The Cohesity DataPlatform Virtual Edition is intended for remote and branch office use cases, as is a new hardware alternative, the C2100, also being announced.
Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Head of Product Management and Marketing
Santa Clara CA-based Cohesity has again expanded the choices for deployment of its Cohesity DataPlatform unified secondary storage solution. The Cohesity DataPlatform Virtual Edition joins the on-prem and cloud versions of the platform. The company also announced a new hardware offering, the Cohesity C2100 Hyperconverged Node, a smaller version of their main platform intended for remote and branch offices where an on-prem solution is desired.
“In expanding our platform beyond on-prem, we decided to start first with the cloud and extend our software-defined data platform there,” said Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Head of Product Management and Marketing. “We demoed that at AWS last fall. We also wanted to move out to the edge. Google cars generate close to a PB of data a year, so we wanted to provide a data protection solution that extended all the way out. This runs not just in the cloud, but on VMs running in a remote location.”
Cohesity’s hyper-converged platform is intended to do the same thing for secondary storage that Nutanix did for primary storage – consolidate all storage functionality on a single platform. Rogers said that there has been significant demand for a virtual version of the product that can meet specified use cases.
“We had a large number of VARs calling on large enterprise customers who wanted to go beyond the data centre, and do it in a way that’s very low cost, and very unintrusive,” he said. “Typical customer use cases would be branches of financial institutions, oil companies with drilling rigs, and federal government or military offices. The Virtual Edition can protect the data and replicate it back to a central secure facility where our standard data platform runs.”
Rogers said that most Cohesity customers can use such an offering.
“Our biggest verticals are health care,” he said. “They typically have a few large hospitals and a lot of satellite offices and remote clinics and doctors’ offices. The Virtual Edition would be ideal for these smaller locations. Our other big vertical is financial services. Any place where you serve a lot of end users will have a large number of remote sites. Almost every customer we have goes behind a central data centre, but any place where data is being created, we can now protect that data at the point of creation.”
For now, the Virtual Edition is only available on VMware vSphere, but the plan is to expand beyond that.
“We started with VMware because they are so widely deployed, but we have other hypervisors on the roadmap, and those will be coming,” Rogers said.
Cohesity Virtual Edition will be available to customers within 90 days.
Cohesity also announced a new hardware option for remote and branch offices as well, the C2100 entry-level hyperconverged node with Cohesity DataPlatform Standard Edition.
“The C2100 is an entry level hardware configuration – a simpler, version of our on-prem appliance,” Rogers said. “One block has up to 20 TB of storage in it.”
The C2100 runs the same software and has the same UI as the Virtual Edition, and they are designed for similar environments, allowing for customer choice.
“If you have a larger branch with several hundred employees, not a main data centre but a significant data centre with a half-dozen servers, you might want this,” Rogers said. “The Virtual Edition for 20TB lists at under $USD 29,000. The C2100 will be under $49,000 for the same amount of storage, but with more expandability and scalability.”
Rogers said that the flexibility of the two new offerings, and their ability to expand the portfolio to address specific use cases, meets an important channel need.
“Solution providers want a strategy that addresses all the needs of the enterprise, and these new offerings will appeal to that,” he stated.
