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Cohesity, a pioneer in the hyperconverged secondary-storage market, Aug. 21 released Cohesity Helios, software-as-a-service-based data management that enables customers to manage and take action on their secondary data and applications globally from a single dashboard.
At the same time, users of this new package of tools can deploy analytics and machine-learning capabilities already inside the platform to predict how new storage configurations will work and find business insights from previously untapped data.
Secondary data is defined here as data that was collected by someone other than the user. Common sources of secondary data for social science, for example, include censuses, information collected by government departments, organizational records and data that was originally collected for other research purposes.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s data platform spans on-premises and private and public clouds, and it can all be controlled from one location. A year ago it added something that was previously unthinkable: It also can be used for workload backup and as a searchable archive for large amounts of structured and unstructured data.
Most Enterprises Have Data All Over the Place
In the real world, enterprises no longer have all of their secondary data and apps in a single data center. Instead, they are spread across multiple silos in different locations globally, creating mass data fragmentation challenges. Cohesity DataPlatform is designed as a new way for organizations to consolidate secondary data and apps—including backup, test/dev, archives and analytics—in a single control screen.
“Organizations are not local—they are global in nature, and so are their data and application infrastructure,” Raj Dutt, Director of Producting Marketing, told eWEEK. “Complexity has grown exponentially with the growth of data and apps as we know. With Cohesity Helios and Data Platform, we are taking a next step, which was always part of the grand plan, to unify secondary data and applications at global scale.”
Helios enables admins to roll out policies or make upgrades across their entire Cohesity multi-cluster environment with a single click, Dutt said. Additional features include:
- Access a smart assistant for IT: Administrators can define service-level agreements (SLAs) by job and workload, and Cohesity SmartAssist will automatically evaluate required versus available resources (e.g., compute, storage) across all clusters to meet SLAs or suggest changes as needed.
- Utilize machine learning for operational insights: Helios evaluates how infrastructure is being used and utilizes ML to determine what adjustments or modifications may be necessary in the future. For example, based on current storage utilization and workload makeup, Helios will proactively recommend when additional resources might be needed to continue meeting business requirements.
- Benefit from peer comparisons: The SaaS solution not only evaluates customers’ operational metadata sets but also analyzes operational metadata from Cohesity customers globally. Organizations can compare infrastructure utilization against anonymized benchmarks from their peers and uncover best practices.
Simplifying Business Planning, Continuity
Businesses cannot afford downtime, but the complexity of modern IT infrastructure makes this increasingly difficult to prevent. Using onboard machine learning, Helios enables organizations to improve business continuity across their secondary infrastructure in the following ways:
- Benefit from proactive health checks: Based on global operational metadata collected from Cohesity, Helios looks at the actions taken by an IT administrator across their sites and alerts them, for example, of anomalies that don’t follow best practices (e.g., if a financial services customer forgets to turn on encryption). Helios will then suggest a recommended path forward.
- Relax with automation: Customers get peace of mind in knowing Helios can automate corrective action for failure of non-critical system resources, including proactively notifying the Cohesity global support team to ensure that any issue is quickly addressed.
- Access a “crystal ball”: Helios empowers administrators to test the impact of future changes across their clusters before rolling them out. Administrators can also evaluate alternative approaches with “what-if” analyses powered by machine learning.
Maximizing Agility, Probing Untapped Data for Useful Insights
Because Helios customers can see all of their Cohesity sites in one view, organizations can easily move data from one location to another, maximizing capacity and improving disaster recovery. Organizations can also use the Cohesity Analytics Workbench (AWB) to find meaningful insights in previously untapped data, starting with three applications:
- Detect patterns that help ensure compliance: With the Pattern Finder application, enterprises can search their secondary data for strings of characters that match the pattern of sensitive or personal data, for example, a Social Security number or a phone number. Organizations can then take corrective action to comply with stringent regulatory requirements.
- Pinpoint bad passwords to mitigate risks: The smart Password Detection application gives companies a way to improve security by searching across global data sets to uncover passwords that fail to meet best practices, such as those that include personal or company names, or are stored in plain text.
- Transcode videos to optimize for capacity: To help optimize resources, IT admins — including those within the security, surveillance and healthcare industries — can use the Video Compression application to reduce the size of large media files while optimizing space.
For more information, read a recent blogpost here, view a YouTube video or download the Cohesity data sheet.