Cohesity gets edgy over data management
Some of your data is on your device/machine.
Some of your data is in a datacentre… gently being drip-fed to you depending upon which application/cloud/web service you are using.
Some of your data is out on the Internet of Things (IoT), out there at the edge.
With the very term edge now potentially meaning more than ‘just’ the IoT (i.e. it’s not just dumb sensors and webcams, it’s a wider world of AI and autonomous compute functions and much bigger pieces of sophisticated equipment from MRI scanners to automobiles), we have a new challenge in terms of edge data management.
Magical analyst house Gartner has conjoured up a prediction to suggest that 30% of the enterprise data workload will reside in the edge by 2025.
Bereft of magical quadrangles, but not less spellbinding in its approach to technology analysis is research firm IDC… similar ‘findings’ from the IDC sorcerers suggest that more than half of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the datacentre or cloud by 2022, according to a report.
If all this happens, we’ll be all to well reminded that data backup is a significant challenge in remote sites.
Data management company Cohesity attempting to address this issue by launching a software-defined platform with no need for onsite IT support. It is claimed to be the first solution to combine backup and recovery, file and object services — and cloud archival in a single platform that is optimised for Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) locations.
Cohesity’s ROBO enterprise solution is targeted at remote sites, such as large retailers, restaurant chains, warehouses, energy companies. It addresses challenges of data fragmentation, management and backup. The solution combines Cohesity software with servers from Cisco and HPE.
Unification situation
The company says that its technology underscores the need for a unified approach to manage and protect data generated or stored at the edge in the same manner as enterprise data located centrally or managed in public cloud environments.
“Enterprises are looking for a simple and sustainable way to handle the increasing volume of data created and stored at edge locations,” said Vineet Abraham, senior vice president of engineering and product management, Cohesity. “By offering the enterprise-class features of Cohesity software in a cost-effective, plug-and-play solution, we are empowering organisations to bring their data center, cloud, and edge together on a single platform.”
The Cohesity solution for ROBO addresses administrative, latency and bandwidth concerns at remote locations while at the same time complying with data recoverability concerns and compliance mandates of corporate headquarters.
Once deployed, a sysadmin can serve application needs by performing management operations centrally — such as creating simple policies for backup and recovery across multiple branch locations, as well as branch replication policies that ensure a copy of the data is available from the data center or cloud in case of local failures.
Customers can now adopt Cohesity’s data management solution for edge locations either as a virtual appliance or as a physical appliance based on newly certified partner servers.
Do you care, developer?
Overall then… can we expect software application developers to suddenly develop a keen interest in the fact that a much greater proportion of their app’s data workload will be exposed to compute functions (and analytics calls… and memory calls… and other input/output mechanics etc.) out on the edge?
In a perfect world, if Cohesity’s technology (or its competitors in this space) works, they won’t have to… well, that’s kind of the whole idea in the first place. Edgy stuff for sure.