Cohesity believes that their bringing compute to where the data sits will allow customers to illuminate previously Dark Data and put it to use in generating better business outcomes.

Hyperconverged secondary storage vendor Cohesity has announced that new capabilities from their Pegasus 6.3 release now enable customers to run applications from third parties directly on the Cohesity platform, as well as Cohesity applications. A newly-announced software developer kit [SDK] gives customers the APIs, documentation and tools to build their own apps on the platform. A new Marketplace – the first for a backup vendor – allows third party vendors to have their apps enabled for the platform, and will also let channel partners make apps they have built for the platform available to a broader audience.

“Our founder, Mohit Aron, saw data fragmentation, data inefficiency, and Dark Data as three critical problem that led him to create Cohesity,” said Raj Dutt, Director of Product Marketing at Cohesity. “We started out by simplifying backup, and then added more use cases to deal with fragmentation. Last year we added Helios to simplify management and address data efficiency. What is left is the problem of Dark Data.”

This is what Cohesity is addressing here, by enabling enterprises to run apps on the same platform where the backup and unstructured data reside.

“We are introducing the capability to make backup and unstructured data productive, by bringing compute to where the data sits,” Dutt said. “That allows customers to run applications directly on the platform, to drive insight by allowing containerized third-party applications directly on the Cohesity platform.”

Dutt said that this capability is based on three main pillars.

“The first is that our SpanFS now runs containerized applications,” Dutt indicated. “This is a feature from our 6.3 release that is being made available early. That’s a unique capability.”

The second element is the new Cohesity Marketplace. At launch, four solutions are hosted there: Splunk Enterprise; two antivirus applications, SentinelOne and the open source Clam Anti-Virus; and Imanis Data, which is also a backup platform but is specifically focused on NoSQL and Hadoop.

“These four applications are baby steps,” Dutt said. “We are the first backup vendor to introduce a marketplace, and this is our Version One.”

Dutt indicated that the Marketplace applications will be very focused, however.

“This is not a Salesforce AppExchange model with thousands of applications,” he said. “We will continue to add new applications, but we will make sure that they address core data protection. We are focusing on two applications of this – business outcomes and operational efficiency – and the main categories we will focus on are data protection, security, compliance and analytics.”

The third pillar of the strategy is that App SDK.

“This gives tools to customers to build their own applications,” Dutt said. “The SDK is for home-grown containerized apps, not to move over third party apps from an ISV. But we will work with ISVs to bring the app on the marketplace.”

Dutt said that with the Marketplace and the SDK, Cohesity enables customers to make backup data productive.

“Customers used to have to build a parallel structure to support their applications, which meant multiple problems,” he said. “Now, customers no longer need to ‘lift and shift’ data. They can gain deep visibility and insights from dark data using Cohesity and third party applications, and can build SDK applications to address their unique circumstances. They can pick and choose what applications will make most sense for them.”

ISVs on the marketplace will also benefit, Dutt stated. In addition to being exposed to more customers, they will get access to more data.

“On ISVs, looking at large amounts of data sets is a major advantage,” he said. “By working on Cohesity, ISVs will have a much larger set – 80 per cent of all enterprise data – to work with.”

For Cohesity’s channel partners, there are several pluses here as well.

“The ability to run containerized applications on our platform is a differentiation,” Dutt said. “No one else does this. In addition, partners can use our SDK themselves to build applications for their customers. That’s especially important in sectors like health care when customers typically don’t have the ability to build applications. Finally, partners van build and submit apps to the marketplace.”

Both the Marketplace and SDK are generally available now. The Cohesity Pegasus 6.3 release from which they come is scheduled for release within the next month.