Catalogic Software today announced the general availability of ECX 2.0, its copy data management platform that manages the full lifecycle of copy data, allowing IT organisations to leverage data copies to enable mission critical business operations while dramatically simplifying operations and reducing capital and operating expenditures. Having completed an extensive “early access” program early this year, ECX 2.0 is already in production in dozens of major IT environments across the globe. ECX is distributed worldwide through Catalogic’s network of value added resellers and distributors.
“Copies of production data in most IT organisations have grown out of control, and in many cases occupy over 80% of the disk storage. Companies simply have not had a data management solution that could deal with the problem. The next great leap in data management will be helping IT organisations get control of their copy data situation, while saving money and leveraging the data copies that are created to drive important business initiatives,” commented Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software. “The new features of ECX 2.0 complete the platform that was envisioned when this journey began three years ago. With ECX 2.0, customers now have a powerful solution that enables them to manage, orchestrate and analyse copy data throughout their enterprise including the Cloud. As we anticipated, with the delivery of this major release, customer adoption of ECX is accelerating rapidly.”
ECX is an intelligent copy data management platform that manages the full lifecycle of copy data, from creation, to usage for various business functions, to deletion and space reclamation. ECX is a software only solution, deployed as a virtual appliance that allows the IT team to leverage the existing storage investment it has made. ECX makes it easy for the IT team to deliver the data copies needed to drive automated uses cases like Recovery, DR, Test/Dev, DevOps and Analytics.
“ECX has restored common sense to our copy data management responsibilities,” commented Jonathan Stinson, Lead Server and Storage Administrator for Hendrick Medical, in Abeline, TX. “Juggling data for testing, development and restoration is no longer an aggravating experience; it just works like it always should have. Data is readily accessible where I need it, in minutes instead of hours allowing us to pursue solutions with a few mouse clicks that we would have deemed too cumbersome to bother with before.”
“Copy data management solutions will transform storage and data protection more than deduplication did 10 years ago,” said George Crump, President Founder of Storage Switzerland. “Catalogic’s ECX platform is an important step forward, especially for data recovery and DR. By making snapshots safe, searchable and automated you can change the data protection paradigm to leverage snapshots for daily tested DR and instant recovery as well as repurposing for test-dev and analytics.”
Key Features in Catalogic’s ECX 2.0:
Data Copy Management
ECX enables simple one-click automation for all copy data workflows—from creation of copies, to usage, to expiration and reclamation. Creating these workflows through ECX saves administrators time, drives repeatability of best practices, and reduces the sprawl of snapshots that never get leveraged. In doing so, ECX drives out complexity and significantly reduces capital and operating expenditures. ECX goes further by delivering SLA compliance and recovery assurance by providing exception-based reporting on all policies that are managed, as well as detailed logging which allows IT to troubleshoot failures faster and help get the systems back into compliance.
Data Copy Orchestration
Copies are created in order to be used for a business function. Leveraging copy data across the enterprise and cloud for multiple use cases must be one of the key value drivers of a copy data management solution. ECX allows IT to automate and orchestrate otherwise complex data reuse scenarios for multiple business solutions such as recovery, DR, test/dev and analytics simply and easily. This orchestration includes storage and VMware infrastructures.
Copy Data Analysis
Visibility and insight are critical to managing any environment. Catalogic ECX provides detailed insight and analytics through advances search, customised reporting and file level analytics.
Ecosystem Integration
The ECX software platform is hardware and hypervisor agnostic, integrating with the copy and replication capabilities of ecosystem partners through extensible plug-is. ECX 2.0’s currently supported platforms include NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP, ONTAP 7-mode, CLOUD ONTAP and VMware.
Customers using NetApp Snapshots, SnapManagers, SnapVault and SnapMirror or VMware’s snapshot and cloning capabilities can now leverage ECX to gain a comprehensive intelligent copy data management solution. Support for other storage platforms and hypervisors will expand rapidly as Catalogic continually tests and certifies new products.
