When Pure Storage Inc. announced a partnership with Catalogic Software Inc. nearly one year ago to jointly produce a copy data management product for enterprise information technology, it was widely seen as an important moment for the two firms. Pure Storage was in a legal dogfight against disk powerhouses like EMC, and Catalogic was beginning to gain traction as customers sought a better path between public and private clouds.

“Catalogic was really flying under the radar,” said Vaughn Stewart (pictured, left), vice president of technology at Pure Storage. He said Catalogic had “a powerful set of tools with a focus on how to bring in copy data management and a data protection scheme into a heterogeneous storage infrastructure.”

Speaking to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, California, studio, Stewart joined Prashant Jagannathan (pictured, right), technical director at Catalogic Software, in a conversation about how the Pure Storage/Catalogic partnership was seeking to transform the storage industry. (* Disclosure below.)

The goal for customers was to “embrace better hybrid storage technologies by making data protection a native element within their on-prem and extending it into the cloud,” according to Stewart.

Managing access to production database

Pure Storage and Catalogic both sought to address a long-term problem in the information technology industry: unwanted tampering with the production database. Operations staffs are loathe to grant production environment access to developers over fears that their activities could degrade functionality and performance. “Nobody wants to touch it because that’s driving business,” Jagannathan explained.

This is often a problem in the public cloud, where the dynamics make it difficult to copy data efficiently. “In the public cloud, there isn’t an ability to make instant copies of production data,” Stewart said.

Catalogic’s product provides a copy data solution that rapidly catalogs information and creates mountable snapshots for instant access across the enterprise. “We get to leverage these engines that are very mature and robust within the enterprise class storage arrays today to deliver this agility and speed,” Stewart stated.

One Pure Storage customer faced the problem of having legacy records stored in a relational database, Stewart shared. That customer is now using the joint Catalogic-Pure technology to make multiple copies and run queries in parallel across multiple cloned instances because its staff wasn’t familiar with how to adopt an Apache Hadoop ecosystem — open-source-based software used for storing, processing and analyzing big data.

“We find customers are being very creative in how they are leveraging these technologies,” said the Pure Storage executive.

Data masking and security

With the ability to make multiple data copies, this raises the prospect of security issues down the line. Jagannathan and Stewart both addressed potential concerns from the perspective that data protection must cover both on-prem and the cloud.

“It’s a main ask for mission-critical applications,” Jagannathan said.

Catalogic integrates with data masking tools and provides information on the content of the data so that IT managers know what kinds of sensitive information they may be dealing with, such as credit card or Social Security data, he explained

When Catalogic’s software is initially installed, infrastructure policies for data handling and access are defined, answering such questions as to whether it should stay in the country and what needs to be masked.

This is one of the key strengths behind the partnership, according to Stewart. “This gives us not just a catalog of services, but it’s all audited,” he said. “We can go back and see who accessed what data at what time.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CubeConversations. (* Disclosure: Catalogic Software Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Catalogic Software nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE