Helios is the first SaaS-based application on top of the Cohesity platform, something that was always part of the company’s vision, and which provides new data and app orchestration and management capabilities.

Hyperconverged secondary storage vendor Cohesity has launched Helios, a new SaaS-based data and app orchestration and management solution. It is an optional paid offering on top of the Cohesity platform, and which leverages machine learning capabilities to provide new operational efficiencies and to drive new business insights.

“Part of [CEO and Founder] Mohit Aron’s grand plan was always getting organizations to think of Infrastructure as a platform,” said Raj Dutt, Product Marketing Manager at Cohesity. “Helios is the latest of our products, and our first SaaS-based offering on top of the platform.”

Dutt highlighted Helios’ infrastructure management capabilities, several of which provide functionality that is entirely new for Cohesity.

“Cohesity has always had policy-based automation, although we have never called it machine learning,” he stated. “With Helios, this is true machine learning. It begins with operational efficiencies that look at how infrastructure is being used, from a global scale, and how It can be improved. A machine-learning based tool, Smart Assist, gives a predictive recommendation on when you have to bring in more resources to meet SLAs – much in the same way that electric cars say how far you can go before you need to recharge. These machine learning capabilities give the recommendations to the IT admin so they can make informed decisions.”

These capabilities allow Helios to auto-schedule jobs based on SLA requirements.

“Helios looks at SLA requirements, what it needs, and what it has, and based on those three things will turn down other requests and give all available resource to a priority job, to make sure SLAs can be met,” Dutt said.

“It benefits from multi-customer management, that allow customers not just to view things, but to control elements,” Dutt said. “Admins can roll out multi-customer clusters and take control at a global scale. That is unique.”

Helios utilizes peer comparisons from appropriate operational metadata of other customers globally to assess infrastructure utilization and determine best practices.

“For example, you can look at how short your backup windows are compared to other organizations,” Dutt indicated. “It’s based on similar workloads, so it makes an apples to apples comparison.”

Helios also provides operational benefits around the simplifying of business planning and continuity.

“It provides a proactive health check, not just for software anomalies but hardware as well,” Dutt said.  “Anomalies that don’t follow best practices, such as configuration validation issues, or encryption not being turned on, will be identified for the admin.”

Other automated capabilities improve efficiency in different ways.

“For example, Helios might recommend the 2.5 version of a specific software instead of the newer 2.6 version, if it is better optimized for what you are doing,” Dutt said. “It also allows admins to offload the case management of non-mission critical things, so the human can focus on the most critical.”

Helios has been armed as well with a powerful new search capability.

“We did have search in the platform before, but this both takes it global and makes it actionable,” Dutt said “Based on what it finds, it provides actionable recommendations to protect or recover data.” It searches within both data and metadata, and across all clusters.

While all these capabilities were about operational enhancement, Helios also provides a Cohesity Analytics Workbench to drive meaningful business insights from untapped data.

“The Analytics Workbench is where things really get interesting, in the way that it brings compute capabilities to data,” Dutt said. At launch, the Workbench has three hosted applications: Pattern Finder; Password Detection; and Video Compression.

“The Pattern Finder application detects patterns, searching a large range of secondary data source file for strings of characters that fit sensitive data patterns, like Social Security numbers and phone numbers,” Dutt stated. “That’s important for compliance.”

The Smart Detection application searches across global data sets to uncover passwords that fail to meet best practices, such as including personal or company names, or storing the password in plain text, while the Video Compression application reduces the size of large media files while optimizing space.

“Helios lets partners bring even more value for customers going forward,” Dutt said. “None of our competitors can offer all these things in a single package.”

Helios is a purchasable product, not a free service. It is available now.