Cohesity Pegasus 6.6 Release: A New Dawn in Simplified Data Management and Business Continuity

For many organizations, business and IT priorities have drastically changed since the onset of the global pandemic. At Cohesity, we continually listen to our customers, and what we hear these days is that they need to accelerate their journey to simplify the way they protect their valuable data and support their employees, who are now working remotely and are more distributed than ever before.

We are therefore thrilled to announce today the availability of Cohesity Pegasus 6.6 — the latest software platform release from Cohesity. The release is packed with exciting new features and updates to help our customers expand protection to yet more data sources, ensure business continuity in case of a disaster, and have an even broader range of certified hardware platforms from which to choose — all managed through one easy-to-use UI. While there are a record-breaking number of new features, here are the key highlights that you can look forward to in the 6.6 release.

Expanded Protection for Modern Data Sources

• Extending support for M365 Teams and Groups: The global pandemic accelerated cloud adoption, with 1 out of 5 corporate employees using Microsoft 365 cloud services for seamless collaboration. In addition to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive, enterprises can now use Cohesity to protect Teams and Groups, rounding out protection of the foundational M365 data sources. Check out this blog to learn more.
• Couchbase protection: In addition to MongoDB, Cassandra, Cloudera, and Hortonworks distributions of Hadoop, enterprises can now also protect their Couchbase environment on Cohesity. The integrated experience will help IT teams simplify their operations and predictably meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The solution offers a built-in security framework, including immutability and granular role-based access controls to defend Couchbase backups against sophisticated cyber threats.
• Protecting SAP HANA on Power Systems: In addition to protecting the traditional SAP running on Oracle systems, customers can now also protect their performance-sensitive SAP HANA on Power Systems with Cohesity, an SAP-certified backup and recovery solution.
• Protecting VMware Tanzu: We first announced the protection of Kubernetes namespaces in our 6.5 software release. In addition to OpenShift, with Cohesity 6.6 software release, Cohesity customers can now protect their VMware Tanzu environment along with their other mission-critical workloads, all one a single multicloud data platform. The new software release extends all the Cohesity enterprise-class capabilities, including auto protection using labels, data protection for persistent volumes and metadata, backing up data and apps using CSI snapshots, to Tanzu environments.

Reduced Data Loss and Downtime

• Near-instant non-disruptive recovery for Oracle: Human errors, natural disasters, and cybersecurity threats continue to be the leading causes of data loss. This latest software release expands Cohesity’s unique instant restore at scale capability to Oracle environments. Cohesity customers can now achieve near-instant recovery time objectives (RTOs), for Oracle databases, of any size, to any point in time, and location — including original or alternate instances. Cohesity’s near-instant recovery of Oracle is non-disruptive and does not require IT Operators to power down the production systems. Additionally, Cohesity customers can continue to leverage zero-cost clones to restore the Oracle database to an alternate non-production server, for example, to accelerate application development or for forensic discovery after a ransomware attack.

Unified Disaster Recovery (DR) Solution Now Generally Available

Last year we announced Cohesity SiteContinuity — an automated DR solution that is integrated with the company’s backup and continuous data protection capabilities — making it the only web-scale, unified solution to protect applications across tiers, service levels, and locations on a single platform. The new 6.6 release marks the General Availability (GA) of Cohesity SiteContinuity which enables customers to simplify their DR operations and management, minimize application downtime and data loss to meet strict SLAs, and lower the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). In its first iteration, SiteContinuity will support failover and failback of vSphere VMs with continuous replication and instant failover across sites. Watch this video to learn more.

Enhanced SmartFiles Capabilities

• Automated DR orchestration for SmartFiles Views: With this feature, admins can now avoid manual DR workflow orchestration, which can be cumbersome at scale, and instead manage DR plans visually across all sites. Admins can automatically failover and failback Views with just a few clicks or recover from or test disasters quickly to satisfy regulatory requirements.

Future-proof Your Investments with Universal Data Adapter

To stay competitive and agile, enterprises have adopted the concept of polyglot persistence — developers are empowered to choose the right tools and databases that are “fit” for purpose. To protect this wide range of databases, IT teams must deploy a host of backup solutions that make IT operations complex.

Cohesity’s latest innovation, the Universal Data Adapter (UDA) simplifies and automates protection for a wide range of databases (RDBMS, open-source, next-gen, in-memory, etc.), all while future-proofing their investments. Instead of deploying point backup products for each database, Cohesity’s UDA enables the backup admin and Database Administrator (DBA) to easily register, create backup jobs, add database instances, and restore data across hosts of database types, all from Cohesity’s single global UI.

No more rip and replace. With UDA, Cohesity customers can automate most of their current and future database protection and management.

• Turnkey data protection for all your databases 
  • Auto-discovery and registration of databases
  • Single pane of glass to register, and manage all the backup and restore
  • Standardize on data protection across workloads and teams
  • Consolidate protection and scheduling across multiple servers and sources

• Reporting and Monitoring
  • UI based reporting for tasks, schedules, and alerts

• Simplified Administration
  • One-click expansion, seamless upgrades
  • No single point of failure
  • Global dedupe and compression, pay-as-you-grow

Expanded Support for Multitenant Data Protection

Service Providers and large enterprises and universities that use Cohesity in multitenant environments now have the capability to support a wider range of workloads in their BaaS offerings to tenants. This includes multitenant backup and restores of SQL servers, file shares, and M365 and OneDrive. In addition to the already available multitenant VM backup, Cohesity’s service provider and university customers now have the capability to offer a full suite of backup offerings for multiple applications — across on-prem, cloud, and edge.

Increased Flexibility and Choice of Certified Hardware Platforms

• Newly certified third-party nodes: In continuation of our goal to provide customers more flexibility and choice of third-party hardware platforms to run Cohesity software, we recently certified additional all-NVMe performance nodes (Cisco, Intel), capacity nodes (Cisco, HPE), and general-purpose nodes (Lenovo).

• Expanded support for heterogeneous clusters: You can now mix all-NVMe nodes and disk-based nodes in a single heterogeneous cluster, provided only one third-party vendor is mixed with Cohesity nodes in the same cluster. This expands the permissible combination of nodes in heterogeneous clusters and allows you to right-size your environment in a way that best meets your TCO and SLA requirements. Explore part I and part II of the Cohesity heterogeneity article series to learn more.

Organizations that can unlock hidden value from their vast data sources and recover from unforeseen events with agility and speed are the ones that survive and even thrive in the new era of accelerated digital transformation. Speed and agility are aided by the convergence of silos coupled with keeping things simple and easy to use. With the Pegasus 6.6 release, it’s clearly a new dawn of data consolidation and business continuity for enterprises who rely on Cohesity to navigate this new era.