Cohesity today announced a new application called
Cohesity Runbook.
Cohesity Runbook provides organizations with a new automation design
canvas that makes it incredibly simple and formulaic for enterprises to
move workloads systematically between on-premises data centers and the
public cloud - a critical need as more and more organizations rely on
the cloud for everything from dev/test to security to disaster recovery.
The Cohesity Runbook application, available through the Cohesity Marketplace,
automates the process of moving workloads from on-premises servers to
the cloud. The application provides administrators with a graphical
design canvas that they can use to drag, drop, and design automation
workflows so that the right sequences happen in the right order as
workloads are moved from one location to another. Cohesity Runbook also
provides APIs to allow administrators to integrate with their preferred
infrastructure-as-code automation tools so they can continue to use
familiar tools while taking advantage of the benefits of the
application.
This
is a major leap forward from the time-consuming and complex process
that some administrators face trying to seamlessly move workloads to the
cloud. For example, if administrators decide to move data to the cloud
for disaster recovery, they often have to deal with incompatible virtual
machine formats and a host of manual processes, scripts, dependencies,
and boot sequences within a constrained time frame. Even worse, if one
step is performed incorrectly, the workloads will likely not launch
properly. The Cohesity Runbook application can quickly spin up new
environments and eliminate the risk of problems caused by manual setup
errors.
Cohesity Runbook builds on the company's modern data management capabilities. Organizations already utilize Cohesity DataProtect to
easily back up their data. Now, Cohesity is giving enterprises an easy
way to move that data to the cloud, in an automated and orchestrated
fashion. Customers can manage both their on-premises and cloud
infrastructure through Cohesity DataPlatform. Cohesity Runbook gives customers another way to make their backup data productive.
Technology Unveiled as Cloud-Based Storage is Set to Increase Rapidly and Dramatically
The
need for easy and reliable processes to move workloads between
locations has grown as enterprises increasingly rely on cloud
infrastructure. A recent survey commissioned
by Cohesity found that 98 percent of respondents expect that their
organization's public cloud-based storage to increase by 93 percent on
average between 2018 and the end of 2019. Additionally, 45 percent of
respondents say their IT teams are already spending 30 to 70 percent of
their day managing all of their organization's secondary data and apps
infrastructure across all public cloud environments.
"The
complexity and manual tasks associated with moving workloads to the
cloud is a critical challenge for enterprises that want to take a modern
approach to their infrastructure, and without the right automated
tools, the problem is just going to get worse," said Raj Rajamani, vice
president of products, Cohesity. "The Cohesity Runbook application gives
IT administrators the ability to create their own precise, step-by-step
blueprint that makes it easy for their organizations to take advantage
of the cloud for application migration and failover."
Propelling Disaster Recovery with Modern Data Management
Many
organizations realize they must prepare for an outage, whether that is a
single server failure or complete site disaster. Instead of maintaining
a costly alternate data center, the cloud can be the ideal place to
failover during these unexpected incidents. However, failover and
failback can be quite challenging, especially in hybrid cloud
environments. Now, with Cohesity Runbook, disaster recovery becomes
seamless as the application solves cloud incompatibility and manual
process issues that can be very challenging to manage, and businesses
can stay up and running for the duration of the outage.
"Workload
migration will become an easier and more reliable process with the
Cohesity Runbook application," said Don Murawski, manager, servers and
storage, Wendy's. "The application will cut down our recovery times and
will save us from troubleshooting new environments. We're also excited
about Cohesity developing a Runbook automation template for future use
cases."
Cohesity
Runbook currently supports disaster recovery and cloud workload
migrations for virtual machines (VMs) to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Other public clouds will be supported in the coming quarters. Cohesity
will also evaluate other use cases beyond disaster recovery for
automation through Cohesity Runbook.
"Infrastructure
automation and the intelligent management of data will become much more
a reality with Cohesity Runbook," said Christophe Bertrand, senior
analyst, ESG Research. "Not only does it automate manual steps and solve
complex challenges associated with disaster recovery and moving
workloads to the cloud, but it also provides a foundation to create
automation templates whether you need a separate environment for
developers or a sandbox environment to quarantine and test for security
threats."
In summary, Cohesity Runbook includes several unique features:
- True Hybrid Cloud Support:
Most solutions only support orchestration that moves workloads between
two on-premises locations, but Cohesity provides direct orchestration
and failover of workloads from on-premises to public cloud
infrastructure.
- Easy Design Canvas:
Cohesity provides a graphical design canvas that makes orchestration
and workflow design clear and easy. The visual interface shows how and
when servers are turned on to address applications and services
dependencies and server boot timings.
- Fast and Reliable: Powered by the Cohesity SpanFS file
system and its capability for instant mass restores, Cohesity Runbook
delivers fast and reliable migrations, spin-ups, and failovers to other
locations. This empowers organizations to utilize the public cloud more
effectively while also avoiding business impacts associated with
outages.
The Cohesity Runbook application is generally available to all customers as part of the latest Pegasus 6.4 software release.