The new Cohesity solution for ROBO is specifically designed for either HPE or Cisco servers, and those vendors and their joint channel partners with Cohesity are the Go-to-Market for this.
The Cohesity HPE ROBO appliance
Today, Cohesity is announcing a Cohesity solution for ROBO, which combines Cohesity software with certified servers from Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Aimed squarely at enterprise customers with significant numbers of ROBO deployments, the solution is targeted at an edge market that Cohesity sees as growing at a near-exponential pace.
“This is an expansion of our data management capabilities into ROBO,” said Raj Dutt, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Cohesity. “We already have a solution there, but we are expanding the capability at the edge.”
Dutt cited Gartner data indicating massive forecast growth in the enterprise edge.
“Data growth as Gartner predicts it will be exponential in the ROBO locations, with a 30x data growth in the edge by 2025, and with enterprise workloads at the edge increasing from 1% to 30% of by 2025,” he stressed. “The majority of large enterprises don’t have technical resources at the edge to deal with this.”
Cohesity has served the ROBO market with Cohesity DataPlatform Virtual Edition, but it is very different from this new offering. While the older offering has been a software-only version that runs in a virtual environment over a broad array of hypervisors, the new one is appliance-based, on qualified Cisco and HPE servers.
“Customer demand has increasingly been for a new hardware-based appliance solution,” Dutt stated. The appliances will combine backup and recovery, file and object services, and cloud archival in a single platform. They require no dedicated resources, unlike the Cohesity DataPlatform Virtual Edition, and are designed for plug-and-play generalist use.
“The software is full-featured, with all the features of the core,” Dutt said. “It is optimized for opex, has simplified management for workload consolidation and easy deployment, and can all be managed through the single console.”
Dutt said that the solution fits multiple uses cases, with a minimum number of 50-100 locations.
The Cohesity Cisco ROBO appliance
“While it is for small ROBO locations, this is NOT a solution for SMBs, he emphasized. It’s enterprises. The software is the same as in the core. The multiple use cases include chain restaurants, large retailers, large pharmas with remote offices, distribution, and warehouse centres that need small footprint boxes. It’s also not just for backup, and includes recovery, file services, object storage, and policy-based data mobility. It replaces multiple point solutions, and reduces bandwidth and cost.”
The appliances also have full integrated cybersecurity, much higher than typical ROBO sites, which have some level of defense but not the same level as the core. The cybersecurity includes immutable file system, DataLock, anomaly detection, data encryption, and anti-ransomware.
While other companies also make servers, the plan is to focus on HPE and Cisco.
“We are a software company,” Dutt said. “HPE and Cisco are strategic Go-to-Market partners. Our goal is to continue to invest with these two, which are the ones that customers have asked for a solution with. We will also not have a Cohesity branded version of this.”
The appliances will be available through HPE, Cisco and their partners by the spring.
“All our partners work with HPE or Cisco,” Dutt said. “This will provide them with a differentiated solution that generates increased revenue with an expanded TAM. Not all partners play in those verticals where this will sell. It lets them get into those discussions with large retailers.”
Training for partners has already begun.
“We are providing them with incentives and helping them with demand generation,” Dutt said.
