Cohesity Launches the Industry’s First Secondary Storage Solution to Unify Fragmented Data Landscape

Cohesity, the pioneer of converged secondary storage, today announced the public launch of the Cohesity Data Platform, the first product designed to consolidate all secondary storage use cases on a unified environment that helps organizations control growing data demands. The Cohesity Data Platform combines a web-scale storage architecture with standards-based hardware components that enable companies to transition from today’s expensive silos for different data use cases to a simple, pay-as-you grow solution for data management. By consolidating a wide range of functions onto a single platform, Cohesity can reduce storage costs by more than half and make enterprise data management incredibly simple.

According to the global research firm IDC, organizations will manage a total of 44 trillion GB of data by 2020, the vast majority of which will be held in secondary storage environments dedicated to a range of use cases, from backup and recovery to test/development and analytics. In order to manage this data, enterprises have traditionally invested in multiple solutions from different vendors to address each use case, resulting in a fragmented enterprise storage approach that is both expensive and difficult to manage. To bring order to data management, Cohesity has launched the first converged secondary storage solution, which scales seamlessly while maintaining the management flexibility necessary to handle a wide variety of workloads. Cohesity empowers companies to control the growing volume of data by replacing the sprawl of point solutions with a single, consolidated platform.

"After testing the product, we immediately saw the value of the Cohesity Data Platform," said Richard Chun, infrastructure engineer for the international law firm Sheppard Mullin. "As we back up more virtual machines, they’ll be fully indexed, and what I can do is build my DevOps on the same system by using snapshots, and it’s all under a single pane of glass. Over time, Cohesity’s solution enables me to tell all my departments, ‘Whatever storage needs you have, whatever profile, I can manage it, and it’s not a deal breaker for us in terms of cost and complexity.’"

"Enterprises face enormous challenges due to the exponential growth of secondary storage data and are currently struggling to manage this siloed data with fragmented solutions," said Mohit Aron, CEO and founder of Cohesity. "To respond to this problem, our team has developed a highly flexible platform that can scale seamlessly without compromising quality of service, so that enterprises can finally consolidate secondary storage on a single, intelligent solution that makes data management across private and public cloud simple and affordable."

"There are many use cases for secondary data beyond backup and recovery, and while each one has seen innovations in the past decade, nobody has looked at these workloads holistically – until now," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at Taneja Group. "Using the same type of thinking we saw applied to HyperConvergence for primary storage, Cohesity has created one system for secondary data that scales out indefinitely and deals with multiple workloads without wasting capacity, compute cycles or manpower. This is a heady vision but I believe the right technologies are now available to bring about this revolution."

The Elements of a Unified Secondary Storage Platform

The Cohesity Data Platform simplifies secondary storage by combining software and hardware components to provide a web-scale storage foundation that can efficiently handle a wide range of workloads. These components include:

• Cohesity’s patented operating environment, OASIS (Open Architecture for Scalable, Intelligent Storage), which combines a scale-out storage architecture with built-in enterprise storage services and quality of service management to consolidate multiple use cases, such as data protection, DevOps, file services, and analytics, on a single platform.

• Two new hardware platforms in the C2000 Series, with each 2U block containing four clustered nodes. Cohesity clusters can mix hardware generations and types in a future-proof model to grow with an organization from four to four hundred nodes.
  • The C2300 offers 48 TB raw HDD capacity and 3.2 TB raw PCI-e SSD capacity
  • The C2500 offers 96 TB raw HDD capacity and 6.4 TB raw PCI-e SSD capacity

The core foundation of the solution is Cohesity OASIS, designed to handle the differing resiliency and performance requirements of multiple data use cases. OASIS combines web-scale storage with built-in enterprise data management features traditionally addressed by separate point solutions:

• Copy Data Management: Global, policy-based deduplication and patented snapshot/ cloning technology enables companies to maximize storage usage and reclaim space from redundant copies of data. Cohesity was recently recognized in Gartner’s 2015 Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies as a player in this emerging space.
• Data Protection: OASIS offers seamless data protection for applications through integrated backup and recovery features, including unlimited snapshotting and thin cloning, with built-in global indexing for full searchability.
• DevOps: With general-purpose storage capabilities from OASIS, including native support for NFS and SMB protocols, enterprises can quickly deploy DevOps clones from backup data, efficiently repurposing passive data in legacy environments for faster development workflows.
• In-Place Analytics: Cohesity offers built-in and programmable data analytics to help enterprises make better, more informed data management and business decisions. Cohesity’s native analytics capabilities provide real-time metrics and forecasting, while its programmable Analytics Workbench empowers businesses to run custom queries against their datasets. All analytics are run in-place on the Cohesity cluster to maximize time-to-insight and eliminate the need for separate data analytics infrastructure. Support for integrated third-party analytics applications will be available in 2016.

The Cohesity Data Platform was designed to work in conjunction with pre-existing enterprise data storage solutions, allowing companies to start with a configuration that fits their environment without the high up-front costs associated with "rip-and-replace" solutions.

Cohesity has transformed the traditional pricing model by unifying software and hardware for a wide-range of use cases and eliminating the need to buy capacity-based software licenses from separate vendors. Additionally, Cohesity allows companies to take a a pay-as-you-grow approach by seamlessly scaling one node at a time, instead of paying up-front for major "forklift" migrations to handle future capacity needs. Cohesity’s open architecture also provides an extensible operating environment for custom and third-party applications to integrate directly onto the platform.