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Cohesity opens up backup data to analytics and applications
Hybrid-cloud backup appliance provider launches marketplace for applications that can apply intelligence, such as analytics, to data held in backup and secondary data stores
Hyper-converged backup appliance maker Cohesity is to provide access to its DataPlatform for applications that help derive insights from data held in secondary storage, such as via analytics.
The aim is to allow applications from Cohesity and third parties to run in its DataPlatform environment and exploit secondary data without needing to make copies or run in a separate location.
The functionality will, for example, allow analytics on structured and unstructured data, provide index and search, including for operations such as e-discovery, as well as security and anti-virus operations.
Via a new Cohesity Marketplace, customers will be able to deploy third-party applications that include: Splunk Enterprise analytics, SentinelOne and Clam anti-virus, plus Imanis for Hadoop and NoSQL database protection.
Cohesity applications will include Insight search and index, Spotlight anomaly detection, and EasyScript script and application programming interface (API) management.
The move marks another step into new territory in the backup arena. Cohesity has been among the pioneers of marrying backup functionality with scale-out hardware reminiscent of hyper-converged infrastructure.
In that way, it can provide an integrated and tested backup and secondary data environment that can be grown in grid-like fashion by adding compute/storage nodes.
Such a cluster of Cohesity nodes makes data visible across on-premise and cloud locations via the Cohesity DataPlatform which can straddle physical appliances, virtual appliances on VMware, and in Amazon S3-supported public clouds.
Read more on backup
- Use of the public cloud for backup data is something all the backup software suppliers provide, but implementations range from simple S3 connections to expansive software offerings.
- While traditional backup apps evolve to meet the cloud via S3 and Azure, a new breed of backup appliances aims to build a single environment across cloud and on-premise.
Its DataPlatform brings together file (NFS/SMB) and object (S3) storage, underpinned by its SpanFS distributed file system, with global indexing and search, data deduplication, clones and snapshots.
Cohesity nodes come on approved HPE and Cisco server hardware, as well as in its own branded C-prefixed hyper-converged nodes, which run up to about 180TB capacity per node.
Cohesity is one of a small number of relative newcomers that also includes Rubrik and Arcserve, which provide backup products with a single file system/object store that can run across on-premise and cloud locations.
The company has also announced a new software developer kit that will allow third parties to create applications for the Cohesity environment to address specific customer use cases.
