Cobalt Iron: Features and Pricing

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Cobalt Iron is an advanced enterprise backup and recovery platform built for today’s business environment. It provides secure protection for critical applications and services, allowing large, small, and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and remote office/branch office (ROBO) companies to quickly recover from disasters or hardware failure. 

Compass from Cobalt Iron helps businesses to convert and optimize old backup solutions into a simplified cloud-based architecture. It also includes advanced encryption technology that enables companies to manage compliance requirements without compromising their ability to recover when disaster strikes.

Description

Compass is a data security solution that uses automation technologies such as analytics, SaaS, multi-cloud, and virtualization. Through commander, an online dashboard that provides a simple and intuitive user experience, it allows customers to manage their whole backup system, while the analytics engine provides the flexibility and intelligence necessary for corporate data protection.

Components of Compass

Analytics Engine

The Analytics Engine uses technology to make things easier, more efficient, and more valuable. Compass provides operational insight based on data protection exhaustion and uses this metadata to enable automated efficiency, hands-free operations, and proactive problem prevention. With its advanced analytics to drive smart insight and actions, Compass can provide information about configuration alerts, alert integration with customers’ event notification platform, system exception and issues notification, and global policy management.

Accelerator

The accelerator is designed to provide data security without the need for consumer involvement. Accelerators are updated and maintained automatically, with no need for hardware configuration, service and support ticketing, storage monitoring, or software revision management. It is monitored by the analytics engine and provided fully functional and ready to accept workloads. Cobalt Iron offers three types of accelerators: physical, virtual, and cloud.

Commander

For all consumer services, the Compass Commander provides a single, consolidated interface. All operations, from control to visibility, are given without the need for extensive training or technological expertise. The Commander is responsible for all operational management. Add additional systems to the data-protection mix, Commander collects operational metrics, and allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your data security operation.

Accelerator Operating System

Accelerator OS is a real-time processing system based on automation and coupled to the analytics engine. It secures server and storage architecture for contemporary data protection by using software-defined data deduplication and compression techniques.

Before Compass After Compass

Cobalt Iron Compass Supported Deployment Type

• Enterprise data center
• Hybrid Cloud
• Public Cloud
• Private Cloud
• Remote offices

Encryption options (in-flight / at rest)

• Source system Spectrum Protect client encryption
• In-flight encryption with generated SSL keys or customer-issued SSL keys
• At-rest encryption on-premises and in-cloud

Presence

Deployed in 44 countries.

Compass Features

Cyber Shield:

Because of the Cyber Shield security protections built into every Compass deployment, your workloads are tightly sealed and not subject to the traditional cybersecurity sources of failure. Compass keeps the software up to date automatically.

Deduplication:

Cobalt Iron uses compression and deduplication techniques to minimize your backup data volume. It reduces unwanted duplication of data, which means it requires less hard drive space for storage. 

Analytics:

Cobalt Iron backs up your data and has real-time analytics to show you how your environment is performing. 

Multi-cloud Support:

You can back up your data to multiple cloud platforms including AWS, Alibaba, Azure Storage, IBM Cloud, and Google Cloud Storage. This provides you with greater flexibility in safeguarding your sensitive information while keeping costs down.

Orchestration Integration:

Cobalt Iron compass can be integrated with enterprise orchestration tools like ServiceNow, Ansible, vRealize, Chef, and Puppet to make multi-cloud data protection easier. The orchestration API is being enhanced all the time to make it easier to integrate with updated services and functionalities. 

SaaS Economics:

The true value of Cobalt Iron SaaS is its ability to reduce IT capital expenditures (CAPEX) by over 50% and operational expenses (OPEX) by helping companies optimize hardware, software, and other assets. 

Alerting and Notifications:

Cobalt Iron can be configured to notify users when a backup fails or has been completed successfully, provide updates, warnings, and other operational notifications. This gives companies an extra layer of confidence in their data protection—when backups are running, they have less downtime because they know when files have been protected. 

Virtual Tape Library:

Cobalt Iron offers a VTL function that is software-defined and completely integrated into the Compass SaaS platform. Compass VTL is a software-based component that is fully integrated into a comprehensive data protection solution. VTL accelerates backups, reduces costs and risks associated with secondary storage, and lowers the overall total cost of ownership (TCO). Your data stays as safe as it is on your primary storage device.

Supported Backup Types

On-premise (Private) and Cloud (Public or private) backup.

Benefits of on-premises backup

• Locality of data
• Performance (backup, archive, and recovery)
• Data control
• Efficient economics

Benefits of cloud backup

• Dynamic economics
• Cloud vendor flexibility
• Elastic growth
• Ease of use
• Anytime, anywhere access
• Off-site / multiple copies

Use Cases of Compass

Replace Complex Backups:

The advantage of using Compass instead of Dell EMC, Commvault, and Veritas is that through analytics-optimized automation, Cobalt Iron delivers a SaaS-based enterprise backup solution that removes up to 90% of daily administration tasks and provides a web-based dashboard to manage all activities.

Replace Expensive Data Domain Appliances:

Cobalt Iron, through its solution, Compass, can migrate or manage workloads when experiencing restore problems or having challenges with appliance management, network traffic consumption, and growing appliance costs.

Eliminate Tape-Based Backup:

Cobalt Iron eliminates the need to use tape-based backups by simplifying operations with a unified web-based dashboard that uses analytics-driven automation to eliminate operational activities. Compass provides a comprehensive set of data security tools for backup, restoration, and archiving.

Simplify NAS Backup:

Cobalt Iron uses Compass NAS agents for policy-based NAS data service level management, by eliminating NDMP backups, NAS operations are cut in half. The data from NAS is integrated with the rest of the corporate backup system, and backup and recovery of NAS systems are accelerated using NAS agents. In addition to incremental-forever backups, policy-based service level management, faster recovery to suit RPO and RTO requirements, and cloud integration features, Compass offers a contemporary methodology to NAS data backup. Using its sophisticated NAS proxy technology, Compass efficiently backups and recovers NAS systems containing billions of data.

Delivery

Software as a service (SaaS)

Pricing/License

Cobalt Iron operates on a pay-as-you-grow SaaS basis. You’ll only be charged for the quantity of data that needs to be backed up and secured.

Cobalt Iron Summary

N.B. All images used are sourced from the manufacturer website.

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