Software-defined storage unicorn Cohesity today released Helios, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool to manage Cohesity deployments both in on-premises data centers and in public clouds.

The new cloud service gives companies visibility and mobility across all of their secondary data and applications from a single dashboard. It also uses machine learning and analytics to power a bunch of new infrastructure management features.

For example, administrators can define service-level agreements (SLAs) by job and workload, and a feature called SmartAssist will automatically evaluate required versus available resources (such as compute and storage) across all clusters to meet SLAs or suggest changes as needed.

Helios also evaluates infrastructure optimization and uses machine learning to determine what adjustments or modifications may be necessary in the future. It can proactively recommend when additional resources might be needed to continue meeting business requirements.

And it not only evaluates an individual customer’s operational metadata sets, it also analyzes operational metadata from Cohesity customers globally. This allows organizations to compare their infrastructure against benchmarks from their peers.

“It will show, for example, how you compare to others in terms of cloud utilization,” said Raj Dutt, director of product marketing at Cohesity. “Essentially it will give you a recommendation and a benchmark, but not just for industry. It will look at workload size and make recommendations against those things.”

The cloud service also uses this global metadata collected to look at actions taken by an IT administrator across their sites and alert them if it detects anomalies that don’t follow best practices. This includes both software and hardware anomalies, Dutt said.

“For example, if a financial services customer forgets to switch on encryption, Helios will alert you and recommend you switch on encryption,” he said. “Or, based on your workload environment, it will recommend you use version 6.4 versus 6.5 because 6.4 is more optimized for your workload.”

The SaaS-tool also looks at hardware anomalies. “If hardware is not performing at its optimum, Helios will alert the user to take corrective action,” Dutt said. Helios can also automate corrective action for failure of non-critical system resources, including proactively notifying the Cohesity global support team to ensure that any issue is fixed.

The company is also rolling out an Analytics Workbench product that it says businesses can use to gain insights from their secondary data. It comes with three pre-built applications, or organizations can develop their own applications on top of it.

The three pre-built applications are:

• Pattern Finder, which allows enterprises to search their secondary data for strings of characters that match the pattern of sensitive or personal data, for example, a Social Security number or a phone number. Organizations can then take corrective action to comply with regulatory requirements.
• Password Detection gives companies a way to improve security by searching across global data sets to uncover passwords that fail to meet best practices, such as those that include personal or company names, or are stored in plain text.
• Video Compression can be used to reduce the size of large media files while optimizing space.

Today’s product rollout follows Cohesity’s $250 million Series D funding round, which closed in June. It brings the company’s total to $410 million. Cohesity says this outpaces all other Series D enterprise software investments in the U.S. over the last 18 months.

In other storage news, Veritas updated its enterprise backup and recovery product. NetBackup 8.1.2 includes closer integration with VMware, and it now also supports Hadoop, Nutanix, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite, HBase, and MongoDB. It also includes new automation, and integrates with Veritas’ cloud-based backup software.

Last month Dell EMC rolled out a new integrated data appliance that provides converged data protection and comes bundled with software for backup, deduplication, replication and recovery, along with disaster recovery and long-term retention to the cloud.

Photo: vapi / 123RF Stock Photo