As a follow up to my recent article Eliminating IT Fragmentation, Inefficiency, and Complexity, I wanted to draw attention to the concept of Closed vs. Open information technology architectures relative to the choice of Point versus Platform solutions.
By definition, a closed-architecture is one that does not allow for integration or adoption of emerging technologies in a simplified manner. This limits customer choice resulting in a very proprietary or vendor-locked solution. Even worse, it forces customers to change their IT architecture in favor of adopting the closed-architecture. In stark comparison, an open-architecture is one that takes advantage of emerging technologies and provides customers “freedom of choice”. This is an important differentiator when customers assess their IT requirements as part of their tactical or strategic goals. I would also argue that an open-architecture is one that is agile to customer needs. For example, if there is a feature/function that is not present within current offering, the R&D team (of said manufacturer) is able to address these requirements within a relatively short period of time as part of a future code release of their operating system.
Cohesity’s patented operating environment, OASIS (Open Architecture for Scalable, Intelligent Storage), combines a scale-out storage architecture with built-in enterprise storage services and quality of service management to consolidate multiple use cases, such as data protection, test/dev, file services and analytics, on a single platform.
At Cohesity, our platform-based approach is an open-architecture. We are truly a software-defined architecture that enables us (and our customers) to take full advantage of newer commodity hardware components such as CPU, RAM, SSD, HDD, etc. In addition, porting of our OASIS operating system has also been realized (ex. Cisco-UCS). Moreover, as our customers continue to provide valuable insights into industry trends and their requirements, we add these new features / functions as part of our non-disruptive code upgrade.
Lastly, customers may have pre-existing investments in various solutions from other vendors. For example, they may have chosen Veritas’ NetBackup, EMC Legato or VEEAM as part of their data protection strategy. Our solution easily integrates into these pre-existing environments and is considered complimentary versus disruptive.
These are just some of the attributes which makes the Cohesity Platform a viable candidate for technology consideration and adoption. Moreover, no technology offering would be complete without a world-class / enterprise-ready customer service organization, R&D and leadership team.
