Cohesity Unveils ‘Workflow Automation Design Canvas’ That Makes It Easy for Enterprises to Systematically Move Applications to the Cloud

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.