Storage Startup Cohesity Says It's Attracting Enterprises, Unveils Wave Of Features To Get More On Board

Cohesity, a storage startup led by a co-founder of hyper-convergence startup Nutanix, unveiled software updates Tuesday that give organizations more control over storing and protecting their data.

Just as hyper-convergence combines compute and storage on a single appliance, Cohesity’s technology consolidates the multiple products typically found in "secondary storage," or storage used for data backup and recovery, software testing and development, and analytics.

Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron, co-founder and former chief technology officer at Nutanix, told CRN the software updates are aimed at the startup's growing base of enterprise customers.

[Related: Storage Startup Cohesity Appoints Ex-NetApp CEO To Board, Former Nicira CEO Joins As Adviser]

For example, he said it's now possible to back up workloads on physical servers running Linux and Windows. Another addition is finer-grained backup and recovery for Microsoft SQL Server, Sharepoint and Exchange, which are widely used by enterprises.

Cohesity's backup and recovery software was previously limited to backing up a virtual machine on a single node, but the updates make it possible to distribute the backup across multiple nodes, said Aron.

Aron said the updates double Cohesity’s previous storage I/O and throughput, and there are also new REST application programming interfaces (APIs) for easier orchestration and automation of workloads.

By eliminating "siloes" of different secondary storage products, Cohesity thinks it can bring more efficiency to a part of IT infrastructure that until now has not been a hotbed for technological innovation.

Mark Campbell, director of research at Trace3, an Irvine, Calif.-based Cohesity partner, said the startup's technology lets customers make use of storage infrastructure and get more return on their investments.

Using Cohesity, an organization could, for example, determine how many employees opened a Powerpoint presentation a CEO gave. It can also use Cohesity to create development and testing environments more quickly.

"Backup and recovery is probably the most unsexy thing in IT. Cohesity is saying, why not make this an interesting part of your business?" Campbell said.

Trace3 is focused on DevOps, big data and cloud computing, and Cohesity has relevance to all three areas, Campbell said. "This is a partner we can bring into just about any scenario," he said.

Cohesity started selling its product in October and Aron said some 80 percent of its customers are enterprise firms. Overall, Cohesity has more than 60 deployments worldwide, according to Aron.

Cohesity has raised $70 million in venture funding in two rounds since its founding in 2013, and Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Sequoia Capital are investors.