Better Together: HPE and Cohesity

The outcomes our customers are looking to achieve are often met with multiple layers of complexity and compromise to arrive at what is operational for their business. The Data Protection Practice is focused on assisting our clients and OEM partners to develop strategies to make those goals a reality. As you may have seen, we've highlighted what is important to our clients today and the not-too-distant future. 

Our clients are constantly being challenged by the velocity with which their business is embracing workload mobility. In the Data Protection space, and more broadly the IT Operations teams are struggling to operationalize the agility data today. The workload sprawl across multiple Public Cloud services is a deployment model that is just like the more traditional distribution of infrastructure that has challenged our customers for years. The constant for our Data Protection clients is that they are and always will be chasing the data. Where is it going? What is the best method to protect? How do we provide consistency in how we operate?

While IT Operations teams are chasing the data, it is crucial that they partner with vendors that will be simple, flexible, scalable and secure. 

Simple

The simplicity of a solution is embedded in the intelligence and awareness it provides customers. Vendor solutions can accomplish this through their cloud-hosted management platform, such as Cohesity's Helios Platform. Whether it is an improvement in capabilities or resolving bugs, vendors in this model can provide customers the readiness their environments demand. The hyper-converged architecture also aligns with simplicity as it provides an all-inclusive building block for customers to leverage. The platform intelligence is strengthened with Cohesity's partnership with HPE InfoSight for servers that provide a cloud-based analytics tool that can predict and prevent hardware problems before they occur. Extending the simplicity across the IT ecosystem for customers allows the Operations teams to keep their eye on what is coming next. 

Flexible

The flexibility of a platform to support workloads wherever they land is critical. This is realized when extending core data center solutions into remote data centers. This can be a fully virtualized edge solution, or more commonly a dedicated platform that can be scaled down efficiently and still provide enterprise-grade features. As always, vendors' ability to protect core datacenter and high-performance workloads is the highest priority. Cohesity's partnership with HPE Server Platforms demonstrates this flexibility by utilizing the DL360 for remote data centers and all-flash workload support, whereas the Apollo and DL380 platforms are certified for core data centers. Consolidation is happening at the data layer, with disparate file and archive platforms often under-utilized and overlooked. Cohesity's SmartFiles and Archive Service deployed on HPE Apollo servers enable operations teams to further extend the data management platform and reduce complexity. 

Scalable

From a macro perspective, our clients have been diligently working to consolidate their data centers. This effort provides organizations the ability to strengthen their operations by architecting for consistency and simplicity. With transformative projects, our clients are expecting vendors to be able to provide a solution in a metered or cloud-like OPEX-driven consumption model. This is leveraged to justify and research the cost of an environment on-prem as compared to the public cloud offerings. As an example, HPE GreenLake offers customers a cloud-like consumption model for IT infrastructure to support the growth they are experiencing. HPE GreenLake and Cohesity enable enterprises the ability to provide a scalable solution that offers consistent performance, broad workload coverage, and data services designed with a consistent deployment architecture. How vendors architect to scale, critical workload protection capabilities, and the data services offered are not equal in this industry.

Security

Our customers' success with Data Protection is now built on the harsh reality of the success of bad actors and proliferation of ransomware in today's world. We are focused on ensuring our customers embrace a Cyber Resilient strategy, with Data Protection providing the last line of defense for recovering from these events. A data protection solution alone cannot provide customers with a Cyber Resiliency strategy. A data protection solution when integrated as part of a broader strategy on how the business responds and recovers to ransomware events affecting your critical business functions. This strategy is often accomplished in iterative and incremental solutions and functions your organization adopts. 

We would love to host a workshop with your operations team to discuss how WWT and our OEM partners can support your organization. We are working with customers daily to develop comprehensive Data Protection strategies, provide analysis of vendor architectures, and ensure alignment of solutions is built with an understanding of your organization's Cyber Resiliency posture. 

Our Data Protection Practice is tightly integrated with our Advanced Technology Center, offering our clients the ability to run demos instantly, schedule labs, and assist with intensive testing and POCs covering all vendors or the use cases that need exploring. We are always building and expanding our offerings with our OEM partners. If there is something you are interested in exploring, let us know!