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Cohesity is a new storage company, headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley (at Santa Clara), with a clear focus on the secondary storage (used for backup, archiving, shares, …) and a vision of a data platform that consolidates the data across all existing silos with it’s own web-scale storage architecture.

In a previous post, I’ve wrote about the Cohesity Data Platform, a product designed to consolidate all secondary storage use cases on a unified environment that helps organizations control growing data demands.

During the last IT Press Tour #17 I’ve got the opportunity to learn more about this solution, directly the board of Cohesity: Mohit Aron (Founder & CEO) and Riccardo Di Blasio (COO and Head of Field Operations).

The company is growing fast with more than 90 employees and customers globally with a presence across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. The experience of the people cames from major companies like VMware (Di Blasio) and Nutanix (Aron).

The idea is quite simple: use the same hyperconverged approach (and the term web-scale is not a case that is the same used by Nutanix) with appliances model to build a scale a storage solution. But not targeted for the primary scope (like virtualization or DMBS clusters), but for the secondary storage and adding at those appliance lot of features useful for this scope.

So, not only the storage solution, the appliances and the scale-out storage, but also all the software that you may need to manage fileshares, development environments, backup, archive with built-in insight and analytics!

Great (and, in my opinion, ambitious) goal, also considering that there are a lot of companies and solutions vertically on all those cases.

But a clear vision and truly reality that the secondary storage is actually too fragments and too much siloes based:

There alre already some solutions to consolidate the storage part, but Cohesity is trying to consolidate also software and solutions part:

But they know well that replace several stacks could be difficult, so for each user cases they can work as a complete replacement, or a step by step replacement, starting from the storage consolidation aspect.

For example, for backup they can be used as a simple backup target for other backup programs, but they provide also native backup capability (actually still limited, compared to other products): in this way could be first step, and maybe you can use Cohesity directly to manage the backup of some unprotected virtual infrastructure.

Cohesity appliance are able to talk directly with vCenter Server and provide agentless backup (using VDAP) of all VMs. Actually they don’t provide any high level application level restore (like single email restore), but this kind of feature is on the roadmap, like the ability to support other hypervisor or also physical systems.

For other cases, the C2000 appliances can act as a scalable fileserver working both with NFS v3 and SMB 3, in the future will add object and potentially block mode such iSCSI.

For sure the interesting aspect is not the web-scale model on the technical point of view, but the “cloud” model in the economic point of view: you can pay it with a As-You-Grow Model!

Disclaimer: Condor Consulting Group has invited me to this even and they will paid for accommodation and travels, but I am not compensated for my time and I’m not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than me.

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.