Cohesity says a new integration with Office 365 Exchange Online, support for the new Azure Data Box, and new failover and failback capabilities for Azure DR should make it easier to sell joint Azure-Cohesity solutions, which have shown strong recent momentum.
Hyperconverged secondary storage vendor Cohesity has released multiple net-new integrations with Microsoft solutions. They have integrated with Office 365 Exchange Online for the first time, bringing the integration they already had with Exchange to the SaaS world. They have announced new support for the Azure Data Box data transfer appliance, which moves large datasets to Azure. New failover and failback capabilities for Azure disaster recovery were also introduced. Last – and from Cohesity’s point of view likely not least – they are also publicizing the growing strength of their relationship, and the exponential growth in their joint customers. The announcements were made at the Microsoft Azure event in Orlando.
“These announcements extend over multiple solution areas, where customers can benefit from one joint platform solution between Microsoft and Cohesity,” said Sameer Nori, Cohesity’s Director of Product Marketing.
The new integration with Office 365 Exchange Online is a first for Cohesity.
“We had support for Exchange before, but this is the first time we have supported the SaaS version,” Nori said. “It will be fully available by the end of the calendar year, and a beta will be available at the end of the month.”
Nori stressed that the data protection capabilities that Cohesity provides go far beyond what is natively available in Azure.
“Office 365 has some data protection capabilities built-in, but it is not what I would call an enterprise grade solution in this area,” he said. “What we bring to the table is the first Web-scale approach for Office 365 backup online. Our auto-protect and auto-discover capabilities provide addition automation, and we enable both automatic addition of new mailboxes and very granular recovery of mailboxes and emails. All these things, and others down the road, enable superior enterprise data protection.”
Cohesity is also announcing a new integration with Azure Data Box, the Azure version of AWS Snowball, which transfers large amount of data. Data Box has been in preview mode for almost a year, and Microsoft is making additional announcements around it at Ignite.
“Data Box is a data transfer appliance, to move large amounts of data when the network is an issue,” Nori said. “Data Box takes these large amounts of data, loads it into the appliance. and ships it to Azure. Our integration is an extension of our long-term retention use case, allowing them to archive data to Data Box in the same way that they archive data to Azure Blob storage. Customers benefit from the same Cohesity UI and workflow.” This integration is available now.
“We are also announcing new failover and failbox capabilities for Azure disaster recovery, to provide a full lifecycle approach to that,” Nori said. They let admins easily spin up virtual machines in Azure based on on-premises backups, and then bring those workloads back to the original location at the end of the disaster.
Finally, Cohesity also announced a dramatic increase in joint customers using joint Cohesity and Microsoft Azure offerings, with the number of joint customers adopting Cohesity’s DataPlatform natively integrated with Azure increasing rapidly in the second half, compared to the first half of Cohesity’s most recent fiscal year, which ended July 31.
“We are seeing almost exponential growth in terms of the number of customers adopting our joint solutions, with almost 3x in last two quarters compared with the two before that, Nori said. This includes a number of high profile reference customers, like Brown University, HKS, and Schneider Electric, across a broad range of verticals that include education, financial services, utilities, transportation, hospitality, communications, legal, and public sector.
“This momentum is ideal, as the capabilities we have in multiple areas in joint solutions with Microsoft shows customers that we can make the best use of Azure,” Nori added. “We are also making continuing strides on our go-to-market with Microsoft in Azure, in terms of the investments that we are both making.”
