Cloud makes it easy to spin up environments when you need them and then shut them down when you don’t. This makes them the ideal low-cost site for dev and test environments, which are often needed for just a few weeks or months.
That’s a big benefit as far as hardware and software go, but there’s one more piece needed for a complete dev or test environment that the cloud provider can’t give you: the data. For dev and test to be complete and realistic, they often need to use a copy of real production data.
Unfortunately, getting those data copies often introduces delays that wipe away the agility of the cloud environment. The developers or QA team usually need to request a copy of the data; they don’t have access to it themselves, so there’s a delay until the administrators have time to get the data and make a copy of it. Then comes the challenge of migrating it into the cloud environment securely and making sure all the necessary data protection is in place. There are often data format conversions needed or issues due to incompatible virtual machines that need to be resolved. The DevOps process can slow to a crawl.
New functionality offered by Cohesity focuses on eliminating this delay and streamlining the process for getting data from backups into the cloud for dev and test use.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Secondary Workloads
Hyperconverged infrastructure provides easily expandable configurations of compute and storage capacity. Cohesity distinguishes itself from other hyperconverged infrastructure providers with its focus on secondary storage. Its devices allow analytics jobs directly on the device, without needing to make additional copies of the data. The Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition enables use of public cloud for data archiving and data tiering through replication to the cloud. Deduplication and data encryption mean data is minimized and protected.
Cohesity for Development and Test (and Production, too!)
With CloudSpin, Cohesity adds support for copying data to the cloud for dev and test, not just backup. Rather than waiting for a data backup to be loaded and handed over to them, developers have self-service access to transfer data backed up on Cohesity DataPlatform to the cloud. Policy-based controls ensure data is still protected. The on-premises virtual machines are converted to the necessary cloud formats for immediate use. CloudSpin can also be used to transfer data and virtual machines from the dev/test environment in the cloud back onsite to speed setting up the production environment.
The development work in the cloud needs to be backed up and protected, too, and Cohesity provides snapshot APIs ensuring that data in the cloud benefits from the same protection offered by Cohesity in your onsite data center.
For businesses struggling to achieve the agility promised by cloud development, Cohesity CloudSpin offers a solution to the challenge of developer access to data. Contact dcVAST to learn more about how you can leverage Cohesity to improve your developer and QA process.
