“Companies want to protect their crown jewels, which is their data. The legacy way of doing this is no longer manageable with the way the data is growing. There is now a heightened interest in being able to manage and protect data in a new generation kind of way.”
Cohesity CEO and founder – Mohit Aron
The incredible success of Facebook, Google and Amazon was born out of their ability to manage the world’s consumer data at scale. Cohesity has adopted the same architectural principles to enable the enterprise to manage all their data stored in-house, in the cloud or at the edge. In addition to backup and restore, customers can easily apply analytics and services to make sense of it all.
Let’s look first at what underpins Cohesity. The company focuses on software that provides simplified and unified data solutions, working with partner vendors including Cisco and HP Enterprise to bundle and distribute with hardware.
The Cohesity platform is formed by what are really three distinct pillars:
It’s essentially a new architecture for data management that can be viewed in a similar way to how Google manages the world’s consumer data.
The key is Cohesity’s SpanFS – a unique fully distributed share-nothing file system for scale, performance, fast-ingest, and limitless snapshots and clones. It provides the foundation to enable so much more than the bare necessities of storage and backup that we are so familiar with…and to be honest, tired of hearing about.
With Cohesity you can receive secondary data from a variety of sources, process them all through the platform, and make them available to a variety of target use cases including:
You can receive and present files using NFS, SMB and S3 protocols simultaneously and manage your secondary file and unstructured data in any way you want. The Cohesity system uses scale-out files and cluster nodes managed by Helios – a core piece of the solution – to uniquely solve problems for backing, restoring, and using your data assets.
While Cohesity does not play in the Tier 0 low latency, high-speed access activity; the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 data is where the magic happens.
Ultimately, Cohesity is a data solution that focuses on the 80% ‘under the surface,’ to:
Everyone needs backup and recovery.
So, when replacing or upgrading your data centre it makes sense that you also look at your backup solution. Often, though, we are deterred from making changes due to complexity, or the need to rip and replace the entire solution, with little perceived uplift for the cost and effort.
Cohesity, however, is trending as a valued addition to data centre solutions. The beauty of Cohesity is that you don’t need to undo any backup solutions that you’ve already got in play. You can layer it in to start with, and then extend into other areas when it suits you. You can also start receiving benefits and create uplift in how you handle your data and make it more productive for your business needs.
Cohesity has an every-cloud approach to data management, backup, and restore – this may not mean something to a lot of people, but it should.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is used to centralise fragmented silos and deliver on-premises IT services with the speed and operational efficiency of the public cloud.
Cohesity consolidates your secondary data including backups, files, and test/dev copies by using scale-out, globally deduped, available storage. The Cohesity platform integrates with all the leading public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 for archival, tiering and replication.
Secondary data, such as system backups and analytics, are connected across public cloud, private cloud, SaaS applications (like Salesforce or Microsoft 365), or even storage hardware, into one unified view and access point for your corporate data.
“Cohesity empowers customers to consolidate a patchwork of secondary silos including backup, files and objects, test/dev, archiving, analytics, and cloud with a platform that scales.”
Cohesity CEO and founder – Mohit Aron
Public cloud and on-premises solutions without Cohesity
You use a public cloud along with a strong Cisco on-premises data centre, but without Cohesity, you perform time consuming processes to:
Public cloud and on-premises solutions with Cohesity
By using Cohesity to consolidate and enable every cloud you can:
Mass data fragmentation is a problem in every business with some backups on-premises and some in platforms like Azure. As a result, we deal with constant complexity in our environments using multiple products, user interfaces, and solutions for:
Cohesity is about simplifying your data, backup and restoration management with a single UI and policy-based automation. With Cohesity, functions normally performed in disparate solutions are brought together in a single platform, not only reducing the number of tools and platforms in your environment, but also providing scalability and extensibility. Managing your secondary data workload is simpler, easier, and more productive. Your file and object access are centralised and simplified.
Search, recover and restore a file
You have a particular document that you want to restore from your backup. What can you do with Cohesity?
Use the global Google-like search function across data and metadata to find, recover or restore your document easily from any of your storage locations, whether on-premises, in the cloud or in archive.
With Cohesity you can eliminate any data protection and recovery silos by converging all your backup infrastructure on a single scale-out platform.
Protect against threats
As technology evolves so does the cyberthreat to your organisation and sophisticated malware is now targeting the backup copies that were once the key to restoring normal operations. Cohesity neutralises this threat by using a multi-layered approach to:
Use Cohesity for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
As an example, you can use Cohesity to prepare your Azure environment so you can spin up your cloud and ensure continuity from a VMware workload point of view during an event. As soon as you have the right to enter Azure you can shift all the Virtual Machines from on-premises into the cloud.
In terms of resiliency, with Cohesity there is improved data protection similar to Zerto, using near real-time replication for certain Virtual Machines between primary and disaster recovery sites. Thanks to the metadata used in the archives, you can move or recover into any other location, for example backup in AWS and recover into Azure.
Replication from one site to another, on-premises or in the cloud to guard against complete failure.
Data presents both opportunity and liability. That might sound a bit counterintuitive, but while data has become almost as valuable as currency when used effectively, it’s also become fragmented, siloed and dark across multiple servers, VMs and cloud services. This makes it hard to optimise, to use and to secure – it’s never been more vulnerable.
Applying traditional thinking to solve these problems just isn’t working anymore which is why Cohesity is gaining so much attention. The company has developed an architecture that consolidates all data and workloads onto a single software-defined platform. This collapses the silos and removes the legacy hardware overheads making previously fragmented data instantly searchable, manageable, and sharable, all in one logical place that can also be secured.
As a Cohesity partner for over 3 years, Data#3 has the experience and expertise to help you take advantage of this new architecture in your own environment. To see Cohesity in action for yourself, we can also facilitate a 30-day cloud trial based on VMware and Microsoft workloads. Contact us to register your interest.
