DataSpring 2020 Enabling TCO Reduction: Simplicity is Tangible by Cohesity March 24, 2020 written by Cohesity March 24, 2020 304 A reduction in infrastructure total cost of ownership can mean lowered expenses as well as corollary advantages: increased employee productivity, agility, and time savings. The benefits are clear. Charting a path to it is more ambiguous. By definition, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is the purchase price of an asset plus the costs of operation. Assessing the total cost of ownership represents taking a broader look at what problem we’re solving, the solution, and the solution’s efficacy over time. Buyers need to look beyond the short-term price, or purchase price, and understand the long-term price. In other words, conversations revolving around TCO reduction need to factor in the core element of TCO analysis: the effectiveness of a solution in addressing the most impactful requirements. The Costs of Complexity With data management, particularly in data protection, IT leaders need to look for a solution that has a curtailed number of components and increases administrator efficiency. A solution that supports TCO reduction initiatives is one that reduces silos and addresses fundamental pain points that users face. This is how you optimize TCO efficacy: solve user needs while thwarting complexity. With Cohesity, customers report a dramatically reduced TCO. Alongside decreased costs, they’re seeing multiple hours saved weekly, freeing up their team to focus on impactful, overarching KPIs, in contrast to managing infrastructure components. Legacy solutions revolve around the latter and are comprised of multiple point elements, leading to data fragmentation across silos. As a result, managing backup and recovery is not only hard—it’s expensive. Cohesity simplifies backup and recovery with a single software-defined solution, and collapsing silos in the process. Simplicity Has its Benefits Cohesity simplifies infrastructure, and reduces TCO, in a number of ways. The principal advantages of Cohesity are: Consolidation of multiple, single-point solutions — media servers, master servers, target storage, and cloud gateways — on one software-defined solution Simplified global management with one UI Dramatically reduced data footprint with global variable length, sliding window, deduplication and compression Non-disruptive upgrades that increase uptime and reduce management time These advantages all support a narrative built around simplicity: simplified infrastructure and simplified management. Simplicity is directly responsible for reducing costs and the time needed for management. Simplicity is tangible. Customers are seeing a ripple effect of value creation, experiencing quantifiable benefits: Decreased management time — freeing up your team’s time to focus on more strategic initiatives Decreased data footprint — allowing you to do more with less A Productivity Time Machine Large customers look for simplified operations and lower costs. With massive workloads under management, many customers need a modern approach to data management. Schneider Electric manages approximately 300TB of data, growing at 12% per year, with many applications and workloads shifting to the cloud. Schneider Electric’s production environment encompasses 28 sites, with >1600 VMs under management. There are a number of components and a massive dataset, increasing room for complexity. The biggest complaint from IT was the complexity within their legacy backup infrastructure. Legacy solutions put a strain on management time and costs. With the incumbent infrastructure, a full backup took more than 40 hours, and backup storage and maintenance costs were more than $20K per year. For Schneider Electric, the answer was simple: they needed a new solution. In defining a new solution, Schneider Electric’s requirements were clear: Enterprise-class backup and recovery with strong performance and a lower TCO Simplified management and administration for a hybrid-cloud environment The ability to migrate off legacy backup file storage Seamless management of remote site data protection Schneider Electric chose Cohesity to satisfy their needs, and they’re seeing dramatic results: CapEx and OpEx savings of >$60K per year Data recovery times reduced by over 70% A data reduction rate of 20x, owing to global, variable-length deduplication and compression A gain of multiple hours per week, owing to faster backup times and native integrations with the leading public clouds With Cohesity, beyond significant financial and storage benefits, Schneider Electric was able to eliminate time spent on maintenance and troubleshooting. Modern solutions don’t just dole out a list of features—they identify and address the most impactful needs of their users. For Schneider Electric, Cohesity provided the most impactful benefit: time. Smaller Footprint, Bigger Savings Other customers benefit from dramatic space savings. Cohesity curtails space utilization by leveraging global, variable-length deduplication and compression. Many customers are able to do more—store more of their data and leverage data for a competitive advantage—on less storage. AutoNation is one of these customers. AutoNation manages over 1.2PB of data. As a result of relying on legacy solutions for data protection, managing this amass of data is not trivial. AutoNation’s IT team experienced