Cohesity, which aims to consolidate all forms of secondary storage on a single platform, builds on cloud archiving and tiering in their spring release with a platform with full cloud capability.
Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Vice President of Marketing and Product
Santa Clara CA-based Cohesity has announced Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition (CE), a complement to their on-prem secondary storage solution, which expands their data protection capabilities in the AWS and Azure clouds to enable complete replication of clusters.
“Our goal is to consolidate secondary storage with our webscale data platform, and now it can run in the cloud as well,” said Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Vice President of Marketing and Product. “It has all the same features of the on-prem platform, in the cloud.”
Cohesity brought its original product to general availability a little more than a year ago. Their CEO, Mohit Aron, was one of Nutanix’s co-founders, and Cohesity has emphasized that its hyper-converged platform was designed to do the same thing for secondary storage that Nutanix did for primary storage – consolidate all storage functionality on a single platform.
“Business continues to grow very, very fast,” Rogers said. “The latest quarter doubled the number of accounts, including well known logos like Western Union, Netgear, and GS 1 Canada. “We have a lot of traction for being just one year into selling.”
The new platform builds on incremental cloud capabilities announced earlier this year.
“With Cohesity 3.0, released in June, we announced the ability to connect to public clouds for archiving purposes, to do away with tape, and also offered the ability to tier into the cloud,” Rogers said. “What we are now announcing is the ability to do complete replication of clusters into the cloud. Customers will be able to order up a data platform on the AWS or Azure Marketplace, and deploy it as a virtual machine into the cloud.
“This is relatively unique, being able to do this active replication in the cloud and provide all the same services,” Rogers said.
The Cohesity cloud platform also translates the applications as they move between VMware, Microsoft, and Amazon Machine Image format.
“This is all done dynamically by us,” Rogers noted. “It’s a very cool feature so the customer doesn’t have to convert their data themselves.”
Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition (CE) is considered to be a complementary product to the on-prem version, not an add-on.
“We view it as equal in stature to the on-prem product, with the ability now to buy our software through a marketplace to run it in the public cloud,” Rogers stated. “Our customers have said they want to buy licenses and have option of buying on-prem, and moving into the cloud. We will be allowing customers to future-proof their investment in this way. They will be able to buy software licenses and its up to them where they choose to deploy them.”
Rogers said that this option will be available as soon as the cloud platform is in production.
The new platform allows Cohesity to support three important use cases, Rogers indicated.
“You can now do disaster recovery into the cloud and recover applications in the cloud,” he said. “Dev/ops is the second area. If you have lots of dev/ops within the environment and want to be able to replicate those production instances into the cloud, and be able to clone images for your developers, you can now do so. The third use case is analytics. If you want to run a large query on data and don’t want to set it up on-prem, you can take advantage of dynamic provisioning in the cloud.”
While the cloud platform supports AWS and Azure today, the plan is to add other clouds in the future.
“We started with AWS and Azure based on customer demand, but Google and other cloud services will be added as we go forward,” Rogers indicated.
The early access program begins next month. Availability is scheduled for the first half of 2017 beginning with the Azure Cloud.
