Concurrent with the acquisition, Cohesity also announces a new version of their platform which incorporates the newly acquired technology

Hyperconverged secondary storage vendor Cohesity has announced that they have acquired Imanis Data, which makes an enterprise backup and data management solution specifically for distributed databases like NoSQL and Hadoop. Cohesity has also announced a new version of their platform which incorporates the Imanis Data capabilities within a unified offering.

Imanis Data uses a machine-learning powered approach to data management to provide data protection to modern distributed databases like NoSQL, Hadoop, MongoDB and Cassandra. They had previously been strategic partners with Cohesity, and their offering had been available in the Cohesity Marketplace.

“Our mission is to provide an end-to-end solution for backup use cases,” said Michael Porat, a Cisco veteran who joined Cohesity as VP of Strategy and Business Development about six months ago. “We could cover the majority of these use cases with our own platform. Imanis Data has a very broad platform for distributed databases. We partnered with them, and got a good understanding of their technology. We decided that they also seemed to be he best technology to address this use case. Acquiring them gave us time to market, because it would have taken a long time to develop this. All the stars were aligned for an acquisition.

“The customer doesn’t want to manage multiple platforms, so this integrated platform makes their life exponentially easier,” Porat emphasized.

“Our focus has always been to address the problem of fragmentation,” said Raj Dutt, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Cohesity. “Most enterprise class workloads are x86 hardware workloads, but we have been getting a lot of requests from customers to support distributed databases. We initially responded to this with the application route, with Imanis Data running on our platform. We then decided that it made sense to have an integrated solution to address the problem of fragmentation, and bring all these workloads onto the same platform.”

These distributed workloads are still a relatively small part of the data centre market, but they are growing, and they have an importance which extends beyond their share of the market.

“Traditional workloads are still the lion’s share in the data centre, but the big investment is now in the distributed workloads,” Dutt said.

“Our customers typically have a huge install base, but a relatively small footprint in these unless they are born in the cloud,” Porat indicated. “However, from a mindshare perspective, these are important because a lot of new stuff is developed on this. So while it isn’t big today in terms of dollars, it is in terms of mindshare.”

This is also a market where third-party solutions have had limited deployment until now.

“Some people think they do not need to protect distributed workloads,” Dutt said. “These fall into two camps. One thinks that they don’t need to protect stateless, containerized modern workloads. The other relies on their agent-based native tools, which won’t work with significant scalability.”

Complicating things further is the fact that some customers have significant numbers of different distributed databases. Dutt said that 38 per cent of customers have over 20 of them.

“A year ago, when people talked about these databases it was MongoDB and Cassandra,” Porat said. “Now you have Couchbase, Hadoop and others, for specific use cases. The breadth of the Imanis Data solution gives us the ability to handle all of them.”

The Imanis Data team, under the leadership of Imanis’ co-Founder and co-CEO, Nitin Donde, will be  joining Cohesity.

At the same time that they announced the acquisition, Cohesity also announced a new version of their platform. As might be expected, given that they have already had an integration with Imanis Data, the distributed database support is now part of the new platform. In addition, the platform will also be adding new internally-developed support for Kubernetes containerized applications, and extending backup and recovery capabilities for Microsoft Office 365 to include Microsoft OneDrive.

“This extends the support we extended to Office 365 last September to Exchange Online, Dutt said. “Further developing our SaaS support with OneDrive, along with the containerized and distributed  database capabilities, make this a complete single Web-scale platform.”

Dutt said that these new capabilities will appeal to Cohesity channel partners on several levels.

“It will provide them with a truly differentiated, integrated solution,” he stated. “It will also expand their Total Addressable Market, because customers who adopt these modern workloads haven’t been leveraging backups, and they will be. This will also provide partners with a recurring revenue stream.”

Cohesity backup and recovery capabilities for HDFS and NoSQL distributed databases are available now. Protection for Kubernetes and Microsoft OneDrive will be available this summer.