Hello, World! I’m extremely excited to announce Cohesity’s exit from stealth-mode today with an incredible team, top-tier investors, and early adopters who are already sharing how Cohesity is helping their organizations. We’re just coming up on our two-year anniversary since Cohesity was founded, and I can’t believe that in this time we have transformed what was once an idea into a company of over 50 people with incredible technology that is changing the way organizations protect, manage, and learn from their data.
Throughout history, brain has always triumphed over brawn. From the Jedi who used the power of thought to control the world around them, to Alan Turing who all but ended the Second World War with the power of his mind, there is no doubt the ‘mind is a terrible thing to waste’. So why stop there? Why don’t we apply the same proven approach to the data center?
After founding Nutanix and watching how impactful bringing convergence into primary storage was for our customers, I realized there was an even bigger opportunity to bring innovation to the data center in secondary storage. This is where the bulk of data sits in the data center, analogous to what sits hidden below the surface an iceberg, consuming tons of space and resources as it sits around idly as an expensive insurance policy.
When taking a look at the secondary storage market, I noticed that the landscape has had minimal innovation: the industry has focused on bigger systems, stronger processors, and fatter pipes to work around the problem of massive data growth and lack of insight into the data that’s being stored. Point solutions like dedupe appliances, copy data virtualization and integrated backup appliances only bandaid the fundamental problem, which is that all this data has not had a single, consolidated home to reside in.
And thus, the idea for Cohesity was born!
My years of work on the Google File System taught me how to put the fundamentals of distributed systems to work to scale for a single application, and this was what I then applied to virtualization with hyper-convergence. Now, we’re taking on a bigger challenge for distributed systems by building an architecture that scales for multiple simultaneous data workflows with different performance and resiliency requirements, all while handling massive and seamless scale, fault-tolerance and non-disruptive operations. I believe it’s the culmination of how web-scale technology can truly have a broad effect on enterprise IT. To accomplish this, the Cohesity team has solved some huge distributed systems conundrums, like eventual consistency, as well as key enterprise storage challenges, eg snapshots that are both frequent and instantaneous. I look forward to sharing more about these technical details in future posts.
I believe it’s the right time for secondary storage to be redefined. With data growth exploding and over 80% of it being stored as merely mounds of passive, unintelligent data, I would like to see the new definition for secondary storage encompass everything that is not a mission-critical, production application requiring a strict SLA. That would mean workflows for data protection, test/dev and analytics could be converged to more efficiently consolidate the storage, usage and analysis of that data.
Cohesity is here to become the shining light of Gandalf’s staff; lighting the way to a brighter, more powerful future for secondary storage by making sense of the dark data below the surface. We’re here to transform the way people interact with their data. We aren’t just building a storage device where information lives, we’re building an ecosystem where data thrives. Cohesity’s infinitely scalable, intelligent platform not only enables our users to easily manage, protect, and store their data, but also put it to work.
We’re so excited to embark on this mission to redefine secondary storage! We look forward to having you join us on this journey. We realize this will not happen overnight, but instead, be a partnership with our customers to transform their datacenters, step by step.
We can’t wait to tell you more about the great things we’re working on here at Cohesity over the coming months.
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