Cloud IT Companies Turn to Coho Data Web-Scale Storage

Coho Data, Inc. announced a number of customers wins, highlighting how its web-scale storage offering is helping enterprises reap the benefits of an Amazon-inspired model for managing storage.

Tiva Software, LLC, a mobile application developer, Tech Accelerator, a VMware lab-as-a-service provider, and Colony Networks, Inc., a wireless IT provider, are three companies serving Fortune 500 customers that have selected Coho’s DataStream scale-out storage solution for on-demand storage services in their virtualized datacenters.

“Today’s enterprise storage offerings from traditional vendors like EMC and Netapp require big upfront investments for systems that create silos of storage for different applications and an expensive refresh cycle every 3-5 years,” explained Ramana Jonnala, co-founder and CEO, Coho Data. “The cloud has changed how people think about storage infrastructure – companies want to buy what they need when they need it and not deal with the hassle of migrating between old and new systems. Coho is bringing that web-scale model to enterprises that want to keep their data on-premise with an architecture that scales performance and capacity with any mix of flash and disk hardware and the simplicity of managing it all as a single system.“

Coho’s DataStream 1000 combines web-scale storage software with hardware to deliver the simplicity and scale-out flexibility of public cloud storage services in an on-premise datacenter.

Designed for demanding enterprise applications, Coho’s built-in CASCADE analytics software optimizes storage performance by learning about a customer’s application environment and auto-tuning flash utilization on a per application basis, as well as providing IT teams with prescriptive guidance on the right mix of flash and disk to deploy to meet their needs.

Mobile POS service provider chooses Coho storage for its 100% virtualized datacenter
Tiva Software builds mobile applications for thousands of end users in the retail industry to handle inventory control and ordering in both a software-as-service and on-premise model. It standardized on VMware to virtualize all of its servers for ease of management and needed performance of its virtualized SQL databases to keep up with the pace of its clients’ fast-paced retail businesses.

Knowing that flash would be key to boosting performance, Tiva Software evaluated various options, and chose Coho Data for its use of PCIe flash combined with HDDs to achieve performance without the all-flash price premium.

“Not having to think about when I need to buy another box for more capacity removes the headache of storage planning for the next three years,” said Isaac Levenson, datacenter manager, Tiva Software. “Even better is that Coho Data automatically load balances between my existing Coho Data hardware and the new hardware models we buy, with virtually no downtime. By using Coho Data we don’t have to plan for data migrations and we get all the benefits of a cloud storage service in our own datacenter with better performance-all of which directly translates to better service for our customers.“

TechAccelerator’s lab-as-service speeds up SLA with Coho storage
TechAccelerator has built a virtual demo lab environment that allows the sales teams of their high-tech clients to use VMware virtualization to provision and deploy VMs to demo their products to prospective customers. It found that the click-to-launch lab times was continually limited by storage performance issues as it grew its virtualized infrastructure.

“Since deploying Coho Data’s solutions, we’ve calculated a 70% reduction in storage management time. In the past, nearly a third of our time was spent wrestling with the underlying storage,” lamented David Hekimian, CEO and co-founder, Tech Accelerator. “With Coho Data, performance out of the box was infinitely better than my existing arrays. For the first 30 days, we only logged in the management UI twice. We didn’t need to touch it because it just worked.“

Colony Networks boosts cloud services with VMware servers and Coho storage
As a cloud-based provider of cellular and Wi-Fi services, Colony Networks collects massive amounts of data around network health and mobile user geo-location from its Fortune 500 customers. When the company’s internal IT organization virtualized 90% of its servers to consolidate mission-critical workloads into a more efficient datacenter footprint, it created a dependency on its shared storage as a critical bottleneck.

“After trying a hyper-converged solution and not achieving the performance needed,” Colony Networks’ VP of network operations, James Martin, explained, “we’re trying to get the datacenter into a framework that allows us to scale with our business. We’ve already seen a 40% increase in performance and know we can easily scale our storage cluster with the latest generation hardware as we grow, without interrupting service.“

Transforming Enterprise Storage CAPEX into Service-Based OPEX
DataStream 1000 delivers the web-scale modularity needed to enable businesses to scale data capacity and performance on demand to any application with multiple hardware options packaged as Coho MicroArrays. The current DataStream 1.6 release supports two configurations of MicroArrays that combine hybrid PCIe flash and HDDs, with two additional hardware configurations for an all-flash MicroArray and an all-disk high capacity MicroArray scheduled to release in early 2015. The DataStream software supports in-place additions of hardware from new generations of flash and disk for non-disruptive system growth.

“With flash prices dropping 35% year-over-year and HDDs continuing to drop at 15% year-over-year, the current model of buying all of your storage hardware upfront simply doesn’t make financial sense. Web-scale storage is not about just capacity scaling. It’s about giving a company of any size the ability to procure and deploy storage hardware just-in-time-like Amazon-so they can benefit from the best prices at that time,” explained Andy Warfield, CTO and co-founder, Coho Data. “This means the software has to be smart enough to support any combination of flash and disk as well as different generations of hardware. We’re essentially eliminating the 3-5 year storage lifecycle and getting rid of painful migrations and downtime.“

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