Secondary storage. The name makes it seem less important than primary workloads, less deserving of focused attention. That lack of focus means that secondary storage can become a primary challenge for data center operations teams. Secondary storage ends up using a mix of storage infrastructure, everything from tape to hard disk drives to solid state drives to cloud storage. That makes managing secondary storage and leveraging the data on those devices a major challenge.
The Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has brought major benefits to the data center, simplifying network, compute, and storage management into a single, scalable, software-defined component. Most of those benefits have been applied to primary workloads. But the hyperconverged infrastructure from firms like Cohesity allow companies to leverage the benefits of HCI for their secondary workloads and secondary storage as well.
Secondary workloads are actually the bulk of the processing and infrastructure in most data centers. Besides being difficult to manage, the disparate technologies used result in data silos and inefficient use of the resources. HCI for secondary storage promises to break down those silos, provide efficient use of resources, and streamline the management.
Making Data Easy to Use As Well As Manage
While data protection is a key secondary storage service, that shouldn’t mean the data is lying there inert and unusable. Cohesity’s secondary storage platform makes the data in secondary storage readily available for use in workloads like analytics, development, and test, minimizing copy data sprawl and supporting DevOps practices. No matter the use case, the data can be accessed from the same device.
The platform also integrates directly with cloud services, making data archived in the cloud as searchable and usable as data stored on-site and taking advantage of the cloud’s infinite capacity to expand the storage required as needed. Direct integration with Pure Storage FlashArray means that primary and secondary storage work together to make sure snapshots are accessible and protected.
The flexibility of HCI for secondary storage provides companies with a flexible stepping-stone to a hybrid cloud model of computing, offering the ability to easily move data between their premises and cloud environments. With the ability to dynamically relocate data, processing can always occur in the most appropriate processing environment.
Although hyperconverged secondary storage is easily scalable, this easy expandability doesn’t mean out-of-control growth. The ease of integration with cloud and primary storage means a reduction in data sprawl, along with a reduction in the operational and management challenges.
Integrate Hyperconverged Secondary Storage Into Your Hybrid Cloud
By using hyperconverged secondary storage, companies gain access to the true benefit of the hybrid cloud: the flexibility to use data whererever and whenever it’s needed without complex management overhead. dcVAST’s offers the Cohesity hyperconverged secondary storage platform as well as managed Amazon Web Services and Nutanix and NetApp hybrid cloud solutions, enabling us to develop customized hybrid cloud configurations that support your primary and secondary workloads effectively. Contact us to learn more about hyperconverged secondary storage and discover if it should be a primary component of your storage infrastructure.
