What separates vendors is focus and execution. In a crowded market, finding the right backup provider is no easy task. While each product has its pros and cons, finding the differentiator can be a daunting task. While Cohesity is relatively new to this space (founded in 2013), they have that focus and execution necessary to be a leader in the backup space.
But Cohesity is more than just backups. The Cohesity storage appliance not only handles your backup storage needs, but can also run your dev and test workloads. Cohesity is focused on your secondary storage needs. That secondary storage consists of any workloads or data that isn’t production. By avoiding the draw of being another primary storage vendor, Cohesity is listening to customers, learning their needs and creating a solution that can fit any size business.
The Cohesity solution was built for a virtualized (VMware-only) environment. Connecting directly to your vCenter servers and pulling your inventory allowing administrators to create backup jobs and policies. While their start was in virtualization, there are still many physical workloads in the datacenter. Creating agents for physical Windows, Linux, and SQL server all backing up to the same storage system and with the same policies prove no workloads can’t be protected by Cohesity.
But wait, there’s more!
While data protection is important, that’s only a small portion of the Cohesity offering. Running these backups directly from the Cohesity storage arrays allows you to free up primary storage resources and (potential) bottlenecks when running multiple instances of the same VM on a single array. Leveraging the SSDs that come in each Cohesity node as a cache tier, testing software patches and deployments from your backed up production VMs means that your performance doesn’t suffer. And with a built in QoS engine your dev/test workloads don’t have to affect the speed of your backups.
Cohesity provides a scale-out solution, meaning as storage demand increases so can your secondary storage space. Operating under a single namespace, as new nodes are added, your space increases without needing to reconfigure jobs to point to a new array or manually re-striping data. Cohesity has customers that have scaled up to as much as 60 nodes with over a petabyte of storage.
To the cloud!
Policy-based backups and replication ensures that your data will be available. Cohesity has the ability to distribute data across the nodes in a cluster, replicate to clusters in another locations, and also replicate your data to a cloud provider in order to satisfy offsite backup requirements. The latest addition to the Cohesity software portfolio is the DataPlatform Cloud Edition. This gives you the ability to run Cohesity in the cloud.
DataPlatform CE is more than just replicating data to the cloud. Your VMs can be backed up to your on-premises cluster and that data can be replicated to your cloud-based array. From that cloud-based array, you can then clone virtual machines to a native cloud format. This means your servers can be run in the cloud in their native format and available to test or even run in the event of migrations or datacenter outages.
Many backup and data protection software vendors are doing replication to the cloud such as Veeam and Zerto. While the features isn’t new, its addition makes Cohesity a serious contender in this space. DataPlatform CE is available currently in tech preview in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, but Cohesity hopes to release it in the first half of 2017 with support for Azure as well as AWS.
Wrapping Up
Data protection and availability is never going to be exciting. Swapping tapes and deploying agents is tedious work. A fully integrated software solution that not only protects your data, but also helps solve the problem of data sprawl, a platform for developers to test against production data in an isolated environment and the ability to migrate workloads to the cloud. That’s about as exciting as it gets in data protection and that is just the tip of the (storage) iceberg.
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Take a look at posts by my fellow delegates from Tech Field Day 12 and watch the videos here.
First Look at Cohesity Cloud Edition
The Silent Threat of Dark Data
Cohesity Provides All of Your Secondary Storage Needs
Secondary Storage is Cohesity’s Primary Goal
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Disclaimer: During Tech Field Day 12, my expenses (flight, hotel, transportation) were paid for by Gestalt IT. Cohesity provided each delegate with a gift bag, but I am under no obligation to write about any of the presented content nor am I compensated for such writing.
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