At a moment when other young storage providers are falling off the table and/or mired in red ink, new-gen secondary storage provider Cohesity finds itself $90 million richer thanks to some influential venture capital supporters.
The Santa Clara, Calif. startup on April 4 announced its largest funding round to date, raising $90 million in a Series C round co-led by investors GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Sequoia Capital.
Cisco Investments and Hewlett Packard Enterprise also participated in this round as strategic investors, joining Accel, ARTIS Ventures, Battery Ventures, DHVC (formerly Danhua Capital), Foundation Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.
Cisco and HPE are already using Cohesity’s software inside their storage offerings. HPE also will be selling Cohesity’s storageware on its own price list, Vice-President of Marketing and Product Patrick Rogers told eWEEK. Cohesity also has a version that works natively with Pure Storage’s all-flash arrays.
Cohesity consolidates secondary storage silos onto a single hyperconverged, web-scale data platform that spans both private and public clouds and can be controlled from one location.
Alongside the funding announcement, the company released two new products, Cohesity DataPlatform 4.0 and Cohesity DataProtect 4.0, which bring together additional data formats and infrastructures, including object storage and network-attached storage (NAS), onto the hyperconverged platform.
“One of the main new items in this release is that we’re now adding object services as one of the new workloads that we will natively support on our platform,” Rogers said. “This is being able to support a distributed [Amazon] S3 (Simple Storage Service) protocol; S3 has become the standard for object services. Amazon offers this natively, so you can interact with S3 via cloud and store data into the cloud.
“It’s a different type of protocol, as opposed to a tree structure like those used by NFS (network file system) and SMB (server message block). It’s really based on metadata.”
Object storage is by far the fastest-growing data subset in the storage industry, and not all storage providers are able to juggle the demands of that alongside databases, backup and NAS-type storage.
Cohesity’s 4.0 version also gives enterprise accounts the ability to set access permissions for individual administrators and operators, assign storage quotas for individual file systems, and create write-once-read-many (WORM) file systems for regulatory compliance. Enterprises can manage all these features through a single administrative console and/or RESTful APIs.
Longtime storage executive and former NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven is a member of the company’s board of directors.
Go here to view a video about Cohesity as a business. To see a video about Cohesity’s role-based access control (RBAC) features, go here.
Cohesity said v4.0 will be publicly available within 90 days. For more information, go here.