Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 15.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Cohesity recently presented at Storage Field Day 15. It’s not the first time I’ve spoken about them, and you can read a few of my articles on them here and here. You can see their videos from Storage Field Day 15 here, and download a PDF copy of my rough notes from here.

The Data Centre Is Boring

Well, not boring exactly. Okay, it’s a little boring. Cohesity talk a lot about the concept of secondary storage and, in their view, most of the storage occupying the DC is made up of secondary storage. Think of your primary storage tier as your applications, and your secondary storage as being comprised of:

• Backups;
• Archival data;
• Analytics; Test/Dev workloads; and
• File shares.

In other words, it’s a whole lot of unstructured data. Cohesity like to talk about the “storage iceberg”, and it’s a pretty reasonable analogy for what’s happening.

[Image courtesy of Cohesity]

Cohesity don’t see all this secondary data as simply a steaming pile of unmanaged chaos and pain. Instead, they see it as a potential opportunity for modernisation. The secondary storage market has delivered, in Cohesity’s view, an opportunity to “[c]lean up the mess left by enterprise backup products”. The idea is that you can use an “Apple-like UI”, operating at “Google-like scale”, to consolidate workloads on the Cohesity DataPlatform and then take advantage of copy data management to really extract value from that data.

The Cohesity Difference

So what differentiates Cohesity from other players in the secondary storage space?

Mohit Aron (pictured above) took us though a number of features in the Cohesity DataPlatform that are making secondary storage both useful and interesting. These include:

• Global Space Efficiency
  • Variable length dedupe
  • Erasure coding
• QoS
  • Multi workload isolation
  • Noisy neighbour prevention
• Instant Mass Restore
  • Any point in time
  • Highly available
• Data Resiliency
  • Strict consistency
  • Ensures data integrity
• Cloud/Apps Integration
  • Multiprotocol
  • Universal access

I’ve been fortunate enough to have some hands on experience with the Cohesity solution and can attest that these features (particularly things like storage efficiency and resiliency) aren’t just marketing. There are some other neat features, such as public cloud support with AWS and Azure that are also worthy of further investigation.

Thoughts And Further Reading

There’s a lot to like about Cohesity’s approach to leveraging secondary storage in the data centre. For a very long time, the value of secondary storage hasn’t been at the forefront of enterprise analytics activities. Or, more bluntly put, copy data management has been something of an ongoing fiasco, with a number of different tools and groups within organisations being required to draw value from the data that’s just sitting there. Cohesity don’t like to position themselves simply as a storage target for data protection, because the DataPlatform is certainly capable of doing a lot more than that. While the messaging has occasionally been confusing, the drive of the company to deliver a comprehensive data management solution that extends beyond traditional solutions shouldn’t be underestimated. Coupled with a relentless focus on ease of use and scalability and the Cohesity offering looks to be a great way of digging in to the “dark data” in your organisation to make sense of what’s going on.

There are still situations where Cohesity may not be the right fit (at the moment), particularly if you have requirements around non-x86 workloads or particularly finicky (read: legacy) enterprise applications. That said, Cohesity are working tirelessly to add new features to the solution at a rapid pace, and are looking to close the gap between themselves and some of the more established players in the market. The value here, however, isn’t just in the extensive data protection capability, but also in the analytics that can be leveraged to provide further insight into your organisation’s protected data. It’s sometimes not immediately obvious why you need to be mining your unstructured data for information. But get yourself the right tools and the right people and you can discover a whole lot of very useful (and sometimes scary) information about your organisation that you wouldn’t otherwise know. And it’s that stuff that lies beneath the surface that can have a real impact on your organisation’s success. Even if it is a little boring.