a gamut of challenges at an alarming cadence, including up to 6,000 backup failures per month which required a dedicated staff member, solely for troubleshooting. AutoNation strived for their next infrastructure solution to provide: A web-scale architecture with a predictable cost model The ability to protect, store, and manage data with a next-generation solution Capabilities beyond modern backup and recovery Single pane of glass management with a hybrid, multi-cloud approach After using Cohesity to manage their data, AutoNation substantially enhanced operational capabilities, improved reliability, decreased management complexity, and lowered its TCO. With Cohesity, AutoNation saved more than 60 percent compared with SAN, owing to a dramatically smaller data footprint. They were able to manage a large, and growing, volume of data using less than half of the storage footprint required by other solutions. A Consistent Theme Customers in a myriad of sectors are all experiencing the benefits of Cohesity—a decreased data footprint, greater productivity, and reduced TCO. The underlying factor is simplicity spurred from the adoption of a modern, holistic solution. As seen from Schneider Electric and AutoNation, simplicity can be visible, quantifiable, and tangible. Learn more about the tangible benefits of Cohesity by reading the stories of more customers who have saved with Cohesity: Read how XO Communications, a Verizon company, not only reduced its TCO by 60% but was also able to leverage backup data for accelerating development and testing. Learn how Vita Group saved over $500k and reduced management time by 3x. Discover how Piedmont Healthcare saved 40% in CapEx and freed up 60% of its storage capacity with Cohesity deduplication — all at one-fifth the time. Srini Sekaran is a Product Marketing Manager at Cohesity, leading dev/test and data protection for databases. Previously, he was in software engineering and product management roles at several organizations, including NASA, Cisco, and AMD. He writes about product, marketing, and technology at srinisekaran.com. Follow him on Twitter @srinisekaran. Read the Special Announcement… Making the Distributed Data Center a Reality with Cohesity DataPlatform for Edge Cohesity announces a new solution that extends and enhances its enterprise-class capabilities for the enterprise edge, empowering organizations to seamlessly manage data within remote office/branch office (ROBO) locations with a single software-defined platform. This is the industry’s first ROBO solution that combines backup and recovery, file and object services, and cloud archival on certified servers from key alliance partners. This gives customers more choice in deployment options at the enterprise edge. It’s no secret that Cohesity is known to be a pioneer in recognizing the issue of mass data fragmentation in enterprises and also providing a solution to this pervasive problem. The issue is further exacerbated by the fact that data is being created faster than ever and will only continue to grow exponentially across the data center, public cloud and the edge. In fact, the massive rise of the enterprise edge data is another proof point of this trend. A recent study conducted by Gartner found that around 10 percent of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud. By 2025, Gartner predicts this figure will reach 75 percent of all data, highlighting the importance of data management at the enterprise edge. Now let’s talk about a specific subset of enterprise edge data—remote and branch offices or ROBO. A recent ESG survey of enterprises found that a whopping 80 percent of ROBO locations have no dedicated/qualified IT resources. It also found that over 30 percent of the enterprises surveyed mentioned local data backup as a significant ROBO challenge. backup is just one of the data management concerns at ROBO locations. Mobility, security, visibility, and ease of managing this data are some of the other issues that keep IT management up at night. ROBO locations are even more vulnerable to external cybersecurity threats as they may not have the same level of data security and defense measures that are deployed at the core data center. All of these issues underscore the importance of data management at ROBO locations and the need for an enterprise-class solution optimized for ROBO. Existing point solutions available today are not without their shortcomings and limitations. Firstly, point solutions being used today at ROBO locations are either too limited in functionality and more suited for small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) environments, or are over-configured and too ‘high-maintenance’ for ROBO locations which already have few or no skilled IT resources. Secondly, given these are point solutions, they add to the problem of mass data fragmentation. And finally, they are complex to manage and require dedicated skilled resources, which also adds to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Granted there are virtual appliances that mitigate some of these issues, but the higher data resiliency and ‘low-touch’ solution that customers need are not fulfilled by a virtual appliance. We at Cohesity believe that enterprises should not have to be forced to choose between good-enough and over-kill approaches to protecting and managing their ROBO data. Which is why we are excited to announce