Gain Visibility and Value from Data with Cohesity DataPlatform

John Flores
March 28, 2019
Blogs | Digital Infrastructure | Managed Services

Data is the coin of the realm for modern business, providing insights that help companies make better decisions, understand markets, boost sales, improve processes and optimize costs. In fact, there are very few business decisions that aren’t influenced by data these days.

Finding and using that data is becoming increasingly difficult, however.

Organizations of all shapes and sizes tend to take a “save everything” mentality when it comes to data, storing everything just in case they might need it later. In addition, these data stores are being continually copied for applications such as backup, disaster recovery, development, testing and analytics. IDC estimates that as much as 60 percent of all stored data are copies.

Over time, this practice creates mass data fragmentation with data spread across myriad infrastructure silos, preventing organizations from fully extracting its value. In a recent Vanson Bourne survey of more than 900 senior IT decision-makers, 87 percent said their organization’s data is fragmented, making management difficult and raising fears around competitive threats, compliance risks, job losses and missed revenue opportunities.

To get the most value from their data, organizations need to find a way to break down these data silos and eliminate the need to continually copy and move data around. The Cohesity DataPlatform solution creates an elegant way to accomplish those goals. Rather than moving copies of data into separate application infrastructures, DataPlatform brings compute to the data.

One Platform for Data and Apps

DataPlatform is a hyper-converged appliance that delivers both storage and compute capacity. Based on a unique distributed file system called SpanFS, the scale-out solution allows organizations to run applications on the same platform that houses massive volumes of backup and unstructured data. It works by creating an abstraction layer that sits between physical data sources and the apps that use that data. Apps can access data within each of the data nodes that form the building blocks of DataPlatform.

SpanFS effectively combines all secondary data, including backups, files, objects, test/development and analytics data. It supports industry-standard file and object protocols such as NFS, SMB and S3 and performs global deduplication, storage tiering, global indexing and search. Data is dynamically balanced across all nodes, and individual nodes can be added or removed to adjust capacity or performance with no downtime.  

There are numerous advantages to this design. By removing the need to use separate infrastructure for running applications, DataPlatform eliminates data silos and reduces data fragmentation. It reduces complexity by allowing organizations to manage everything from a single user interface. It advances business-critical goals around compliance, eDiscovery and security by enabling key apps to look holistically across all backup and unstructured data.

Easy App Access

The Cohesity Marketplace makes it easy to download and use Cohesity-developed applications as well as a variety of third-party apps for conducting granular analysis, ensuring data compliance, improving security and more. Third-party apps available through the marketplace include Splunk Enterprise for indexing and analyzing data, SentinelOne and Clam antivirus solutions, and Imanis Data, a machine-learning-based data management platform.

Cohesity-developed applications include Insight, which enables interactive text search across all data nodes, and Spotlight, a security tool for monitoring any modifications to file data. The Cohesity EasyScript application streamlines the complex and time-consuming process of uploading, executing and managing scripts by providing convenient access to all script creation elements.

How valuable is your data? That’s obviously difficult to say with certainty. PwC analysts have estimated that, in the financial sector alone, the revenue from commercializing data is about $300 billion per year. However, data is only valuable if you understand where it is, what it is and how to use it. By eliminating data silos and reducing fragmentation, Cohesity DataPlatform provides a framework for fully realizing the value of your data assets.

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