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Cohesity isn’t messing around with its platform updates. Right on the heels of the 4.0 version of its Orion storage software announced in April comes the next new version, a mere four months later.
New ideas, DevOps, rapid iteration and testing appear to be well entrenched in that shop.
Cohesity, one of the true pioneers of hyperconverged secondary storage, on Aug. 1 launched Orion 5.0, which it describes as the industry’s first storage platform to combine end-to-end data protection and big-data storage on distributed, “infinitely scalable” architecture.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s data platform can span on-premises and private and public clouds, and it can all be controlled from one location. Now it is also adding something that was previously unthinkable: It can be used for workload backup and as a searchable archive for large amounts of structured and unstructured data.
Archiving Now Has a Place in Hyperconverged Storage
The term “archive” is never used in this type of context; it’s always been a separate product. Just ask Iron Mountain.
To say that Cohesity is attempting to be all things storage to all users is close to the truth. It wasn’t all that long ago that each one of these features was made by a separate vendor and that they all had to be integrated manually by highly overworked storage admins.
Now, using this type of new-gen, largely automated system, those storage professionals can click a few boxes to make sure all the permissions are set up, the security is in place and the right connections to clouds and on-premises arrays are in order before they can put everything on autopilot and go take a nap.
Well, maybe it’s not quite that simple, but automation has made these jobs a lot easier in only the last few years. Cohesity is among the new-gen security “easy button” culprits.
“We go way beyond just data protection, which is just an insurance policy for productive use of your underlying assets,” Vice-President of Marketing and Product Patrick Rogers told eWEEK. “So why not use it for test/dev, to run analytics–to bring the compute to the data rather than copying the data into a Hadoop cluster? Finally it also consolidates files and objects–the most egregious in terms of data growth.”
More Efficient Data and Infrastructure Re-use
Cohesity Orion 5.0’s fully indexed and searchable platform gives IT administrators better access and greater insight into their data and eliminates redundant copies, Rogers said. Data is now instantly accessible to any application and user via standard protocols including NFS, CIFS/SMB, and S3. This drives more efficient data and infrastructure re-use across data protection, archive, content repositories, test/dev and analytic workloads, Rogers said.
The platform scales incrementally to cover companies’ overall storage needs as they increase or decrease, instead of requiring administrators to set up separate environments for each specific workload. It also eliminates the need to monitor and manage these different architectures, freeing up time to focus on innovation rather than maintenance, Rogers said.
To ensure that the platform continues to serve customers as quickly as they grow, Cohesity Orion demonstrated linear, non-disruptive scaling through 256 nodes, 3 petabytes capacity, and 80 GB/s throughput in a recent test conducted by the Taneja Group.
The latest Cohesity hyperconverged platform that can handle any secondary data use case, Rogers said. Its new C3000 Dense Nodes improve storage capacity by a factor of seven and rack density by a factor of two and are aimed at large content repositories or data protection workloads that require low storage cost per terabyte, such as media content or financial and medical records.
Key enhancements in V5.0 to support archiving for any type of content:
- simultaneous multiprotocol access to content via NFS, CIFS/SMB, and S3 protocols;
- gobal in-line deduplication and compression across all content, including the industry’s first and only deduplicated S3 object storage;
- global indexing and search for rapid retrieval; and
- file system and user quotas with audit logs.
Key enhancements to expand data protection capabilities:
- ability to back up hypervisors beyond VMware vSphere, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, and Linux KVM;
- ability to back up NAS devices beyond NetApp, including EMC Isilon, Pure Storage Flashblade, and any generic NAS, for both NFS and CIFS/SMB file systems;
- new file-level backups for physical Linux servers, in addition to volume-based backups, and bare-metal restores for Windows servers; and
- any-point-in-time, instant restores at scale, validated by a recent ESG Spotlight Report.
Cohesity Orion 5.0 will become generally available for all customers in about 90 days, the company said. For more information, you can view this video or check out the 5.0 platform infographic.