Cohesity – Secondary storage consolidation

While almost the entire storage industry is interested in making the storage ready for mission critical environments/data, Cohesity thouhgt the other way. They started working to re-define the way Secondary data being dealt. Their presentation at Storage Field Day 8 discussed their vision and how they achieved it.

Cohesity storage in simple words is – Secondary storage consolidation.

Every year, multi billion Dollars are being spent in managing the Secondary data and those are still being managed inefficiently. These stats made Cohesity design solutions for Secondary data workflows (including Data protection, Analytics, File shares, DevOps etc… ).

Cohesity Architecture : The requirements varies with different workflows and this is the biggest challenge in having a single system handling all of them. Cohesity makes use of high-performance commodity hardware. And the distributed filesystem, OASIS (Open Architecture for Scalable Intelligent Storage) is the intelligence behind the Cohesity functions. OASIS operating environment enables various functions including infinite linear scalability, mixed workload, global deduplication, SnapTree, self-healer etc…

Implementing Cohesity solutions for data protection helps customers to easily setup policies etc.. and have instant recovery of data. SnapTree clones are another highlight from Cohesity. Clones instant and we can have a reduced RPO with frequent clones. Cohesity solutions have a detailed indexing at different levels and this is customizable also. This helps in detailed built-in analytics for different matrices. Along-with built-in analytics, Cohesity solutions support custom analytics also with AWB (Analytics WorkBench). It helps the customers to run their own code for various analysis on their data.

Hardware : Cohesity C2000 series hardware include C2300 and C2500. Both these are 4-node blocks with Intel Xeon processors. Upto 6.4 TB PCIe FLASH (per block) and 10 GbE & 1 GbE interfaces are also supported. Detailed hardware specifications sheet is available here.

Closing thoughts : Mohit Aron (Founder and CEO of Cohesity) given enough care in choosing the experienced technicians and managed to raise enough fund for execution. This earned them a spot in the top startups of the last year by CRN, Forbes, Business Insider etc… With just a few months from the new product announcement, Cohesity have to do a lot of hardwork in making a good customer base. Recently they have appointed the former NetApp CEO Daniel Warmenhoven to their board of directors. These additional experiences will surely help them in taking strategic decisions.

Additional resources : 

You may find additional reading here and presentation videos from the Tech Field Day website here.

Visit the Cohesity website for product overview and additional resources. There are a few good blog posts from SFD8 delegates Enrico Signoretti, Dan Frith, Scott D. Lowe, Mark May  and Jon Klaus.

Here you can find more posts from me on SFD8.

Disclaimer: My travel and accommodation expenses for the SFD8 (Storage Field Day 8) event were paid by the Tech Field Day team. I am not requested to post about event content and I am not getting paid for any posts or for the time I spend during the event.