Cohesity is describing the ability for third-party applications to run on its platform as an industry-first in the storage space.
The hyper-converged secondary storage company announced yesterday that third-party applications can now run directly on the Cohesity DataPlatform, eliminating the need to make copies of backup data to move to a separate infrastructure since all of an organization’s backup and unstructured data can run directly on the platform. And, of course, running applications on a single platform means reduced costs.
Think of it as a smartphone running multiple applications on the same platform with a single UI, explained Mohit Aron, CEO and founder of Cohesity.
“I saw that many of the innovative design principles brought about by the smartphone could be applied to a serious and widespread IT problem that was inhibiting many organizations from being as effective as they could be,” noted Aron in a blog post. “We coined the term mass data fragmentation to describe it – the vast and growing sprawl of secondary data that has become scattered across different locations, trapped in infrastructure silos, and buried unseen in long forgotten storage systems, making it almost impossible for IT to manage – still less utilize the data for business advantage.”
It’s well-known that legacy infrastructure often houses a dozen or more separate components, each with a separate UI and barriers to sharing data. A recent survey commissioned by Cohesity says more than 90 per cent of respondents are worried about the level of visibility they have into their secondary data. That’s a pretty big problem when data visibility, and retrieval of that data, is now the mainstay of today’s compliance policies.
Additionally, Cohesity announced a software developer kit (SDK) as part of a new Cohesity Developer Portal, allowing business and developers to build custom apps at their own pace. App stores, another innovation popularized by the smartphone, is something Cohesity decided to build as well. Customers will be able to download apps from the Cohesity MarketPlace and run them directly on the Cohesity DataPlatform. Cohesity has already announced four third-party applications:
- Splunk Enterprise: Customers can use Splunk Enterprise to analyze, investigate, and take action from their backup and unstructured data sets.
- SentinelOne: Provides up-to-date virus libraries based on machine-learning algorithms, directly on the Cohesity DataPlatform. Internet connectivity is not needed.
Clam Anti-Virus: Enterprises can defend their file infrastructure against attacks by running the Clam Anti-Virus open-source application directly on file data stored on the Cohesity DataPlatform, instead of copying the data onto parallel infrastructure for analysis. - Imanis Data: Expands Cohesity DataProtect capabilities to help protect modern NoSQL workloads.
Cohesity also launched three of its own apps:
- Insight: This application uses an index to search data as it is stored on the Cohesity DataPlatform.
- Spotlight: Use it to monitor any modifications to file data. For example, this application can determine, through anomaly detection, if there may have been a potential internal or external security breach, like a ransomware attack.
- EasyScript: Streamlines time-consuming processes such as uploading, executing, and managing scripts by providing access to all script creation elements, along with Cohesity APIs and sample scripts.
Both the marketplace and SDK are generally available now, and Cohesity says the Cohesity Pegasus 6.3 release, from which most of the latest announcements come from, is scheduled for release in March.
Cohesity’s channel ecosystem is extensive, and includes various service providers and technology partners. You can learn more about it here.