Copy data management vendors expand breadth of offerings

This roundup of copy management systems from the leading vendors shows the distinct categories and implementation models this cost-saving technology can provide. Copy data management describes the management of information other than what is stored in primary systems. Copy data can be used for data protection purposes, such as snapshots or backups, or to seed test and development environments for ongoing application development. Other uses include testing upgrades of existing applications and using the data for mining or analytics.

As we examine products from the leading copy data management vendors in the marketplace, we can see several distinct categories and implementation models. Some vendors sell physical appliances, including storage. Others sell virtual appliances, either alongside the physical appliance or as the main delivery mechanism. Some products also support public cloud, running instances of the software as a cloud virtual machine (VM).

Most of these products are from startups; however, the breadth of copy data management systems is widening as traditional vendors add more data management features to their platforms. Here, we dig deeper into the products from the six leading copy data management vendors.

Actifio

Actifio Inc. uses a scale-out object store at the heart of its product. Actifio's Virtual Data Pipeline feature ingests data from both virtual and physical platforms. The Actifio Sky platform supports traditional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange and SAP, with additional support for virtual environments, including VMware vSphere.

Sky ingests data at a block level, while still retaining application consistency. After an initial full copy of data is taken, subsequent ingests of incremental data are used to enable the creation of synthetic application images. These are made available through product features that enable instant application mounting, cloning or restoration.

#Cohesity Inc. was founded in June 2013 by @MohitAron, one of the original founders of #Nutanix Inc. The company has taken in $160 million in funding, including $90 million in April 2017.

The underlying Cohesity technology is a scale-out file system that enables a high number of snapshot images and the ability to retrieve data from any image with no impact on performance. Cohesity's software, known as DataPlatform, is available in three forms -- as dedicated hardware appliance nodes and in two software-only versions.

There are currently three hardware nodes available -- a minimum of four per physical server block -- and scaling storage capacity from 6 TB per node of HDD and 800 GB of flash (C2100 model) to 24 TB per node of HDD and 1.6 TB of flash (C2500). CPU performance starts at dual Intel Xeon E5-2603 processors (six-core), scaling to eight E5-2630 eight-core processors. System memory scales from 64 GB to 256 GB.

Cohesity prices its hardware on a per node basis, with all software licenses included.

DataPlatform Virtual Edition enables customers to include Cohesity running on vSphere as part of a remote office/branch office (ROBO)-edge data protection environment. This includes the ability to replicate data into a core data center for additional off-site protection.

Cloud Edition is a cluster-deployed version of the Cohesity software that runs in the public cloud and provides all of the protection and data management benefits of applications running on premises. Data can be replicated between the core and the cloud for off-site protection and to enable features such as data migration.

Unlike products from the other copy data management vendors discussed here, DataPlatform supports a scale-out file system. This means customers can migrate existing file servers or filers to DataPlatform and benefit from a consolidated architecture.

DataPlatform 4.0, released in April 2017, introduced object storage capabilities using the Amazon Simple Storage Service API. It also has the ability to take NAS backups and protect existing file system data with write once, read many protection. Coverage of physical servers and storage has been extended using Pure Storage's FlashArray//M.

Physical and virtual appliances are priced on a per node basis. The company's DataProtect software is licensed by capacity.

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