Cohesity took its remote office, branch office (ROBO) service DataPlatform Virtual Edition to the edge today with the launch of its new hardware-based appliance to manage data in ROBO locations. 

The appliance — which combines Cohesity software with certified servers from Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) — aims to simplify backup, recovery, file services, object storage, and policy-based data mobility to an organization's core data center or the public cloud for archival, replication, and tiering though a single platform, said Cohesity’s senior director of product marketing Raj Dutt.

The vendor's larger enterprise customers struggle with mass data fragmentation and high operating expenses, which Dutt said is result of dependency on dedicated technical resources to deploy and operate ROBO locations, combined with ongoing hypervisor licenses cost to run virtual solutions. The ROBO product aims to address these pain points at the edge.

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. 

Large organizations and distributed enterprises, such as national retailers, global warehouse and distribution centers, and IT services, have dozens if not thousands of remote locations, which continue to become more dispersed, further decentralizing data. 

Enterprises in these verticals need to backup and protect their data close to the source and then back the data up to the core data center or cloud periodically, Dutt said.

Using Cohesity Helios, a software-as-a-service-based global management user interface, customers are able to manage ROBO data similar to how they manage their data in traditional data centers and public clouds. The hardware-based offering runs on a single server, available with either 4 or 8 terabytes of storage. It also includes Cohesity’s DataPlatform Standard Edition and DataProtect pre-loaded on Cisco or HPE servers. 

It allows companies to manage global locations through a single user interface with API-driven architecture to consolidate workloads. Further, Dutt said that the new product can reduce enterprises' data footprint and optimize bandwidth utilization via global deduplication and compression, which also helps reduce total cost of ownership.

It also features built-in anti-ransomware capabilities including an immutable file system, DataLock policies, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and instant restore, all of which provide higher data resilience and performance, Dutt said.

Although the vendor claims its latest offering to be an industry first, it certainly isn’t the only provider with ROBO data protection and recovery services.

Veritas has a small version of its SME Flex 5240 appliance for ROBO and edge locations that protects and restores data at the edge site and integrates with NetBackup in the data center and the cloud.

Additionally, Aparavi File Protect & Insight protects files from core to edge to cloud, and this includes backing up files from central storage devices and large numbers of endpoints, to any or multiple cloud destinations.