This month Cohesity had a double announcement, a fresh round of funding and a new release of their platform. The funding is round C and at US$90M more than doubles their total funding. One interesting aspect is having HP Pathfinder & Cisco Investments join for this round. The other aspect is that it has been two years since the last round of funding, suggesting that the cash burn rate isn’t too high. OK, enough about the funding, what is new with the product? First off there are new capabilities. Cohesity is not just about backup, an S3 object storage option adds to the existing NFS and SMB file server capability. The file server gets quotas and the ability to have a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) configuration where files are immutable. The underlying storage system now has erasure coding for more space efficiency. There are 2+1 and 5+2 schemes for erasure coding, both yield more usable space. The 5+2 scheme will tolerate two concurrent failures, such as a drive failure while you are rebuilding from a node failure. Another welcome feature is RBAC. Either local accounts or your Active Directory is used for authentication. There are built-in roles and you can create your own, then assign roles on objects for users or groups. There are two features that are all about backup. One is the ability to backup NAS devices, initially NetApp filers. The second is the ability to assign a protection policy to a vCenter folder or tag. Then any VM in the folder or with the tag will get the protection policy applied. I like inheriting protection from vCenter inventory, it is one less thing to need to manage.
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