Dell have announced a new player in the entry-level storage space that affectively replaces the MD3 range and also treads on the toes of its cousin the SCv3020. It's called the ME4 and at present is available in three different sizes.
Read MoreThroughout the podcast, Barry, Mike and Paul discuss their experience of the show, the conversations Mike and Paul are having with customers while they man the 'Meet the experts' area as well as their roles within the Dell Solutions Centre in Limerick.
Read MoreMyself and Barry were lucky enough to be invited to the first vRetreat event of 2019 recently. The event was held at Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea Football stadium. For more information about what Barry and I thought about the day, the technology and the stadium, watch our video below.
Read MoreI recently attended vRetreat in London and had the opportunity to hear from one of the sponsors Cohesity regarding their solution and the latest updates. I have seen Cohesity present several times now, so I thought it was about time that I pass some information on to those of you that read Define Tomorrow.
Cohesity is in the hybrid storage market but specifically for secondary storage workloads such as backup, file, archiving and more for enterprise size companies.
Cohesity was founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron who created the web-scale file system at Google, principles of this were infinitely scalable and continuously available, values that have been brought to the Cohesity platform. This isn’t where Mohit Aron’s history ends, however, he was also a co-founder of Nutanix.
First, we need to understand why Cohesity is concentrating on secondary storage and what is the issues with secondary storage. Secondary storage is all the data in your infrastructure that maybe isn’t actively being used or does not have a specific performance need. Great examples of this include data for backups, archiving, test and development and more. Finding these types of data a home is often a struggle, with scalability, reliability and cost often being a problem as well as performance. While you don’t necessarily need the same levels of performance as your expensive primary storage, you do need it to be reliable and scale as the data grows and it will grow! I find that customers either leave this data on their primary array which can be costly or invest in a cheaper platform that doesn’t meet the full business requirements. This is where Cohesity steps in.
Cohesity is a scale-out solution made up of multiple x86 physical server nodes with a minimum initial configuration of three nodes. However, it is also available as a virtual appliance for ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office) situations and directly from the cloud. This is where you will start to notice the differences between Cohesity and the vast majority of its competition.
Cohesity’s own hardware is manufactured by Intel and is a blade-based solution sitting in a dumb chassis delivering four X86 server nodes and twelve disk slots per chassis. The system is easily scaled in a web-scale fashion a single node at a time. Each node has at least two 10Gb uplinks, dual 6 core CPUs, 64GB RAM and over 800GB of flash, scalable depending on the model up to 2TB. Cohesity also works with Cisco and HPE to deliver rackmount server solutions. With all of this resource available, Cohesity is much more than a big box of dumb storage. It has a number of built-in services making use of that resource such as inline global deduplication and compression, backup, file services and analytics.
Cohesity runs a file system called SpanFS, which based on the Google File System allows for web-scale or infinite scalability. Currently, this has been tested up to 256 nodes with not flatline in performance, that's a whopping 10PB of capacity! It is compatible with NFS, S3 and SMB protocols; all protocols can be used at the same time and on the same volume all with global in-line deduplication. Because all deduplication metadata is kept in flash, there is no penalty regarding rehydration of data when accessed from the system. The file system is intelligent and able to detect the type of I/O and able to optimise on the fly specifically for random or sequential IO. The SpanFS refers to the nature of the file system spanning everything, with no master node, data is spanned across the hyperconverged nodes, as well as the flash and HDD storage tiers and even remote cloud storage.
I highly recommend having a read of this whitepaper if you want to know more about the SpanFS file system
https://cohesity.com/resource-assets/white-paper/Cohesity-SpanFS-and-SnapTree-WP.pdf
Once data is written to the platform there is global indexing and search allowing you to search across all stored data for anything you wish to find. There is no doubt with legislation such as GDPR coming into place having the ability to search for specific data across your infrastructure when you receive a request for personal data will become a must. I would love to see this in action and understand how accurate it would be able to assist with tasks like this across a variety of scenarios, e.g. word document, SQL database etc.
Cohestiy uses a patented snapshot technology called SnapTree which uses a distributed redirect on write snapshot method. The result is no lack of performance and unlimited snapshots that are instantly available. The key technology differentiator in SnapTree is the access path to any given data block is fixed length and previous snapshots don’t need to be traversed to rehydrate backups. The net result is fully hydrated backups which from a business perspective enables instant mass restores of VMs and significantly lower RTOs. – Many thanks to Jason Monger of Cohesity for explaining that so eloquently.
