Demitasse

One of the central ideas of Hyperconverged and almost any modern IT infrastructure product is simplicity. This simplicity of deployment is great; it delivers fast time to value. Simplicity in operation is even more critical as it keeps the cost of ownership under control. Both converged, and hyperconverged products have simple deployment, a matter of a few hours from hardware delivery to a deployed platform. But they are very different when it comes time to apply updates. Updating a vBlock to a new standard release is a professional services engagement and might takes months to plan and weeks to execute. Most hyperconverged platforms include an updating process that can be initiated by customers and completed in one day, although you should test on a non-production system first. There are businesses replacing fleets of vBlocks with fleets of Hyperconverged clusters to make the updating process simpler. In the Build Day Live event last year with Pure Storage I was very impressed with the ability to update the Purity OS on the array without any downtime for the VMs that were hosted on the array. Equally impressive was the ability to upgrade from one model of the array to a more powerful one without any downtime. Hopefully, your on-premises infrastructure is this easy to update. Today I upgraded my Cohesity Virtual Edition appliance that is protecting my lab environment. It took me under 20 minutes, including the 10 minutes to download the update file from the Cohesity support site, I recorded a video of the process which is here on YouTube. I did test the update on another Cohesity Virtual Edition. Hopefully, I’ll be able to show you replication between those two appliances shortly.

Past Cohesity videos

Cohesity Virtual Edition Deployment Walk Through
Cohesity – Archive and Tier to public cloud
Active Directory Authentication for My Cohesity Cluster

Disclosure: This post is part of my work with Cohesity.

I am continuing to learn about Cohesity and share my learnings with you. This week I added my Cohesity cluster to Active Directory so that I could use AD accounts to manage the platform rather than the built-in account. The process is shown in this video and took all of five minutes to complete. The security model in Cohesity is reasonably straightforward but flexible. Accounts are given a role which defaults to being global but can be filtered to specific objects. There are roles for cluster administrators, backup operators, and backup viewers as well as a couple more that I haven’t investigated. There is also a facility to create custom roles based on your specific security policies. I granted one AD group administrative rights to replace using the admin account and gave another group the operator role so that they could look after data management, but not change the cluster setup. One important thing is to secure the built-in admin account’s password, configuring AD authentication supplements built-in authentication, so the local accounts still exist. Set a complex password and document it in whatever safe location you use for system passwords. Now that the cluster is joined to AD, the login page has a drop-down for domain selection. The delegation of user authentication to Active Directory was quick and easy on my Cohesity cluster.

Past Cohesity videos

Cohesity Virtual Edition Deployment Walk Through

Cohesity – Archive and Tier to public cloud

Disclosure: This post is part of my work with Cohesity.

I am surprised that we do not have more SaaS-based management platforms, ever since Cloud Physics launched in 2013 it has made sense to me that SaaS was a great model for managing infrastructure. All of the usual SaaS benefits apply, the software is always up to date, and that is not the IT team’s problem. But the real genius of Cloud Physics is that they have a vast information warehouse of data about their customer’s environment and can learn from the data to help every customer operate better. Just before VMworld USA, my friends at Cohesity launched their own SaaS management platform called Helios. One aspect of Helios is to unify management of multiple Cohesity clusters, both on-premises and in public cloud. Another aspect is to enable the more intelligent use of the information inside those Cohesity clusters.

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There is definitely a divide between what is possible with on-premises IT infrastructure and what is possible with public cloud services. On-premises infrastructure is finite, dedicated, under our direct control, and paid for up front even if we don’t use it. Public cloud infrastructure is effectively infinite but must be shared with other tenants of the public cloud. We have limited control of public cloud infrastructure, but we only need to pay for what we actually use. These differences mean that most organizations are using a hybrid cloud approach, some IT on-premises and some from one or more public clouds. One of the first infrastructure elements that are outsourced to the public cloud is cold data storage, and it was no coincidence that S3 was one of the first services that AWS offered. The two usual initial adoption models are tape replacement and tiering. Both these adoptions models treat cloud storage as an extension of on-premises backup storage.

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I’ve just started working with Cohesity and have made a video of my first deployment of the Cohesity DataPlatform Virtual Edition. I had been through the OVA deployment and configuration, but this was my first ever hands-on time with the Cohesity UI, and I had not watched or read any other walk-through. I was impressed, I deployed the appliance, backed up two VMs and completed one whole VM restore, and two file level restores in under an hour elapsed time. The video is about half that length; I sped up quite a few places where I was waiting for data movement. You can find the video here on my Notes for Engineers YouTube channel.

I was impressed that the user interface is straightforward to work with and is focused on routine tasks, protection and recovery are both front and center. The opening screen after logging onto the appliance has plenty of useful information for at-a-glance status and health.

In the coming months, I will spend quite a bit more time with the Cohesity product, learning and sharing what I learn with you. I do want to spend some time looking at the data management features and how Public Cloud is impacting the use of products like Cohesity.

Disclosure: This post is part of my work with Cohesity.

There seems to be a fashion to rename your backup product as a data management product. I think that there are significant differences between data protection and data management, some products are not merely being renamed but are fundamentally different. I think it is worthwhile identifying the difference between products that are made for data protection and those that were designed from the start for data management. As always happens, I expect marketing departments to jump on-board the new name even when it is not within the capabilities of their products.

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