Cohesity cyber resilience for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

As enterprises accelerate migration from traditional virtual machines (VM) to Red Hat® OpenShift® Virtualization, protecting those workloads demands more than a traditional backup. Organizations need immutable, cyber-resilient data protection that travels with the workload—on site, in a cloud environment, and everywhere in between. Cohesity can deliver this protection across both Cohesity DataProtect and Cohesity NetBackup, fully supported with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Cohesity Data Cloud. 

Red Hat OpenShift is an industry-leading application platform powered by Kubernetes. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is an included capability of Red Hat OpenShift that allows organizations to run and manage VMs alongside containers on a single, modern platform. OpenShift Virtualization offers a future-ready foundation that supports existing VMs while remaining flexible to accommodate modern workloads. 

Cohesity Data Cloud extends Red Hat OpenShift platform with comprehensive data protection, cyber resilience, and AI-powered security. Customers can choose between 2 proven Cohesity data protection engines—Cohesity DataProtect or Cohesity NetBackup:

• Cohesity DataProtect: Built for modern, cloud-native environments prioritizing simplicity, integrated security, and unified hybrid management while offering a scalable platform.
• Cohesity NetBackup: Built for organizations requiring highly reliable disaggregated architecture or for existing Cohesity NetBackup customers extending proven protection to OpenShift Virtualization workloads.

Integrated cyber resilience

Cohesity’s multilayered security approach strengthens every layer of the architecture to protect OpenShift Virtualization environments throughout the full threat lifecycle. Cohesity Data Cloud provides:

• Immutable backups and zero trust principles that help prevent unauthorized modification of backup data, providing a clean recovery point.
• AI/ML-powered anomaly detection and malware scanning to identify threats early and prevent silent propagation into backup repositories.
• Cyber vaulting and clean-room technology that offers isolated, verifiable recovery environments for critical workloads.
• Federal Information Processing Standard Publication (FIPS) 140-2, a validated encryption architecture to help maintain cryptographic standards in regulated environments.
• Multifactor and multiperson authorization (MFA/MPA) that protects against credential-based attacks on administrative access.
• Write once, read many (WORM) and audit capabilities to help satisfy governance obligations with tamper-proof retention.

Cohesity DataProtect architecture

Cohesity DataProtect paired with OpenShift Virtualization takes advantage of Cohesity’s application programming interface (API)-first approach and platform capabilities such as global search and global deduplication to help organizations simplify data protection, speed access to protected data, and increase storage efficiency. The key elements of the solution are a Cohesity-developed data mover and Velero, acting together. 

The data mover is responsible for processing the actual data of the entities being protected, while Velero is used to process the associated metadata. These resources are deployed on the worker nodes in an OpenShift cluster as a daemonset, within a Cohesity-created namespace. Additionally, Cohesity DataProtect integrates with Kubernetes-native snapshots using the Container Storage Interface (CSI). 

Cohesity Data Cloud platform has an award-winning user interface (UI) that allows Red Hat OpenShift administrators to protect and recover workloads with remarkable ease. Coupled with a security focus tied to aspects like immutability, quorum control, multifactor authentication, and RBAC, this integration means that security and usability are aligned. 

Cohesity NetBackup architecture

To reduce the operational overhead of workload administrators, Cohesity NetBackup can dynamically discover namespaces that contain OpenShift Virtualization VMs and protect them automatically with intelligent policies. Administrators can also configure specific retention policies for each snapshot and backup copy for full flexibility and control. Additionally, administrators can throttle the number of concurrent data protection workflows or even change how often Cohesity NetBackup queries the Kubernetes cluster to discover new applications that need protection.

Once a snapshot is taken, Cohesity NetBackup’s elastic data mover dynamically tiers data off to the storage of choice, optimizing an organization’s network and storage costs. With the cloud-native scale of Cohesity NetBackup’s data mover, organizations can expand to an enterprise scale while maintaining a low total cost of ownership. This growth can be accomplished by powering down data mover nodes when not in use, and by moving data off the primary storage to more optimized and protected storage targets.

With Cohesity NetBackup’s industry-leading ransomware resilience capabilities² that provide immutable storage, malware scanning, anomaly detection, and support for Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS), organizations can be confident in the recoverability of their OpenShift Virtualization environment.

Increase operational efficiency and scale for data protection. 

• Centralized management: Cohesity Data Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift simplify operations, reducing the complexity and overhead associated with managing disparate systems.
• Scalable architecture: Both Cohesity Data Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift offer highly scalable architectures, allowing your infrastructure to grow with your business needs without compromising performance or reliability.
• Automated workflows: Use automation to simplify backup and recovery processes, reducing the administrative burden on IT teams and enabling them to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Ensure data is properly protected and can be restored quickly.

• Ransomware protection: Cohesity’s multilayered security architecture, advanced ransomware detection, and immutable backups help safeguard VMs and containers against cyber threats.
• Compliance and governance: Help customers comply with industry regulations and internal governance policies through immutability, comprehensive reporting, auditing, and data retention capabilities such as WORM and legal hold capabilities.

Use consistent data management and protection across environments.

• Optimized performance: Maximize the performance of your virtual environments with Cohesity Data Cloud’s efficient data management capabilities and container orchestration of Red Hat OpenShift.
• Unified protection: Cohesity offers uninterrupted, end-to-end backup and recovery for VMs and containerized applications running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, protecting your critical data.

OpenShift Virtualization provides a unified, scalable platform for migrating VMs, supporting modernization and consistent management across hybrid cloud environments. Cohesity Data Cloud, an AI-powered data security solution, can manage and protect VMs to help prevent data loss and provide rapid recovery in the event of a cyberattack or an outage. Together, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Cohesity Data Cloud provide a supported solution that addresses the challenges of modern environments, offering a platform that strengthens data protection, bolsters security, and simplifies operations.

To learn more about Cohesity and Red Hat joint solutions, access these resources: 

• Executive video: Cohesity and Red Hat
• Blog: Enhancing cyber resilience
• Webinar: Enterprise-grade protection with OpenShift Virtualization and Cohesity