that we are extending and enhancing our current data management offerings for the enterprise edge with a new plug-and-play physical appliance optimized for enterprise ROBO locations. The new solution combines Cohesity software with certified 1U1N servers from our key technology partner Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) and is available through their go-to-market channels. The joint solution is designed for quick and easy installation and offers enterprises the same functionality at ROBO locations that they rely upon in the data center. This is the industry’s first solution to combine backup and recovery, file and object services, and data migration for archival, replication, and tiering in a single platform that is optimized for ROBO locations and continues to extend the power of modern data management to more customers. With the new Cohesity ROBO appliance, large enterprises with numerous branch locations, such as retailers, chain restaurants, gas stations and rental car agencies can seamlessly manage data within their ROBO locations with a single software-defined platform—the same web-scale platform that many organizations use today to manage data across existing data center and cloud environments. Available in 4TB and 8TB usable capacity, the ROBO appliance will include Cohesity DataPlatform Standard Edition and Cohesity DataProtect preloaded on HPE ProLiant DL 360 Gen 10 rack server. Below are the detailed software and hardware specifications for both these options: The new HPE ROBO appliance powered by Cohesity gives customers an added choice of deployment option of Cohesity DataPlatform for Edge. Customers can choose the new appliance-based option when they want a dedicated, plug-and-play device or go for the existing software-only option of Cohesity DataPlatform Virtual Edition running on an existing hypervisor environment. Every customer has unique requirements but the guidance below might help you select the right option: No matter which deployment option you choose, Cohesity DataPlatform for Edge dramatically simplifies data management and protection at remote and branch office locations by consolidating backup, recovery, file services and object storage on a single software-defined solution. It allows easy, policy-based data mobility to the core and leading public cloud providers for long-term archival, replication and tiering. Cohesity DataPlatform for Edge allows flexible granular recovery, to any point in time, significantly reduced data footprint and WAN bandwidth utilization from remote sites with global variable-length, sliding-window dedupe and compression. Enjoy peace of mind with Cohesity’s integrated cybersecurity against ransomware with immutable file system, DataLock (WORM), data encryption, early anomaly detection with Cohesity Helios machine learning and instant mass restore. And last but not least, easily manage all your non-latency sensitive data and applications with a single, easy-to-navigate user interface across core, cloud and edge. We are excited to continue our journey of redefining data management, one ROBO location at a time, and look forward to making our customers a part of this journey. To learn more, visit the Cohesity DataPlatform for Edge product page on Cohesity.com Other Useful Resources: Press Release Blog Datasheet Cohesity-HPE solutions webpage The new ROBO appliance is now Generally Available and can be procured through HPE and its channel partners. Nikitha Omkar is an experienced B2B product marketing professional, managing HPE solutions marketing at Cohesity. Previously she held various marketing and sales roles at Cisco, Avaya and Brillio (a silicon-valley startup). She is passionate about simplifying technology and is always exploring new and innovative ways to make technology relevant, consumable and exciting for everyone! Follow her on Twitter @nikiomkar. ConnectConvergeDataSpring2020 0 comment 0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail Cohesity Cohesity ushers in a new era in data management that solves a critical challenge facing businesses today: mass data fragmentation. The vast majority of enterprise data — backups, archives, file shares, object stores, and data used for dev/test and analytics — sits in fragmented infrastructure silos that make it hard to protect, expensive to manage, and difficult to analyze. Cohesity consolidates silos onto one web-scale platform, spanning on-premises, cloud, and the edge, and uniquely empowers organizations to run apps on that platform — making it easier than ever to back up and extract insights from data. Cohesity is a 2019 CNBC Disruptor and was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Visit our website and blog, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and like us on Facebook. previous post Is the US Ready for Centralized Data Privacy Enforcement? next post Crystal Point: The NonStop Connectivity Bunch You may also like To bring strategy back into your security, turn... December 6, 2021 Getting Started with Data-centric Security December 6, 2021 HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform brings the cloud to... December 6, 2021 Democratization of AI in the Enterprise December 6, 2021 Getting the most from your data-driven transformation: 10... December 6, 2021 How to Safeguard Your Data & Applications from... 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