Virtualization in the data center helped businesses collapse their primary workloads for better efficiency. Now companies like Cohesity (News - Alert) are working to help companies collapse their secondary workloads.
By secondary workloads I’m referring to the data stored in data centers. That includes all of a company’s analytics workloads running on Hadoop, archived data, backups, file shares, etc.
This kind of data is not mission critical, yet it probably accounts for a fair share of data center capacity, says Patrick Rogers (News - Alert), head of marketing and product at Cohesity, who met with me at the recent TMC Editors’ Day in Santa Clara, Calif. The fact that this data sits in different silos, and that multiple copies of it exist across these silos, only compounds the inefficiency of this setup, Rogers adds.
The good news is that Cohesity offers solutions that can help consolidate this siloed data onto a web-scale architecture, and enable companies to realize huge efficiencies and savings in the process. There are more than 50 enterprises using Cohesity solutions today.
Before we get into the uses cases of this solution, we should note that Cohesity was founded by one of the same guys who established Nutanix, the web-scale enterprise cloud platform company that had a wildly successful IPO in late September. Mohit Aron took his knowledge and success at building hyperconverged systems at Nutanix to build a limitless storage system that consolidates data, makes it easy to search all data, and eliminates duplication.
Backup is the initial use case for the Cohesity solution, and it’s been a very successful solution, says Rogers. That’s because it helps with simplification and eliminates costly software licenses, media servers, and backup targets. That can enable a business to cut its costs by 50 to 80 percent, he says.
Other use cases include analytics and application development. Cohesity enables backup copies to be cloned and used by developers.
Edited by Alicia Young
