Cohesity’s updated software-defined storage product, announced today, combines data protection and scalable file and object storage.

Enterprises can use the new Orion storage platform as a backup system, as well as a searchable archive for large amounts of structured and unstructured data, the company said. It works across clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, as well as on-premises data centers.

The SD-storage product allows enterprises to consolidate “secondary storage silos,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of marketing and products at Cohesity.

Secondary storage encompasses file shares, archives, analytics, backups, unstructured content, test and development data — essentially everything that’s not mission critical. This data makes up 80 percent of enterprises’ storage needs, Rogers said.

“What we hear from enterprise customers is ‘I’m experiencing a data explosion right now and it’s all the unstructured data,’” he said. “They are constantly buying storage for their data centers and most of this is unstructured data — all the archives and media they have to store. Mohit decided to tackle this with distributed systems and software-defined storage.”

Rogers is referring to Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron, who started the hyperconverged secondary storage company in 2013 after also co-founding Nutanix and working as a Google File System engineer.

In April, Cohesity raised more than $90 million in a Series C funding round, led by Sequoia Capital and Alphabet’s venture arm GV, previously known as Google Ventures. Other investors included Cisco Investments and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Enterprises have historically used one storage system for data backup and recovery and another to archive massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. This ranges from customer records to large-scale media content.

But with the increasing amount of data that organizations need to store, these separate infrastructures make storage more complicated and costly, Rogers said. Plus, companies have to work across multiple user interfaces to handle separate data use cases.

“Another problem is too many redundant copies,” he explained. Companies may need to back up a logistics system, for example. And then they also need a copy of this data for developers, and another for analytics. “Right there, that’s three copies. Too many copies, too many silos. And legacy storage devices can’t keep up.”

Orion builds on the company’s earlier data platform. In addition to providing a single platform for data protection and archiving across on-premises and cloud ecosystems, it eliminates redundant copies.

“With the new release, we are now offering scale-out file and object storage services,” Rogers said. “It doesn’t just do data protection; you can now consolidate all of your unstructured data onto Cohesity Orion.”

The updated software also supports access to content across multiple protocols including Network File System (NFS), Common Internet File System/Server Message Block (CIFS/SMB), and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).

While earlier releases only supported VMware vSphere, Orion works with any hypervisor including Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, and Linux KVM. It also includes the ability to back up network-attached storage (NAS) devices beyond NetApp, including EMC Isilon, Pure Storage Flashblade, and any generic NAS, for both NFS and CIFS/SMB file systems. New file-level backups support physical Linux servers, in addition to volume-based backups, and bare-metal restores for Windows servers.