How Cohesity Made Long-Term Data Retention and Archival Simple

How Cohesity Made Long-Term Data Retention and Archival Simple With Cohesity CloudArchive and CloudArchive Direct

Data is the lifeblood of every business. But with ever-growing data and its archival, compliance requirements, along with the need to protect it from ransomware vulnerabilities, enterprises are forced to reevaluate long-term retention (LTR) strategies.

Challenges

1. Inefficient Legacy LTR Solutions

   Because legacy LTR solutions such as tape archives are unreliable and time-consuming, they are a thing of the past. The inflexible archival process of storing and handling tape media is tedious and cost-intensive. With exponential data growth, today’s organizations require a next-gen data management solution that provides faster and more flexible archival that can easily scale up to petabytes of storage.

2. High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

   

   Although initial archival cost is low in tape media, eventually as data grows, the capital and operational costs also rise because the staff is required to manage the entire archival and retrieval process. Enterprises want smarter archival solutions that can reduce the data transfer time and cost. They also need more intelligent ways to tier data to cheaper alternative locations such as cloud storage.

   TCO Comparison	TCO for Storing 100 TB of Data Over a Period of 5 Years ($)
   Tape	$150,000	Includes tape cost, maintenance and support cost, encryption license cost, workforce cost, and infrastructure cost
   Cloud (AWS S3)	$120,000	Yearly data storage and retrieval cost, network cost, and API cost

3. Slow and Cumbersome Recovery

   

   Recovering data from legacy LTR is a nightmare. No global indexing is available with tape media to swiftly search and find the granular data that needs to be recovered. In the new world, customers are looking for LTR  solutions that provide faster and more granular recovery of data without much tending and supervision.

4. Need for Data Immutability

   

   In this data-driven world, threats to backup and archival security are on the rise. Customers are now looking beyond basic archival needs to the immutable storage of data in the cloud, which has become an absolute necessity.

Cohesity’s Next-Gen Archiving Capabilities

Cohesity’s next-gen data management platform solves all these challenges and provides a lot more features with its modern archiving capabilities, CloudArchive and CloudArchive Direct.

CloudArchive

• Recommended for LTR use case when a local copy of data is needed
• A full copy of data and metadata is stored on Cohesity as well as on the external target

Cohesity CloudArchive first backs up your data, metadata, and index onto a Cohesity cluster and then copies your backups to an external target—object storage from cloud vendors, S3-compatible storage, or NFS-mounted storage.

You can use CloudArchive if you have aggressive Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for data recovery, as CloudArchive offers nearly instant recovery of your data, by either recovering a complete storage volume to a Cohesity View (storage volume) or recovering selected files and folders.

CloudArchive Direct

• Recommended for LTR use cases when a local copy of data is not needed
• Only index and metadata get stored on Cohesity

Cohesity’s CloudArchive Direct solution provides an efficient and innovative approach by streaming your data directly into lower-cost cloud storage without having to store a copy locally. The solution allows you to search and restore seamlessly while reducing TCO by storing only the metadata and index on the Cohesity cluster.

Key Benefits of Next-Gen Cloud Archive Solutions

Built keeping simplicity in mind, Cohesity’s user interface helps you archive data instantly to multiple targets. Simplifying the archival process with just a few clicks, you can set and instantly change policies according to your archival and regulatory requirements.

Incremental Forever Archival

Incremental forever archival operations eliminate the need for periodic full archival of data and metadata and increase the space efficiency in the external target.

Global Deduplication and Improved Efficiency

Cohesity archival solutions provide global deduplication across workloads and reduce cloud storage footprints. Along with change block tracking and compression, only the necessary data is sent to the cloud for archival to further reduce data transfer costs as well as improve archival and retrieval times.

Data Movement (Lifecycle Management)

The data movement option included with protection policies allows Cohesity clusters to directly manage down tiering of data in the cloud. Cohesity provides efficiency and cost savings by landing archive data on faster cloud storage access tiers initially and then moving that data to slower and lower-cost storage access tiers.

As data gets older, the chance of recovering from older snapshots goes down. Most of the operational-level recoveries are done from the latest snapshots. Hence, Cohesity stores metadata, index, and latest snapshots always in the higher tier for faster recovery.

Rapid Granular Search and Recovery

Faster search and retrieval of data from public clouds make data more useful to businesses. Cohesity’s global search and world-class indexing engine provide enterprises with instant access to data archived in the public cloud. The built-in Search & Indexing capability allows restoring a single file/folder or a combination of them. Cohesity’s recovery options allow you to recover the data through the same source cluster.

Cohesity always stores all archive jobs as self-contained copies in the cloud. Even if the source cluster is unavailable, you can still recover the archived data through a new cluster with the Cloud Retrieve capability.

Write Once, Read Many (WORM) Support

Cohesity CloudArchive also supports the WORM model to ensure the data written onto the targets is immutable (cannot be deleted or overwritten) for the period configured by the user. With WORM capability, Cohesity ensures that your valuable archived data can counter ransomware attacks by preventing them from encrypting, modifying, or deleting the data which is stored in Cohesity as well as in the cloud.

Efficient Space Reclamation

Cohesity’s intelligent archival engine identifies the partially expired data and efficiently reclaims that space on the external target, thus reducing your data storage cost in the public cloud. Cohesity uses intelligent algorithms and automated lightweight serverless computing to reclaim the storage and reduce your TCO.

Next-Gen Archiving Delivers Better Results

With Cohesity’s next-gen cloud archive solutions, you will extract maximum benefits from cloud storage. The organizations that have modernized their archival strategy with Cohesity’s CloudArchive and CloudArchive Direct solutions have significantly reduced backup times, long-term storage costs, and operational overhead.