As excited as I am to share the release of the Cohesity Data Platform v2, simply calling this a “v2” is an understatement of understatements!
Our engineers have been relentlessly working to make the vision of hyperconverged secondary storage a reality. This new release now has all the core enterprise building blocks to deliver key data protection, test/dev, file services and analytics use-cases within the Cohesity Data Platform.
Since there are so many new features and enhancements packed in this release, for the sake of this post I will highlight just a few and we’ll follow them up with deeper dive write-ups in the coming weeks.
Open Architecture for Scalable Intelligent Storage (OASIS)
OASIS was built from the ground-up to be a fully-distributed, strongly-consistent and versatile storage architecture that can scale performance and capacity linearly while handling multiple secondary storage use-cases simultaneously. A key part of the architecture is our unique snapshotting technology called SnapTree. SnapTree allows for frequent and near-instant snapshots, while keeping the data fully-hydrated.
Let me state this claim again and with an assertion because of how big a technological leap this is…
SnapTree is the ONLY technology we know of which can take frequent and near-instant snapshots, all while keeping data fully-hydrated at the same time!
So what?
- It means that you can achieve the most stringent of RPO/RTO parameters imaginable.
- It means that copy data management capabilities are baked into the file system to provide seamless, agile and efficient Test/Dev and Analytics environments.
Lets begin with the most important workload that OASIS supports, the one that gets the data into the platform, keeps it super safe, secure and disaster-resilient…
Data Protection
We have significantly enhanced Data Protection to address stringent RPOs without impacting the RTOs. Our VADP-based incremental-forever backup scheme offers fast, reliable backups and our use of policies enables backup frequency and retention policies to be set at very granular level. When combined with replication and archival options now available in v2, this effectively meets any combination of recovery and retention requirements.
Another big ticket item in v2 is Data Throttling. This modulates the backup ingest performance over the production workloads at the vCenter or DataStore level, offering a much-needed breather for VMware. As a result you can run your backups at any time during the day and no longer worry about finding the right window for backups.
Replication
Replication is the primary building block of any enterprise’s disaster recovery (DR) solution. The main goal of replication is to ensure that datasets are replicated to the DR site in an efficient and performant manner. Every piece of data that the business owns is not treated equal and as a result enterprises require the flexibility to apply the right DR strategy for their business at a granular level.
As a staple part of replication in the Cohesity Data Platform v2, we have implemented a policy-based approach. The cluster allows data to be replicated at the following granularity which itself is user-configurable:
- Cluster-wide
- Replicating backup jobs based on the protection policy
- View (Storage Volume) -based replication
Additionally, we support the following replication topologies:
- One -> One
- Many -> One
- One -> Many
Archival
Cheap-and-deep cloud and object storage solutions are becoming a viable alternative for long-term archival requirements. The Cohesity Data Platform allows you to archive your data to Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure, Google Nearline, or any S3-compatible object storage solutions. For those users who prefer tape over cloud or object storage, we’ve got you covered – tape archival is available as an option as well.
Now let’s talk about some key enhancements to the platform itself…
QoS: You can now deploy mixed workloads on the OASIS platform. This guarantees that the performance and service level objectives are not impacted by the various workloads that can now leverage Cohesity v2 policy-driven QoS approach.
Encryption: We support native AES 256-bit FIPS-compliant encryption with built-in key management for data-at-rest. If you already have an existing key management system, you can also configure your Cohesity cluster to leverage that external capability. In addition to all of that, we also empower users to encrypt the data at different levels of granularity within the cluster.
Cloud: Users can now use cloud as an additional storage tier. I don’t have to tell you how useful it can be to be able to leverage additional resources in burst or unpredictable workload situations. Of course it reduces the need to buy more Cohesity storage but we are a customer-driven company and we will ALWAYS optimize for our customers.
SMB: Since our first release, SMB support has been a much sought after ask as an addition to the platform. In v2, we have added support for SMB 2.X and 3.0. This allows us to support various workloads, from efficient storage for Microsoft SQL dumps to SMB target for backup applications such as Veeam, Commvault, NetBackup, and others. Coupled with Active Directory integration, this SMB support expands our native file services support as well.
Oh… there’s just one more thing…
Analytics Workbench (AWB)
One of the main goals of our hyperconverged secondary storage platform is to allow you to use the stored data to gain storage and business insights. Finally, you have the ability to “unlock the value of your data” and make business decisions from the data that, until now, had been left in the dark. This is achieved by using AWB, which we are highlighting in Cohesity v2. It allows you to analyze data from various workflows, such as backup and file services, and gain insights from these datasets. You now have the ability to run in-place analytics using AWB and, as a result, expensive and time-consuming operations such as copying data out and creating more silos of data for analytics are eliminated. You don’t need to create data lakes when you already have the whole data ocean at your fingertips!
Above and beyond that, we are also shipping a set of pre-built AWB apps that you can use to analyze any dataset right away. AWB also allows you to create your own custom analytics apps and run them natively on the platform!
This is only the beginning…
All in all, this is one feature-packed release! This brief post cannot possibly convey or do justice to its breadth of capabilities. In subsequent posts, we’ll be showcasing some of our engineers discussing some of the deeper details around the innovations of the Cohesity Data Platform.
