Cohesity is next up in my flurry of Tech Field Day 12 previews with their secondary storage play. I just recently got to see Cohesity present as they were a sponsor at our Toronto VMUG which took place at the legendary Hockey Hall of Fame, so I guess you could say that Cohesity is the only vendor I’ve seen present in the same building as the Stanley Cup. Okay, I’ll try and get the Canadian out of me here and continue on with the post…
[symple_box color=”yellow” fade_in=”false” float=”center” text_align=”left” width=””]Disclaimer: As a Tech Field Day 12 delegate all of my flight, travel, accommodations, eats, and drinks are paid for. However I did not receive any compensation nor am I required to write anything in regards to the event or the presenting companies. All that said, this is done at my own discretion.[/symple_box]
Who is Cohesity?
Cohesity was founded in 2013 (I’m detecting somewhat of a Tech Field Day 12 pattern here) by Mohit Aron, former CTO and co-founder of Nutanix. You can certainly see Mohit’s previous experience at Google and Nutanix shining through in Cohesity’s offering – Offering complete visibility into an organizations “dark data” on their secondary storage appliance.
Secondary Storage?
Cohesity’s appliance in itself doesn’t claim to be a primary storage array – they aim at the secondary storage market. Think of non mission critical data – data such as backups, file shares and test/dev copies. All this data is a perfect fit for a Cohesity appliance. How this data gets there and what we can do with it all lies within Cohesity’s DataProtect and DataPlatform software!
DataProtect and DataPlatform
For the most part, the on boarding of all this data onto their appliance is done through backups – Cohesity’s DataProtect platform to be more specific. DataProtect seamlessly integrates into your vSphere environment and begins to back up your infrastructure using a set of predefined and custom policies, or SLA’s if you will. Policies are setup to define things such as RPO – how often we want to back up, as well as retention policies for archival – Backups over 30 days shall be archived to Azure/Amazon/Google.
Once the data resides within Cohesity’s appliance, another technology DataPlatform takes over – DataPlatform provides a Google-esque search across all the data, be it on premises or archived to cloud. Here is where we can do some risk management, searching for patterns such as credit card number or social insurance numbers. DataPlatform also allows us to leverage our backups for items such as test/dev, creating a complete copy of our environments very fast – isolated from our actual production networks.
With the release of 3.0, we have also seen physical Windows and Linux support added into the platform – so just as we protect our VMs, we can protect our physical servers, along with the applications such as SQL/Exchange/Sharepoint that are running on them.
With a best of VMworld 2016 award under their belts I’m pretty excited to go deeper into Cohesity – and expect to hear a lot more as to what their next steps might be! Stay up to date on Cohesity and all things mwpreston/Tech Field Dayby watching my page here – and see all there is to know about Tech Field Day 12 on the main landing page here! Thanks for reading and see yah in November 🙂
