Primary Storage
Primary storage is mainly defined by its use case. It’s the data most frequently accessed by applications. It’s typically the data accessed using the highest throughput available on the network. The media used for the storage will often by the fastest storage type, such as solid-state drives (SSDs) either entirely or in combination with traditional hard disks. Primary storage is used for mission critical data.
Secondary Storage
Due to the enormous growth of data across all businesses, secondary storage is starting to become more important in the enterprise. What differentiates secondary storage from primary storage is largely the SLA. Data stored in secondary storage doesn’t have mission critical SLA requirements. Because of this, secondary storage can drive more efficiency and productivity.
Today’s enterprise storage landscape is going through a substantial disruption. And a big part of this change is the recognition of secondary storage as a separate category in the overall landscape. Traditionally, most storage vendors focused on primary storage that would meet the needs of production applications. However, organizations are starting to realize that approximately 70 percent of their storage capacity is consumed by secondary workloads.
Secondary Storage Opportunities
What has started out as backup and disaster recovery needs for secondary storage has grown to development and test instances, archives, unstructured content, analytics, data warehousing, and more. Today, organizations are looking for ways to get better use out of all of this data in a simpler, more effective way.
Because the SLAs on secondary workloads are not as stringent as they are on primary, mission critical data, secondary storage is able to offer improved efficiency. With secondary storage, organizations can enable global deduplication, snapshots, clones for immediate recovery, and indexing of the data for instant search.
While filming our latest RoadCast video series, we met with Cohesity to learn more about evolving storage landscape.
Secondary Workloads
In Orion 5.0, Cohesity’s fifth generation of its software, the underlying file system allows organizations to incorporate and run secondary workloads more effectively. The new file system, called SpanFS, spans nodes, on-premises and cloud infrastructures, and workloads. What’s unique about it is that it provides web-scale type performance.
It supports distributed snapshots and clones, so copies of data can be easily performed for backup, DevTest, and other scenarios. It’s also globally deduplicated, which means it’s very efficient, and it’s also multiprotocol, so data can be accessed via any Ethernet-based protocol.
The added advantage of Cohesity’s secondary storage is that it can extend to the cloud, which isn’t always easy for enterprises to accomplish. The benefit is that Cohesity’s platform is software defined.
Cloud Integration
We met with Sai Mukundan, Product Manager at Cohesity, to learn more about their cloud integration and what it means for customers. The company’s platform connects seamlessly to public cloud storage and services to enable hybrid cloud environments.
Mukundan discusses the three major areas and use cases their customers are looking at incorporating cloud storage. Mukundan also covers the networking aspects of connecting secondary storage to the cloud and how the integration is handled.
Check out the video to learn more about Cohesity’s cloud integration for secondary storage.
Mohit Aron Talks About Accelerating Growth
In a separate video, we spoke with Cohesity’s Founder and CEO, Mohit Aron, who shared some of the success stories, metrics and company highlights. 2017 has been a stellar year for Cohesity, with 600 percent revenue growth both nationally and internationally, along with a huge company expansion across all departments. In the video, Aron also shares some of the major awards Cohesity has earned in recent months and the company’s plans for next year.
Watch the short video to learn more about where the company is headed in the near future.
This post was provided by guest blogger Scott D. Lowe, Co-Founder of ActualTech Media where he serves as Senior Content Editor and Strategist. Scott is an enterprise IT veteran with more than twenty years experience in senior and CIO roles across multiple organizations.
