There are four main enhancements, one of which is the addition of file and object storage support to give the Cohesity platform an archiving capability as well as backup.
Hyper-converged secondary storage vendor Cohesity has broadened its functionality with the Orion 5.0 release of their platform. The addition of file and object storage support to the massively scalable platform now allows Orion to serve as a searchable archive. While this moves Cohesity’s functionality beyond data protection, they have also enhanced the data protection capabilities, adding virtual support beyond vSphere, NAS support beyond NetApp, and automation to their Oracle support. They also announced general availability of their Cloud Edition and their new SnapFS and SnapTree enhancements to the file system underlying the platform.
“This release extends our vision of consolidating secondary storage, so that you can use our data platform to do more than just back up,” said Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Head of Product Management and Marketing.
The enhancements begin with the addition of support for files and objects on Orion, allowing it to become a searchable archive for large amounts of structured and unstructured data, as well as a backup repository.
“We had been natively protecting data protection workloads, and now we are adding native support for files and objects,” Rogers said. “This will let companies consolidate all their records on Cohesity. It will also allow them to stop storing redundant data and stop making 10 to 12 copies. With this, they only make the copies that they need.”
Rogers said that customers may naturally ask whether the platform will scale with all this additional data on it, so to respond to that, Cohesity is releasing data showing near-linear scaling on a massive 256 node cluster, for IDD sequential writes and reads, and random writes and reads.
“No one else can do this linear scaling,” Rogers said. “It’s Google-like scaling. We can scale up and instantly restore, while traditional backup takes an hour to just do the prep work. That’s the advantage of having an underlying file system. We knew all this before, and we talked about it with customers. Now though. we have the benchmarking for it. We can also restore beyond the last backup if desired, also instantly, with our SnapTree technology.”
Cohesity is also amplifying what it supports in its traditional data protection, with the slogans ‘Any hypervisor’ and ‘Any NAS.’
“We are significantly expanding our data protection footprint,” Rogers said. “Before, we offered virtual support for VMware VSphere. Now we also support Hyper-V [2012R2 and 2016], Nutanix AHV, and Linux KVM. Before, we supported NetApp NAS. Now we support any NAS. We are also updating our Oracle RMAN backup. We’ve always had Oracle support, but there was always a requirement to do some scripting, and we have eliminated that.”
The third component to the announcement is the General Availability of the Cohesity Cloud Edition.
“The GA is with the Azure cloud, and it can be ordered from the Microsoft marketplace,” Rogers said. “AWS and Google will follow.”
Finally, Cohesity is announcing new enabling technology, with enhancements to the file system underlying their platform.
“SpanFS spans individual server nodes and workloads, and marries our scale-out technology and the SnapTree pointer system for unlimited snaps and clones,” Rogers stated. “That’s really unique – that combination of scale-out plus these enterprise features. We can do what Isilon and NetApp do, but on a Web scale basis.”
