… Launching Secondary Storage Platform

Cohesity, Inc., in converged secondary storage, emerged from stealth mode to reveal the details of its storage solution.

The Cohesity Data Platform takes aim at companies’ looming ‘dark data’ problem – the rising volume of unstructured data sets that demand enormous resources yet continue to grow unchecked and remain unanalyzed. By converging the multiple solutions companies now use to handle secondary storage – which Cohesity is redefining to encompass data protection, archiving, DevOps, and analytics – on a single, infinitely scalable and intelligent platform, Cohesity will reduce costs, simplify management, and deliver powerful data insights to customers.

Bringing the efficiency of converged architectures to the overlooked secondary storage market, the platform will eliminate the need to address data sprawl using separate point solutions, such as deduplication backup target appliances and copy data management products. It also enables organizations to scale efficiently by purchasing only the storage they need now, on demand. All of this happens on a programmable, globally indexed platform that delivers insight more efficiently. It allows analytics capabilities to reside directly in secondary storage, the largest repository of data across the organization, so there’s no need to create separate copies of data for a dedicated analytics cluster, reducing cost and data sprawl across the organization.

Confronting the ‘Dark Data’ Tsunami
Today’s organizations face a tsunami of new data that will be 44 times greater in 2020 than in 2009, according to CSC Research. More than 80% of this data will be spread across a wide range of secondary storage solutions designed specifically for backup, development, or analytics. This results in large masses of ‘dark data,’ defined by Gartner as “the information assets organizations collect, process, and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes.” The proliferation of highly specific storage products compounds the growing dark data problem by making it more expensive to store, more complex to manage, and harder to mine for valuable business insight.

The Cohesity Data Platform takes a new approach to the dark data
problem using a three-pronged attack:

• Manage and Protect Seamlessly. Web-scale storage with converged data protection eliminates the needless complexity and overhead of multiple products and vendors.
• Use Efficiently. A unified platform transforms secondary storage into active data for DevOps, with built-in copy data virtualization and public cloud integration to deliver simpler, more efficient storage across the enterprise.
• Learn Instantly. Immediate insight into data type, usage, and performance – with programmability for custom queries to handle previously complex workflows like data masking – make rapid business analysis of dark data possible.

“The latest storage innovations have mainly addressed the production environment, but we see even greater opportunities in secondary storage because it covers a much larger volume of data and the current market is so fragmented,” said ESG Research founder and senior analyst Steve Duplessie. “Cohesity’s focus on converging secondary storage workflows and making it possible to extract intelligence from this data could open up a vastly underserved market.”

Founder’s Technical Acumen and Past Successes
Led to Secondary Storage Opportunity
Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by CEO Mohit Aron, whose experience in hyper-convergence movement led him to the enormous market need for a converged secondary storage solution. Early in his career, he helped design the Google File System, which achieved efficiencies for the company’s primary storage tasks. He followed up by founding the hyper-converged infrastructure company, Nutanix. He pioneered the concept of hyper-convergence, an architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization. As Nutanix’s CTO, he brought this solution to market for a range of customers that realized the benefits of convergence for primary storage environments. At Cohesity, he intends to extend the benefits of convergence to the much larger secondary storage landscape.

“The majority of an organization’s data is spread out over many different products, and we recognized the need to converge these together for a more efficient approach,” Aron said. “To date, this hadn’t been done because building an architecture that scales to support this volume of data with good performance and resiliency for live data usage was technically very challenging. The Cohesity Data Platform brings the innovation of a Google-like, scalable system with the right enterprise storage features to fundamentally change the way customers store and extract value from their data.”

Cohesity envisions this transformation as a phased journey that starts by unifying secondary storage on an infinitely scalable platform that stores and protects all customer data. As customers scale out the platform for data protection, they can start using that previously passive data for DevOps. In the third phase, as that data is consolidated, they can then analyze it to detect key trends effectively, get immediate alerts about security issues, and see the whole picture to drive the right business decisions.

Cohesity Early Access Program
Cohesity has rolled out an Early Access Program that has helped select clients realize valuable new efficiencies. Brand-name pilot customers, including Tribune Media, a worldwide, publicly traded media company, and GS1 Canada, an industry-driven organization that enables subscribers to synchronize product data in accordance with global supply chain standards, have already seen value in the Cohesity Data Platform.

“As one of the largest media companies in the world, the amount of data that Tribune Media has to deal with doubles every year, forcing us to constantly evaluate new ways to keep our data protected, stored, and most of all, recoverable,” said Tribune Media Company SVP David Giambruno. “Cohesity gives us an easy way to manage, store, and extract value from our data – all from a single platform that scales as we need it. Cohesity is dramatically simplifying the way we do business.“

“Faced with the complex task of managing massive amounts of data that must be backed up and secured, we are excited about Cohesity’s vision for converging data onto a unified, scale-out solution,” said GS1 Canada SVP of technology Sase Janki. “Cohesity provides simpler data protection and powerful insight, which is what we want from our next-generation solution for storage and recovery. We look forward to scaling this environment as we need, one node at a time, so we can spend less time managing our data infrastructure.”