Cohesity and Cisco turned up the heat on their data management relationship with Cohesity adding I/O Boost technology to its DataPlatform that supports Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) and HyperFlex all-flash non-volatile memory express (NVMe). 

I/O Boost is a flash-optimized technology that Cohesity says accelerates its management software to improve backup and access performance by between 200% and 800%. It does this by supporting parallel storage for access to metadata and data with intelligent placement directly on a server’s connected NVMe SSDs to maximize peak performance for workloads. 

According to the data management vendor, the technology enhances DataPlatform’s architecture to deliver better efficiency for storing and accessing metadata while making flash-based systems more affordable. 

The product addresses enterprises’ growing data volumes and simplifies data centers by consolidating backup and recovery, scale-out network attached storage (NAS), development testing, and object storage use cases into a unified data management platform.

And because it is fully integrated with Cisco’s HyperFlex, the new offering creates a complete convergence of hyperconverged hardware and software for primary storage as well as for non-latency sensitive workloads, said Jawwad Memon, Cisco's senior product manager for scale-out storage, UCS solutions.

This is particularly appealing as increased use of cloud platforms as storage mediums has grown alongside enterprises’ transition to the cloud and beyond. According to Gartner, around 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud. By 2025, this figure will reach 75%. “As the volume and velocity of data increases, so too does the inefficiency of streaming all this information to a cloud or data center for processing,” said Gartner senior research director Santhosh Rao in a blog post. 

The Cisco­-Cohesity partnership blossomed last spring after Cohesity joined the CiscoSolutions program in a bid to help customers consolidate their entire data stack on an integrated, hyperconverged platform. 

Cohesity’s DataPlatform consolidates secondary data storage silos onto a hyperconverged, scale-out platform that spans private and public clouds. HyperFlex is Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure package that offers computing, networking, and storage resources in a unified system that promises greater flexibility for enterprise workloads.

The combination of HyperFlex and Cohesity further expands our [Cisco’s] portfolio to accelerate backup and recovery at scale, Memon said. “Enterprises are demanding faster recovery times and having access to data at a much faster speed that cannot be delivered with spinning media.”