Cohesity Expands Cisco, HPE-Backed Remote/Branch Office Solution

Turning its attention to the expected growth of data at the edge – 30X from 2019-2025 according to Gartner – Cohesity on Wednesday announced a new appliance-based solution for remote office/branch office (ROBO) management solution that extends its current Cohesity DataPlatform Virtual Edition (VE). 

The new solution for ROBO combines Cohesity software with certified servers from Cisco and HPE, and is designed for distributed enterprises with many branch locations. This latest offer allows these businesses to remotely manage data through a single software-defined data management platform. 

Cohesity’s Raj Dutt

“We already have the Cohesity DataPlatform VE running in remote locations but we were getting – by we, I mean Cohesity, HPE and Cisco – requests from customers to have something which is more appliance-based, and we also heard the same thing echoed through the Gartner,” Raj Dutt, senior director, product marketing at Cohesity, told Channel Futures.

Dutt refers to the 30X data growth at the edge, where ROBO is a subset of that figure.

“This is interesting because it redefines how the enterprise workload data resides within the enterprise landscape,” he said.

Cohesity DataPlatform is a software solution that consolidates backups, file shares, object stores and data for dev/test and analytics on a web-scale data management platform. It runs on HPE, Cisco, Dell and Cohesity appliances. The Cohesity software offers the same capabilities in the public cloud. For ROBO, there’s a VE version that runs in VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix AHV, and RHEL. 

“The VE version is flexible because it allows customers today to run 1TB-16TB, in 1TB increments. We’ve seen our customers run this VE in the same production environment in ROBO, sharing resources. It does require some level of technical expertise because you need to deploy a hypervisor to deploy and manage an environment like this,” said Dutt. 

The new ROBO appliance-based solution comes preloaded with Cohesity’s DataPlatform and DataProtect software – the same running in the core – and runs on HPE- and Cisco-certified servers. It comes in a 4TB and 8TB format that’s easy to deploy, reducing opex and eliminating the need to have hypervisor licenses at each of the remote locations, according to Dutt. 

“This solution will only be available to our HPE and Cisco partners,” he said.  

HPE has been a Cohesity partner for few years. In late 2018, HPE elevated its partnership with Cohesity – beyond a 2017 partnership where Cohesity joined the HPE Complete Program to deliver hyperconverged secondary storage solutions to enterprise customers – via an OEM agreement to offer a jointly certified solution available directly from HPE and partners, worldwide. Also, in June 2018, Cohesity closed a $250 million in Series D funding led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, including strategic investors HPE, Cisco Investments, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, Sequoia Capital and others. That followed Series C funding in 2017, where Cohesity raised more than $90 million from multiple investors including HPE and Cisco Investments. 

HPE’s Stephen Bacon

“The momentum that we’ve seen [with Cohesity] has really started to build, especially over the last six months, with significant growth in the number of new logos which we’re securing together, as well as the amount of revenue we’re driving together,” Stephen Bacon, director, product management and partner engineering at HPE, told Channel Futures. 

The target market for the new Cohesity solution are large and distributed businesses with 50-100 or more locations. Target vertical markets include retail, chain restaurants, warehouse and distribution, pharmaceutical, global IT services and energy. 

Dutt notes that the benefit to partners is offering a differentiated enterprise-class solution, workload consolidation and integrated cybersecurity. Partners will be able to increase revenue by expanding their total addressable market, earn recurring revenue and offer value-added services. Cohesity will offer go-to-market enablement such as sales training, incentives and demand generation. 

The ROBO appliances will be available this spring.