If you follow Cohesity and have not been lying under the rock for the past couple of weeks, then you must already know that Cohesity was just named a Cisco Solution Partner. We gained entry to the ‘club’ because our Cohesity system is now available on Cisco UCS rackservers. The official press release could tell only so much, what with all the guidelines we had to follow. But this is our blog so we promise to go into a little more detail here.
First off, our clients, partners and investors all know that we are a software company. We bring to the market the most innovative, disruptive and versatile software defined storage platform. So it was going to be a matter of time before we made this platform available on other enterprise-class hardware. But wanting to make it available is one thing and finding a ready and capable partner who can support our aspirations is a whole different thing. In Cisco, we found the perfect partner. And we went about qualifying the right hardware in a very methodical and by-the-book way.
The UCS product line has been a smashing success in the market. It is an “integrated computing infrastructure with embedded management”. Most importantly, it can handle scale-out workloads – a must for our scale-out platform. Within the UCS product line the C-series rack servers are specifically ideal for storage-heavy workloads. We chose stock C240-M4 rack server. It gives us the flexibility to significantly increase both storage and performance per node as customer needs evolve.
Both Cohesity and Cisco did the qualification in their respective labs and published a joint reference architecture that you can download here. But we didn’t do this qualification just to check a box and claim that we are a software defined storage system. We have worked hard to streamline the supply chain so that our customers, with the help of our channel partners, can easily procure and deploy the integrated solution. We are also helping our channel partners set up the UCS hardware in their labs so that they can demonstrate the solution to the customers. And of-course we continue to work with Cisco to make this solution more widely available and to further extend our collaboration.
So what does it mean for our customers and our channel partners? It means that they will be able to realize the benefits of Cohesity’s hyperconverged secondary storage on Cisco’s industry-leading hardware. For channel partners, it means that they now have access to an extended portfolio of server platforms, offering greater flexibility and efficiency in the data center.
