Cohesity is looking to move beyond its hyper-converged backup roots with an aggressive drive to attract customers looking for file and object storage as principal use cases.
Last summer, hyper-converged secondary storage vendor Cohesity announced the release of the Orion 5.0 release of their platform, which added file and object storage support to their platform and allowed it to serve as a searchable archive. Now they are making a concerted push into that space, which includes publicizing customers who purchased Cohesity principally for those use cases, or who have added them since.
“With the introduction of 5.0, we added the capability of doing file and object storage,” said Raj Dutt, Product Marketing Manager at Cohesity. “Since then, we have added additional functionality and seen an uptick in customer adoption for these uses. Now we are announcing that we are actively open for business in file and object storage.”
Dutt said that while most of their customers who are using the platform for file and object storage started with the traditional data protection use case, and branched out from that, they are starting to see customers whose first use case was these newer functions.
“One of these customers – a law firm which had acquired other law firms – started looking at us when they were looking for a solution that would help them manage their files,” Dutt said. “They did a proof-of-concept on us, and we were successful. While the opportunity started as a file storage opportunity, and started at the edge, their backup was coming up for renewal in the next six months, and we moved into that. So while most of our customers started with data protection and added file storage, we are now seeing others start with files.”
Manhattan Associates, which provides inventory, supply chain and omni-channel commerce technology, is a more typical reference customer, which started looking for backup, and wound up replacing their legacy backup with a platform that combined data protection and file storage and long-term archiving.
“Manhattan saw the benefit of an HCI platform and using us to consolidate all their secondary workloads, including file storage,” Dutt indicated. This included long-term archiving in AWS, allowing Manhattan to eliminate the use of tape for archiving.
Dutt stressed that the enormous rate of growth of data assists Cohesity’s value proposition more than ever.
“It’s not news any more that the data is growing – but the rate – 800 per cent over the next five years, continues to be very high, with most of that being unstructured data,” he said. “Organizations now have fragmented environments with dark data – even cloud providers have siloes with different clouds to manage different workloads. We consolidate everything on a single platform that runs from the edge to the cloud, eliminating the licensing siloes, and provide customers with a huge advantage because they can work on data in the cloud.”
“We are robust and enterprise-ready, so we can sell aggressively into the file and object space,” said Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Head of Product Management and Marketing. “We are now ready to go into that market.”
