Pure Storage has struck an alliance with old school data protection vendor Veritas to protect FlashBlade and use it as a backup target and also to protect FlashArray with snapshots sent to public clouds.
Pure Storage pitches FlashBlade, its flash array for unstructured data, as a data hub suitable for combining five storage workloads that might be in separate silos: data lake, backup, data warehouse, streaming analytics and AI cluster.
It says FlashBlade can scale out and provide fast access to stored data regardless of whether the IO is sequential or random, whether the data comes in small or large blocks, and irrespective of the access type, file (NFS) or object (S3).
Veritas NetBackup protects Flashblade’s entire data hub architecture and can also use FlashBlade as a backup target. The results is rapid restore when necessary.
Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers tells clients: “We believe Pure is beginning to actively push the strategy of positioning FlashBlade as a solution for Rapid Restore adoption. In addition to the announcement with Veritas, we would note that our conversations with Pure at last week’s Commvault Go conference highlighted rapid restore as an increasingly visible growth opportunity for the company going forward.”
The CloudPoint product in Veritas’ portfolio offers snapshot-based enterprise cloud backup to multiple public clouds. The company has integrated NetBackup and CloudPoint with Pure’s primary data array, FlashArray, to achieve this.
Veritas claims to be the worldwide market share leader in enterprise data protection, with Pure’s Katie Colbert, VP Alliances, saying it is the industry’s “undisputed market share leader.”
We have no independent numbers to validate this claim but by another metric, Veritas has some serious competition. The most recent Gartner enterprise data protection magic quadrant includes Veritas in the leaders’ quadrant, in third place behind Commvault and IBM. Veeam is in fifth place behind Dell EMC.
That was in June 2016, and the next enterprise data protection MQ has been delayed because vendors have recruited key Gartner analysts. Given Veeam’s growth rates and Veritas’ restructuring initiatives Veeam could overtake Veritas in the next release of enterprise data protection market share reports.
+Comment
This an astute marketing move by Veritas to strike up an alliance with fast-growing Pure, which also has partnerships with Commvault, Rubrik and Veeam. For example, Veeam can back up FlashArray to FlashBlade, Commvault can protect Flash array, and Rubrik can protect both FlashArray and FlashBlade.
Typically no flash array vendor has exclusive deals with a data protection supplier, and no data protection supplier has exclusive deals with a flash array vendor. We expect Veritas to sign similar deals with all the main storage flash array vendors. We also expect Commvault, Rubrik and Veeam to replicate Veritas’ FlashBlade support in their deals with Pure Storage This is a defensive necessity.
