Cohesity Intros CloudSpin for Data Management

Most IT organizations routinely make use of backup software to migrate data into the cloud. Now Cohesity wants to take that concept a step further with the addition of CloudSpin, which enables developers to replicate from a development environment in the cloud.

Cloudspin is enabled by a portal set up by IT organizations that rely on the Cohesity DataPlatform to manage secondary storage. The Cohesity DataPlatform makes it possible to automatically replicate data between different instances of hypervisors without any intervention of an internal IT organization required. CloudSpin extends the native cloud application programming interface (API) support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure that Cohesity built into its platform. That capability enables IT administrators to set up portals through which developers can self-select what data to replicate into a public cloud, says Sameer Nori, director of product marketing for Cohesity.

That approach allows the internal IT organization to maintain some control over what data can be accessed for developing applications versus letting developers programmatically access data haphazardly using an API.

“We still believe developers and application owners will look to IT to get data,” says Nori.

Moving large amounts of data into public clouds typically requires a significant amount of time. Developers are anxious to take advantage of cloud resources to build applications. But until they can test how those application interact with corporate data, they need to either wait for IT to migrate the data required and then refactor it for the local cloud hypervisor or move the application back to an on-premises environment to complete the testing process.

Scheduled to be available in the next 90 to 120 days, CloudSpin eliminates the need to move an application back to an on-premises environment to complete the testing process, says Nori.

It’s unclear to what degree data gravity issues are holding back shifting application workloads to the cloud. But as more data either gets created or moved into public clouds, it becomes more likely that applications will be both developed and hosted in the cloud. As is often the case in IT, however, getting data from one place to another is one of those things in IT that historically has been much more easily said than done.