Cohesity’s inbuilt backup solution is called DataProtect and is managed by a modern HTML5 interface. DataProtect will allow you to backup VM and files within your infrastructure using a mix of agent and agentless based technologies depending on where the data stored. There is inbuilt support for VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, Physical Servers and much more. Data stored across the Cohesity platform, not just for backup can be replicated to not only another physical Cohesity platform but to a virtual platform at a branch office or in the cloud, or any other type of S3 or NFS storage.
vRetreat took place on the 15th of February 2018 in London, with presentations from Zerto and Cohesity with much food and fun at the Crystal Maze! Read about my thoughts and experiences from the day.
Read MoreIt’s hard to believe the popular SC4020 has been around for over 3 years now and recently Dell EMC have announced its successor, the SC5020. This post will look at some of the key differences and improvements to the mid-range SC storage array.
Read MoreNimble Storage's Nick Dyer and ComputerWorld's Barry Coombs run through what is new in the updated Nimble OS version 4
Read MoreI had the opportunity to catch up with Nimble Storage's Nick Dyer, we spoke about changes in the industry, Nimble's latest firmware release and functionality as well as they recently announced cloud volumes technology.
Read MoreThis weeks latest tech news focuses on cyber security reports, outages and the growth of Cloud in 2017.
Read MoreWith most of the big industry events over, the majority of announcements and updates have already been released and the news is a little quiet. However, we have put together the biggest stories of the past week into one place.
Read MoreLast week I flew out to the Dell Customer Solution Centre in Limerick Ireland. Whilst the trip was only 48 hours end to end we had a jam-packed agenda, aiming to get a good overview of the combined mid-market storage portfolio for both Dell and EMC.
Read MoreWe were lucky enough to meet with Darren Gross, Director of Channel at VMworld 2016 held in Barcelona. Darren and Barry discuss the announcements at the show, Tintri's products and the changes happening to the industry.
Read MoreI was lucky enough to meet with Gary Quinn CEO of Falconstor at VMworld Barcelona 2016. We discussed the storage industry, the journey to the cloud as well as our thoughts on the show.
Read MoreToday Dell announced SCOS7 for the SC series of storage, alongside this was the updated Dell Storage Manager which unifies the SC and PS platforms for management but also cross platform replication.
Read MoreToday Dell have announced the latest release of their Dell Storage Operating System (SCOS) version 7. This is the most feature rich software release Dell have had for some time and this post will look at some of the key features soon to be available free of charge for customers who have an active support contract.
Read MoreEarlier this week Nimble Storage announced the introduction of their first ever all-flash array storage. The announcement was made at an impressive launch party where customers and partners of Nimble were invited to join the celebration of the launch in either London or Manchester.
Read MoreOne of our partners, Nimble Storage have put together a short video of their time at VMworld 2015. Our operations director and industry recognised vExpert, Barry Coombs features talking about our successful relationship with them.
Barry speaks to David Cumberworth VP of Atlantis Computing in EMEA, we discuss who Atlantis Computing are, what have they been doing and where are they going? David also shares his top for those of you looking to Define Tomorrow for your organisation.
Barry speaks to Imation systems engineer Ross Copper-Smith live on the show floor at VMworld Europe 2015, understand who Imation are, what products do they offer and what is Ross's top tip for IT Managers and Engineers that are looking to Define Tomorrow for their business.
Barry catches up with Chuck Dubuque to learn more about Tintri storage, what makes there platform unique and gets his tip for the future for those of us that are looking to Define Tomorrow
Join us as we explore the innovative world of Copilot, diving into its various versions, standout features, and the benefits they bring. Consider this episode your guide to integrating Copilot seamlessly into your organisation, equipped with essential tips on data governance and organisation-wide templates.
In this tech-packed conversation, we demystify the intricacies of modern management and unveil the power duo – Microsoft Intune and Windows Autopilot.
The home to all the latest news, innovations, insights and resources from ComputerWorld's crack team of experts and engineers...
In this episode, we're unravelling the mysteries of the latest Microsoft 365: Loop. Join us as we equip you with all the essential details to transform from a Loop novice to a Loop legend.
Join us as we explore the innovative world of Copilot, diving into its various versions, standout features, and the benefits they bring. Consider this episode your guide to integrating Copilot seamlessly into your organisation, equipped with essential tips on data governance and organisation-wide templates.
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In this episode, we're unravelling the mysteries of the latest Microsoft 365: Loop. Join us as we equip you with all the essential details to transform from a Loop novice to a Loop legend.