The enhancements include a major improvement to the platform’s performance as well as the ability to now handle physical protection as well as virtual.

Santa Clara CA-based Cohesity has announced new 3.0 releases of its core DataPlatform product as well as its DataProtect software. Both are scheduled to be available within 90 days.

Cohesity came out of stealth a year ago, and brought its first product to market last fall, an infinitely scalable storage platform designed for the convergence of all secondary storage – not just backup, but test/dev, file services, and analytic data as well. Its founder and CEO, Mohit Aron, was the co-founder of Nutanix and author of the term hyper-convergence. Cohesity’s objective is straightforward – to have the same disruptive impact on the secondary storage market that Nutanix had on primary storage.

“The 3.0 release of DataPlatform delivers a tremendous improvement in performance,” Aron said. “It doubles IOPS and throughput performance for file access, something that we had tremendous demand for from customers. We have also improved VMware backup performance so that you can now have parallel ingest across multiple nodes for large VMs.” Replication speeds have also been tremendously improved with WAN optimization technology, he added.

On the software side, the big news with the DataProtect 3.0 release is the ability to move beyond virtual protection.

“Now we can also back up physical Windows and Linux servers as well as virtual ones,” Aron said.

Support has not yet been extended to containers, which Aron said are not yet the developing presence in secondary storage that they are in primary storage.

“We are looking at containers, but customers haven’t been asking for this so far because most of them are not using containers yet,” he said.

“Our road map is very customer driven and I have zero customers asking for containers right now,” Aron added. “Eventually this request will come, for secondary storage as well as primary storage, and we will jump as soon as we hear that.”

DataProtect 3.0 also adds the ability to perform app-aware Windows server backups, which ensure 100 per cent consistent point-in-time restores for Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, and Microsoft Exchange Server.

Cohesity also announced a couple of additional enhancements, including new orchestration and automation capabilities for both DataProtect and DataPlatform designed to eliminate errors in manual workflows for data protection and dev-test operations.

“Customers told us that they wanted to be able to add automation using tools that they like, and asked us to expose our REST APIs for this purpose, and we have done this,” Aron said.

“We have also improved our CloudArchive public cloud integration, with granular search and object-level recovery from images stored in public cloud archives,” Aron stated. “Previously, you were limited to downloading the full image.”

Aron indicated that this enhancement significantly improves Cohesity’s hybrid cloud strategy.

“With CloudArchive, our customers don’t have to babysit anything, as it’s all done for them. While we never lead with cost, it can tremendously reduce costs, as well as the storage footprint, which is reduced by 80 per cent.”

Aron indicated that in Cohesity’s third quarter of selling they now have approximately 20 paying customers, with between 60 and 70 more in various stages of trying out the product.

“We are very pleased with the results so far,” he said. “What’s especially important is that 80 per cent of these are enterprise customers. These have a lot longer sales cycle than the mid-market companies where we started with Nutanix.”

Cohesity has a 100 per cent channel go-to-market model and introduced a channel program earlier this year.