Unstructured Data Headaches: Finding the Elusive Aspirin

Most organizations have no idea what information they have, what it’s worth and why they store it. This becomes critical when sensitive or regulated data, and who has access to it, is at stake.

“When organizations need to actually find information, it takes too long, costs too much and is either lacking in results or overwhelming in possibilities,” says Marcus Loh, chief technology officer of Cohesity Asia Pacific and Japan. “With different backup solutions, which includes buying more hardware, organizations are just compounding the problem.”

Loh adds that “87% of organizations agree that in the long run, fragmented unstructured data is or will become nearly impossible to manage in the long term. It is a ticking time bomb.”

Yet, it is a problem that is not going to go away anytime soon. Gartner says that “by 2024, enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object storage from what they have in 2019”.

The solution to this mass data fragmentation, according to the Cohesity is to “redefine data management.”

While this term has often been thrown around in data management circles for years, the unique selling point of Cohesity’s solution was how it could bring “Google-like” simplicity to data management.

Leaning on Google Experience

Google has a limitless filing system that scales on-demand.

Sheena Chin, managing director of sales at Cohesity ASEAN, points out that Cohesity CEO and founder, Mohit Aron, was one of the founding architects who designed the Google filing system. Attributed as the ‘father of hyper-convergence’, Aron has spent more than 15 years building scalable, high-performance distributed systems.

A web-scale software-defined data management platform solution that radically simplifies the way companies protect, control and extract value data.

Radically simplifying the way companies protect, control and extract value from their data, Cohesity proposes a web-scale software-defined data management platform solution.

One Data Platform to Rule Them All 

The key to the Cohesity approach, which promises easier cloud integration and 70% reduction in TCO, is collapsing workload silos, eliminating copies and then sharing data efficiently.

The Cohesity DataPlatform is “the only solution built on a hyper-converged, scale-out design.” Designed on similar principles to Google and powered by Cohesity product Span FS, it spans from edge to core and across the public cloud to deliver true global deduplication and storage efficiency.

Only one UI, Cohesity Helios, is required to provide a single view and global management. In concert with Cohesity DataPlatform, the SaaS-based application manages all workloads and data, utilizing cutting edge machine learning algorithms to proactively assess IT needs and automate infrastructure resources.

Cohesity DataProtect provides modern backup and recovery software, implements simple policy-based backup, archiving to public cloud and data recovery with an instant mass restore.

Cohesity MarketPlace adds apps and services from Cohesity as well as third parties.

Backup and recovery: fast-food style

Wendy’s is a Cohesity customer that understands its value. When it experienced a primary storage failure that took the IT team over a week to recover data, it found their legacy backup infrastructure overly burdensome and complex. With 1PB of data to manage and which is growing at about 10% per year, the fast-food chain needed a better solution.

Right off the bat, Cohesity reduced backup times from 12 hours to two. Deploying DataPlatform, DataProtect, and CloudSpin, Cohesity now backs up the entire production environment for Wendy’s, which includes the 1PB of data, approximately 850 Linux and Windows servers and over 700 virtual machines.

Cohesity’s auto-protect technology helped Wendy’s to save more than USD 60,000 per year on CapEx.

“We are pleased Cohesity lived up to our expectations and delivered a next-generation backup and recovery solution for Wendy’s, ensuring the solution is scalable and set up for future growth as we expand more operations and test/dev to the cloud,” says Don Murawski, manager of Wendy’s Servers and Storage.

With administration and management greatly simplified, installation took literally “a matter of minutes.” Cohesity allowed Wendy’s to also free up staff resources, having gained 15 hours per week for staff by removing the need to troubleshoot. The ease of use meant that a dedicated expert administrator was not imperative to manage the platform.

Since deployment, Wendy’s saw 18 times in storage reduction and with a raw capacity of 300TB, Cohesity is now backing up 171TB after deduplication and compression.

Cohesity’s auto-protect technology reduces complexity and cost, giving Wendy’s CapEx savings of more than USD 60,000 per year.

“Before Cohesity, there were some gaps in our disaster recovery plan,” says Murawski. “Now we can spin up data in Cohesity with a few simple clicks and have the resources to restore local backups. Cohesity’s instant mass restore has eliminated roadblocks we had with previous legacy infrastructure, and this has transformed operations at Wendy’s.”

Photo credit: iStockphoto/MangoStar_Studio