The public cloud has enabled enterprises to increase their agility and bring applications and services to market faster. It’s no wonder that the cloud is becoming the natural destination for application development initiatives that are central to digital transformation. We’ve seen customers struggle with two challenges in application test and development.
1) Data Copies Cause Inefficiency in Application Test & Development
Application owners and developers typically have to wait days or even weeks to get data that they can use for test/dev purposes. Let’s think about the cycle. A developer needs a set of production data to test a new application. Backups are a perfect solution as they run regularly and capture the production data. However, a developer can’t use the data from the backup target storage directly. Backups today are strictly an insurance policy and tend to stay idle when not in use.
If you’re in IT and storage, you’re experiencing this pain. You are asked by a developer for a set of data. So you have to provision a new set of storage, or re-provision an existing set. At one time, there was even a whole category of product that was developed to solve this problem – called copy data management. In either case, this is time-consuming, inefficient, and expensive. Additionally, on-premises backups can’t easily be used for test/dev in the cloud. Many organizations are using the cloud for test/dev, but there is VM format incompatibility between on-premises and the cloud. Yet another headache.
2) Lack of Enterprise-Grade Backups Impede Application Test and Development in the Cloud
Many organizations are working now to develop native applications in the cloud. But with this comes new questions about how well protected they are, specifically do existing approaches to backup work well? Is having custom scripts a scalable solution? Does the process for managing snapshots work? The answer is likely no.
Cohesity Accelerates Application Test and Development
Today we’re excited to announce two new cloud capabilities that will help you accelerate your application test and development initiatives, while keeping your data protected. Let’s dive into the details of how we’re solving each of the problems above in a simple, elegant way that reduces operational overhead and manual processes.
Accelerating Test and Development with Cohesity CloudSpin
Cohesity CloudSpin is a new capability in Cohesity DataPlatform, which accelerates your test/dev initiatives in the cloud. With CloudSpin you can:
- Eliminate expensive copies of data: You don’t have to make multiple copies of data to enable your application development teams. Developers can utilize on-premises backup data in the cloud with CloudSpin.
- Convert on-premises VMs to appropriate cloud formats: Format issues across on-premises and the cloud impede true application mobility. Making this process easy and seamless is where CloudSpin shines.
- Provision data for test/dev in the cloud: Spinning VMs up instantly in the cloud is a key requirement for more agile test/dev. Once the test/dev process in the cloud is done, the VM can be brought down. CloudSpin makes this very easy to do based on idle backup data from on-premises.
- Consistent manageability: Having a consistent management approach to manage both on-premises and cloud backup simplifies administration and reduces TCO. Cohesity DataPlatform provides that across both on-premises and the public cloud.
Ensuring Application Test & Development in the Cloud is Protected Natively with Snapshot APIs
Integration with the snapshot APIs of the public cloud providers ensures that you can benefit from the same world class data protection capabilities in the cloud with Cohesity as you have on-premises. With this integration you can:
- Automate backup of cloud applications: Backup of cloud applications today involves using a mix of custom and homegrown scripts. The process of managing snapshots is not trivial either. There is no easy way to know which snapshots exist and which should be retired, among other things. Integration with native snapshot APIs helps alleviate these issues and introduces more automation by leveraging tags available in the public cloud providers.
- Reduce time spent on manual administration with growth in cloud VMs: VMs are constantly getting added or removed based on changing needs, so there needs to be a more intelligent way to manage this process. Auto-discovery and Auto-protect capabilities in Cohesity DataProtect can now be used for cloud native backup and greatly streamline administration.
With these new capabilities we’re enabling idle backup data to be easily used in the cloud for test/dev, allowing that data to be protected natively in the cloud and moving it back to on-premises for promoting to production. You can benefit from a single solution for both test/dev and backup that allows you to accelerate your application test and development in the cloud.
You can find more information on this solution or our other cloud solutions here. These new capabilities are another step towards our vision of enabling multiple secondary data use cases on a single platform.
