At the AWS Re:Invent event, Cohesity is emphasizing the significance of the AWS partnership to the company’s growing cloud business, by formally announcing and emphasizing the significance of AWS-related enhancements that have become available.

Today, hyperconverged secondary storage vendor Cohesity is formally announcing further integrations that expand their relationship with AWS. The announcements were made in conjunction with the AWS Re:Invent event in Las Vegas, where Cohesity is in attendance this week at Booth #2620.

“The story here is that we are continuing to expand our solution set with AWS, in three different solutions areas,” said Sameer Nori, Cohesity’s Director of Product Marketing. “The first is around the integration we have had with AWS Snowball, AWS’s petabyte-scale transport solution that moves large amounts of data in and out of the AWS Cloud securely. This is something that we were already supporting, but we never talked about it. This is the first time that we have announced it in the market. It is a significant in its extension of long-term retention data use cases.” Customers are able to use the Cohesity interface to create a policy-based protection task, and archive data to Snowball securely, and at a much lower cost than moving the data through the Internet.

The second component of the announcement is that Cohesity is now able to provide full lifecycle management for disaster recovery, with failover and failback, in the AWS cloud.

“This reflects an extension of our capabilities here, which has come into being over the last three months or so,” Nori said. “It allows for the use of the AWS cloud as a full-fledged disaster recovery site by providing complete lifecycle management with full automation capabilities.” Specifically, Cohesity has further developed automated policies at multiple steps of the DR lifecycle, enabling customers to use this automation to activate backup VMs on AWS in a DR incident, and then bring the workloads back to the original location when the incident has ended.

The enhancements to backup and recovery processes in the AWS cloud also reflect an increased level of automation.

“We have improved our cloud-based backup and recovery processes in the latest release of our platform, to better back up cloud-native virtual machines that are in the AWS infrastructure,” Nori stated. “This leverages our integration with Amazon Elastic Block Store [EBS] snapshot APIs to provide native cloud backup capabilities and leverage everything from the cloud perspective that we bring to the table.”

Like the other announcements, this is not a brand new integration, but is comparatively recent, and is being formally announced now.

“This capability will offer a Cohesity solution, for customers looking to do more backup in the cloud itself, who have often been using other products,” Nori said. “This integration brings our platform capabilities around backup up significantly, and that’s an important new capability.”

Nori noted that these capabilities address things Cohesity’s partner Advisory Council recently raised, about their desire to incorporate more cloud value-add services.

“From a partner standpoint, this means two things,” he said. “Partners should feel confident about our broad portfolio of cloud solutions, and their ability to present a complete set of services. The second is that our cloud business is strong and growing fast, and this gives partners an opportunity to increase their cloud practice and focus.”

Cohesity also released some data indicating strong growth in their business with AWS over the past year.

“We are seeing extremely strong growth in our business with AWS, in terms of the number of customers, and the amount of AWS Cloud consumption,” Nori indicated.

The number of Cohesity customers who have integrations with AWS tripled in the second half of Cohesity’s most recent fiscal year, which ended July 30, compared to the first half of the fiscal year. Cohesity now has more than 75 joint customers with AWS, including Air Bud Entertainment, LendingClub, the San Francisco Giants, and other lighthouse clients. Total petabytes of AWS Cloud consumption on Cohesity’s platform has grown by 17x since December 2017.

Cohesity has a broad cloud platform strategy, and Nori indicated they are also seeing growth along the same lines in the Azure and Google Clouds, although the Google business is a clear Number Three.

“We are, however, very excited about the AWS partnership, and we expect to bring more significant capabilities around AWS to the market,” Nori concluded.