Cohesity rolls out innovative ROBO solution for data management

Cohesity has launched a new solution that combines backup and recovery, file and object services, and cloud archival on certified servers from key alliance partners.

The solution enables businesses to manage data within remote office/branch office (ROBO) locations with a single software-defined platform. This is the same web-scale platform that organisations use to manage data across existing data center and cloud environments.

The new Cohesity solution for ROBO combines Cohesity software with certified servers from Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and is designed for enterprises with numerous branch locations, such as national banks, retailers, chain restaurants, rental car agencies, warehousing and distribution, pharmaceutical, and global IT services, the company states.

Such branch locations often have data that needs to be managed, protected, and secured locally, without dedicated IT staff on-site administration, Cohesity states.

The solution is designed for simple installation and offers enterprises similar functionality at branch locations in the data center.

This is the industry's first solution to combine backup and recovery, file and object services, and cloud archival in a single platform that is optimised for ROBO locations and extends modern data management to more customers.

According to a report from research firm IDC, more than half of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud by 2022, Cohesity states.

As such, there is a growing need for a unified approach to manage and protect data generated or stored at the edge in the same manner as enterprise data located centrally or managed in public cloud environments.

The Cohesity solution for ROBO addresses administrative, latency, and bandwidth concerns at remote locations while at the same time complying with data recoverability concerns and compliance mandates of corporate headquarters, according to Cohesity.

Once deployed, administrators can perform management operations centrally, such as creating policies for backup and recovery across multiple branch locations, as well as branch replication policies that ensure a copy of the data is available from the data center or cloud in case of local failures.

With this new ROBO solution, customers will have direct access to the capabilities of Cohesity's data management software for the data center.

These include an immutable file system to help defend against ransomware, global variable-length sliding window deduplication and compression to optimise both storage efficiency and bandwidth utilisation, data encryption at rest and in flight for security, and instant mass restores to recover a branch when needed.

Customers can also use Cohesity software on certified hardware to provide file and object services (for example to replace local Windows file servers) as well as archival functions (including cloud storage options) at the edge so that customers can simplify overall site maintenance and operations, Cohesity states.

HPE vice president and general manager Big Data Analytics and Scale-Out Data Platforms Patrick Osburne says, "Enterprises that rely on intelligent data platform solutions from HPE and Cohesity software to run backup, file and object services, and cloud archival use cases in their data center can now extend that functionality to their branch office locations.

"This new solution plays a very important role in our portfolio and provides joint customers our best-in-class servers and services combined with Cohesity's innovative data management software.

Cisco senior director Data Center Solutions Siva Sivakumar says, "Cisco's enterprise customers are increasingly generating and processing data in ROBO locations, and its important that we offer them an industry-first solution that handles data management use cases in a simple, unified, and effective way.

"Cisco's UCS Servers and Intersight SaaS platform combined with Cohesity software deliver the ideal solution at scale with architectural consistency from Datacenter to Cloud to Edge.

Trace3 national director Data Center Doug Austin says, "For customers who are moving more and more of their data away from the data center, we see the new Cohesity data management solution for the enterprise edge as a great fit.

"The solution offers multiple benefits for technology leaders who want to extend modern data management capabilities to their branch offices and distributed locations. Trace3 has been partnered with Cohesity since the company's inception, and together we're excited to provide our customers a complete data management solution from the core to the cloud and edge.

Cohesity's new solution provides the following capabilities:

• Backup and recovery that supports modern and traditional data sources
• Flexible granular recovery, to any point in time
• High data resiliency and the ability to replicate or archive data to the core or the public cloud
• A reduction in the data footprint and WAN bandwidth utilisation from remote sites with global variable-length sliding-window deduplication and compression
• Integrated cybersecurity with an immutable file system, DataLock (WORM), data encryption, and anti-ransomware capabilities
• Multi-protocol support for files and objects (NFS, SMB, S3)
• A single user interface to simplify data management across core, cloud, and edge

The new solution builds on Cohesity's existing edge capabilities. Customers can now adopt Cohesity's data management solution for edge locations either as a virtual appliance or as a physical appliance based on newly certified partner servers.

Cohesity senior vice president of engineering and product management Vineet Abraham says, "Enterprises are looking for a simple and sustainable way to handle the increasing volume of data created and stored at edge locations.

"By offering the enterprise-class features of Cohesity software in a cost-effective, plug-and-play solution, we are empowering organisations to bring their data center, cloud, and edge together on a single platform.

"Use cases that rely on edge computing are growing rapidly. We need a data management solution that is scalable, flexible, and simple enough to manage globally distributed data as our customers business and data strategy evolves," says John White, chief innovation officer at Expedient, a Cohesity managed service provider.

"This new solution optimised for ROBO environments will help us deliver the same level of data protection and management for customer branch offices that we have achieved with our on-premises and cloud services while consolidating our IT stack by removing separate edge solutions for archiving and file services," White says.

Cohesity's solution for ROBO will be generally available to all customers from Cisco and HPE by Spring 2020.