Why Cohesity
I hope it goes without saying I wanted to work for a company that shares my professional values around winning the right way, customer focus, and something our founder, Mohit Aron says, “Stay humble and keep learning.” That statement itself is pretty humble from the lead architect behind the google file system (GFS), along with founding one of technology’s most successful startups in recent years, Nutanix.
Of course I also needed to work for a company I believe has luminescent technology, something that can actually help organizations reach their objectives easier and faster. I joined Cohesity because I firmly believe that the simplest solution always has the lowest TCO, and managing data has to get radically simpler.
The Problem with Today’s Storage Offerings
The primary storage market has undergone a serious transformation in the past 5 years, thanks largely to NAND flash, which is THE game changer in primary storage today. The transition is well under way and primary storage providers offer terrific choices for customers looking to upgrade their old primary production storage systems with a flashy new storage array or hyperconverged appliances.
Are newer storage systems faster? You bet! More efficient? Certainly. Simpler? Like, completely eliminating islands of backup/file/object/cloud storage? Eh, not really. While primary storage today is faster and more efficient than ever before, I noticed that many of my customer’s most insistent demands were not being addressed. These needs include (but are not restricted to):
- Comprehensive consolidation of data silos
- Modernized data protection and ransomware strategy
- Improved operational visibility (think dark data)
- App mobility (from site à site, site à cloud or cloud à cloud)
- Ability to scale up/out
- Tech refresh & lifecycle management
A system for managing data storage that is truly simple would address most of these needs, but the problem is that massive data fragmentation has led to dark silos of fractured infrastructure that is vulnerable to threats, immobile, inefficient and impossible to extract any value from. No commercially available platform can really address all these needs, at least not until now.
We are entering into a new era where data growth is exponential, and merely updating new storage media and protocols has done very little to solve these newer fragmentation, mobility and visibility difficulties. Historically, attempting to address these large-scale customer needs with a single service, vendor or application is like trying to strap up another horse to pull your buggy… It might go a little faster but it’s more complex and it will never be a car.
Back it Up, Back it Up – Beep, Beep, Beep
Take for example, data protection. Let’s say your company puts out an RFP for a complete backup solution. One particular vendor offers data protection software for backup & DR. After a nice demo, this starts to sound pretty good but upon further examination, a complete solution would require a server OS to run the software (like Windows), a general purpose files system (like NTFS), and a disk appliance sized to your best projections for several years.
Even within just this one area of secondary data, we have given an example of fragmentation of GUI’s, multiple vendor relationships, support contracts and so on. Even worse, at large scale, this type of traditional backup architecture will require multiple proxy servers and disk silos to spread the load, further amplifying the fragmentation for larger enterprise organizations.
While at first, this backup software looked promising to address a critical need for data protection, now this solution looks far too complex and limited. This type of typical backup solution does nothing to collapse other silos of storage such as file/object, test/dev & analytical workloads, and prolonged exposure will give you… Confusion!
Managing data is way too complex. As my peer Dimitris says on his excellent blog post here, “storage should be easy to consume.” I whole-heartedly agree with his thesis statement. I believe what Cohesity offers is something fundamentally new.
After a few of my most-respected peers moved to Cohesity, I had to rub the magic lamp. Out popped a blue Robin Williams and Poof, I’m here! Now let me introduce you to our enchanted potion (ok, I’m done with magic jokes.)
Cohesity addresses these needs with a platform we suitably named DataPlatform®. Cohesity DataPlatform® is a scale-out solution that consolidates all your secondary workloads, including backup and recovery, files and objects, test/dev and analytics in a single, cloud-native solution. I look forward to telling you all about Cohesity in follow-on posts about what DataPlatform® does and how it does it, but for now- just know that it’s really cool.
If you read this far, thank you! Bryan and I plan to have many more posts and pics as we tour the mid-south spreading green goodness and making all our customer’s data dreams come true so stay tuned, and as always, #GoGreen!
