Cohesity added file and object storage to its data backup platform. The capabilities allow customers to consolidate secondary storage, eliminating data copies and hardware silos.

The software-defined storage platform is built on hyperconverged infrastructure — scalable nodes that consist of compute and storage in a bundled appliance. “You see Nutanix out there with their system for primary applications,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of marketing and products at Cohesity. “We do hyperconverged for secondary.”

In fact, Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron started the hyperconverged secondary storage company in 2013 after also co-founding Nutanix and working as a Google File System engineer. The company’s customers include Shutterstock, Manhattan Associates, Tribune Media, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Secondary storage includes any workload that doesn’t require a strict service level agreement (SLA). “It consists of file shares, backups, archived content, test-dev instances, log data, and media content,” Rogers said. “That’s what is driving this data explosion — corporations are not throwing this away. They view it as valuable information, so they keep it, and they are going to mine it in the future.”

But this massive amount of data requiring storage also creates problems.

“It’s becoming unmanageable,” Rogers said. “Many are dumping it into the cloud, but just moving it to the cloud doesn’t solve the problem. You still have siloes in the cloud, and it’s being managed by someone else.”

Cohesity says its DataPlatform solves this problem and allows enterprises to simplify their data centers by bringing everything onto one, scale-out platform. The software-defined storage runs in on-premises data centers, any cloud, and edge locations.

The platform is based on technology the company announced last year. “SpanFS is the underlying technology,” Rogers said.

SpanFS is Cohesity’s web-scale distributed file system. The software provides multi-protocol access (NFS, SMB, and 3S), as well as global indexing, deduplication, and search capabilities. This makes enterprise data “more productive,” Rogers said.

“You may store data on us from an archive, but you could use that same data to run analytics,” he explained. “Now, you’re making use of these corporate assets in ways that weren't easy to do before. Our view is, the data is there just run the data analytics in place."

Gartner forecasts that more than 80 percent of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centers by 2021, up from 30 percent in 2017.