’s multi-layered security provides an extra level of protection vs. ransomware and cyberattacks. Together, Pure Storage and Commvault secure and proactively defend customers’ data vs. these threats and provide accelerated recoverability using the power of flash, creating tiered resiliency to your data protection strategy.

Having a plan in place before an attack happens is imperative to ensure your data can be back online quickly – a core component of having a tiered resiliency plan. When that plan includes the security, scale, and performance of the 2 companies, you deliver best-in-class recoverability so your business can become more resilient, reduce downtime and data loss, and save time and money.

Together, Commvault with FlashBlade//S for mission-critical data and workloads and FlashBlade//E for backup and recovery repositories creates a complete end-to-end data protection solution that delivers the performance, security, economics, and recoverability needed for today’s data-centric environments. 

Resources:
Pure Storage FlashBlade//E product page
Commvault Data Protection Platform page    
FlashBlade Object Storage   
SafeMode Snapshots