Federal clients gain seamless data management and reduced TCO with Cohesity

The Challenge

SEVTECH recently engaged with a federal agency that needed to architect a data management solution to back up a virtualized environment, as well as replicate data to its disaster recovery site for business continuity. SEVTECH was brought in to build a new solution covering 40 branch locations with large data volumes.

Each branch location for the agency manages up to 80 TB of data, and to further complicate the requirements, each site must adhere to the rules and regulations of its particular jurisdiction. Because of this mandate, it was imperative to keep data isolated and secure at each branch location. The agency needed a solution to effectively manage a de-centralized environment with seamless scalability.

The Solution

After considering Cohesity, Commvault and other providers through a Proof of Concept (PoC), SEVTECH recommended Cohesity for a flexible, scalable data management solution. Cohesity won out for its ease of deployment, scalability, ease-of-use, and the ability to quickly restore data at scale. While other vendors didn’t provide the restore capabilities the agency needed, or in some cases, the restore actually failed, Cohesity not only provided reliable data restores, but also had an attractive licensing model.

The agency deployed Cohesity DataProtect for a complete data management solution. In addition to providing backup and recovery, Cohesity also provides NAS file services for its VDI environment, acting as a file server for VDI instances and providing network shares for active directory users.

Since implementation, the agency has expanded its use cases and will consider additional Cohesity features in the near future. Cohesity DataPlatform Virtual Edition has been tested and will deploy to branch office locations once approved. The agency is also testing using Cohesity for replicating data from on-prem to AWS, and once FedRAMP and other requirements are met internally, the agency will use Cohesity’s native integration with AWS Glacier for disaster recovery. SEVTECH is also working with the agency to restore virtual machines from the Nutanix environment onto Cohesity to run in production at an alternative data center while the primary data center is offline.

The Results

Since deploying Cohesity, SEVTECH has seen tremendous results for its client. Compared to the previous legacy solution, time for snapshot recovery was improved by over 25%. Overall backup and recovery times were cut by more than half compared to Commvault.

Cost savings came in multiple ways, including reduced TCO for power and disk space at each branch location. The agency will continue to lower costs as it adopts data archival to the cloud, as well as provide ease-of-management for a reduction in OpEx. Cohesity’s portable licensing model is cost-effective and ahead of its competitors.

The Cohesity solution provides flexibility for data management, giving the agency options for how to manage and restore data. Now that the agency has the ability to restore VMs from its primary storage onto Cohesity, it will allow the IT team to provide business continuity. For example, if a site were to go down, the video footage can be redirected to a VM at another location without having to reconfigure a VM or lose surveillance data. Cohesity allows for data replication to a secondary on-prem data center or to the cloud to ensure data integrity.

“Cohesity was the only data management provider we could identify for our customer that checked all the boxes, and could offer a hyperconverged model that the environment required,” states Venson. “I see Cohesity offering much more than backup and recovery, and that is a huge benefit for our client.”