Cohesity Shines a Light on 'Dark Data' With Its Radically Efficient Secondary Storage Platform

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 17, 2015) - Cohesity, the pioneer of converged secondary storage, emerged from stealth mode today to reveal the details of its radically efficient and intelligent storage solution. The Cohesity Data Platform takes aim at companies' looming "dark data" problem -- the rising volume of unstructured data that demands enormous resources yet continues to grow unchecked and remain unanalyzed. By converging the multiple solutions companies now use to handle secondary storage -- which Cohesity is redefining to encompass data protection, archiving, DevOps, and analytics -- on a single, infinitely scalable and intelligent platform, Cohesity will reduce costs, simplify management, and deliver powerful data insights to customers.

Bringing the efficiency of converged architectures to the overlooked secondary storage market, the Cohesity Data Platform will eliminate the need to address data sprawl using separate point solutions, such as deduplication backup target appliances and copy data management products. It also enables organizations to scale efficiently by purchasing only the storage they need now, on demand. All of this happens on a programmable, globally indexed platform that delivers insight more efficiently. Cohesity allows analytics capabilities to reside directly in secondary storage, the largest repository of data across the organization, so there's no need to create separate copies of data for a dedicated analytics cluster, significantly reducing cost and data sprawl across the organization.

Confronting the 'Dark Data' Tsunami

Today's organizations face a tsunami of new data that will be 44 times greater in 2020 than in 2009, according to CSC Research. More than 80 percent of this data will be spread across a wide range of secondary storage solutions designed specifically for data protection, development, or analytics. This results in large masses of "dark data," defined by Gartner as "the information assets organizations collect, process, and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes." The proliferation of highly specific storage products compounds the growing "dark data" problem by making it more expensive to store, more complex to manage, and harder to mine for valuable business insight.

The Cohesity Data Platform takes a radically new approach to the "dark data" problem using a three-pronged attack:

• Manage and Protect Seamlessly. Web-scale storage with converged data protection eliminates the needless complexity and overhead of multiple products and vendors.
• Use Efficiently. A unified platform transforms secondary storage into flash-powered, live data for DevOps, with built-in copy data virtualization and public cloud integration to deliver simpler, more efficient data storage across the enterprise.
• Learn Instantly. Immediate insight into data type, usage, and performance -- with in-place analytics and programmability for custom queries to handle previously complex workflows like data masking -- make rapid business analysis of "dark data" possible.

"The latest storage innovations have mainly addressed the production environment, but we see even greater opportunities in secondary storage because it covers a much larger volume of data and the current market is so fragmented," said ESG Research Founder and Senior Analyst Steve Duplessie. "Cohesity's focus on converging secondary storage workflows and making it possible to extract intelligence from this data could open up a vastly underserved market."

Founder's Technical Acumen and Past Successes Led to Secondary Storage Opportunity

Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by CEO Mohit Aron, whose experience as the pioneer of the hyper-convergence movement eventually led him to the enormous market need for a converged secondary storage solution. Early in his career, Aron helped design the Google File System, which achieved enormous efficiencies for the company's primary storage tasks. He followed up by founding the leading hyper-converged infrastructure company, Nutanix. Aron pioneered the concept of hyper-convergence, the first architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization. As Nutanix's CTO, he brought this solution to market for a wide range of customers that realized the benefits of convergence for primary storage environments. At Cohesity, Aron intends to extend the benefits of convergence to the much larger secondary storage landscape.

"The majority of an organization's data is spread out over many different products, and we recognized the need to converge these together for a more efficient approach," Aron said. "To date, this hadn't been done because building an architecture that scales to support this volume of data with good performance and resiliency for live data usage was technically very challenging. The Cohesity Data Platform brings the innovation of a Google-like, scalable system with the right enterprise storage features to fundamentally change the way customers store and extract value from their data."

Cohesity envisions this transformation as a phased journey that starts by unifying secondary storage on an infinitely scalable platform that stores and protects all customer data. As customers scale out the Cohesity platform for data protection, they can start using that previously passive data for DevOps. In the third phase, as that data is consolidated, they can then analyze it to detect key trends effectively, get immediate alerts about security issues, and most importantly, see the whole picture to drive the right business decisions.

Early Success and Building Anticipation Around Cohesity Early Access Program

Cohesity has already rolled out an Early Access Program that has helped select clients realize valuable new efficiencies. Brand-name pilot customers, including Tribune Media, a worldwide, publicly traded media company, and GS1 Canada, an industry-driven organization that enables subscribers to synchronize product data in accordance with global supply chain standards, have already seen enormous value in the Cohesity Data Platform.

"As one of the largest media companies in the world, the amount of data that Tribune Media has to deal with doubles every year, forcing us to constantly evaluate new ways to keep our data protected, stored, and most of all, recoverable," said Tribune Media Senior Vice President David Giambruno. "Cohesity gives us an easy way to manage, store, and extract value from our data -- all from a single platform that scales as we need it. Cohesity is dramatically simplifying the way we do business."

"Faced with the complex task of managing massive amounts of data that must be backed up and secured, we are excited about Cohesity's vision for converging data onto a unified, scale-out solution," said GS1 Canada Senior Vice President of Technology Sase Janki. "Cohesity provides simpler data protection and powerful insight, which is what we want from our next-generation solution for storage and recovery. We look forward to scaling this environment as we need, one node at a time, so we can spend less time managing our data infrastructure."

Find out more and sign up for the Early Access Program at www.cohesity.com/early-access/.

About Cohesity
Cohesity's mission is to enable companies of all sizes to bring order to their data chaos. Its intelligent data platform converges secondary storage workflows to transform disparate silos of data into business insight. Started by Mohit Aron, the pioneer of hyper-convergence, Cohesity takes aim at the inefficient, fractured landscape of secondary storage for data protection, development, and analytics by applying a distributed, web-scale architecture to break down these data silos. Its solution converges all secondary storage workflows onto an intelligent, infinitely scalable data platform so customers can store and protect data seamlessly, use it efficiently, and learn from it instantly. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and is backed by leading venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital, ARTIS Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, and Trinity Ventures. For more information, visit www.cohesity.com.