Cohesity Expands Protection, Management Coverage to Modern Workloads

Cohesity, the hyperconverged secondary storage vendor, on Wednesday announced expanded capabilities to protect modern workloads, such as NoSQL distributed data bases, Kubernetes containerized applications and SaaS applications, in addition to its current support for workloads, such as Oracle, SQL, and SAP Hana.

All data sources are protected and managed from a single web-scale platform. Today’s product announcement coincides with Cohesity’s acquisition of Imanis Data.

Hadoop big data workloads, NoSQL distributed databases, containers and SaaS applications are now common components of the enterprise IT stack. But solutions that protect each of these modern workloads separately are often very complex to manage, can increase costs, and further compound the critical problem of mass data fragmentation. Cohesity defines mass data fragmentation as data siloes that create an unsustainable model for enterprises to manage, protect and leverage valuable digital resources.

Cohesity’s Raj Dutt

“The capability to have both the Cohesity and Imanis solutions work together is now available,” Raj Dutt, product marketing director at Cohesity, told Channel Futures. “Partners can deploy Imanis as a container on the Cohesity data platform or as a VM and point it to Cohesity.”

Citing industry research, Dutt said that almost every organization wants to adopt modern workloads; however, they don’t understand the need for protecting them. Some misperceptions in the market: Distributed databases don’t need protection; containers are stateless, so they don’t need protection; and SaaS applications are protected by cloud providers.

“Most of these points are just not true,” he said. “Take distributed databases, for example; yes, [they are] protected against hardware failures … but what [they are] not immune to is human error or cyberattacks or even compliance requirements.”

Hadoop big-data workloads, NoSQL distributed databases, containers and SaaS applications are now common components of the enterprise IT stack. But solutions that protect each of these modern workloads separately are often very complex to manage, can increase costs, and further compound the critical problem of mass data fragmentation.

Here’s a deeper dive into today’s news:

Web-Scale Protection for Hadoop and NoSQL Workloads

Through the acquisition of Imanis Data, Cohesity now provides backup, recovery and data management capabilities for Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) workloads and NoSQL distributed databases that were previously available only for traditional databases. These new capabilities empower modern enterprises to improve efficiency and get more out of their data. Some features include:

Backup and Recover Containerized Applications as Quickly and Easily as Virtual Machines

Cohesity will deliver backup and recovery capabilities for Kubernetes-based containerized applications that match the level of protection previously available just for virtual machines (VMs). Through native integration with Kubernetes, Cohesity will protect underlying data and …

… the application state so that enterprises can back up the entire application, not just its data.

Backups for containerized applications will be application-consistent and can be done in “incremental forever” mode, meaning customers only need to perform one full backup and then incremental backups after that, which reduces backup time and simplifies operations. Restores can be done either to the original location or an alternate location, providing disaster recovery and migration options for customers.

Extending Support for SaaS Applications

Cohesity will add greater support for enterprises’ increasing reliance on SaaS applications by extending backup and recovery capabilities for Microsoft Office 365 to include Microsoft OneDrive. This empowers customers to protect against data loss due to error or malware, and to assist with e-discovery or compliance.

Cohesity will make it easy to meet security and compliance requirements by leveraging information available in Azure Active Directory to help customers create backup and recovery policies. These new capabilities will build on existing protections for Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online that were introduced last year.