A Cisco end-of-life notice confirmed it is going to stop selling certain Cisco Select Cohesity Solutions, initially with no replacement option specified but now with alternatives.
Update: Cisco and Cohesity provided explanatory statement, 6 August 2024.
Cohesity entered Cisco’s Solutions Plus program in March 2019, enabling its internal sales teams to sell Cohesity software products running on UCS servers. There was joint sales, marketing, service and support, and product roadmap alignment between Cohesity and Cisco, which is a strategic investor in Cohesity.
Cisco’s end-of-life notice, emitted at the weekend, announced that November 4, 2024 is the end-of-sale date, and identified Cohesity SiteContinuity Delivered as a Service, DataProtect and Flexible DataProtect Delivered as a Service, and Replica or Retention Delivered as a Service as the affected Cohesity offerings.
An event that may be related to this EOL notice is that Cisco made a strategic investment in anti-ransomware startup Halycyon at the start of this month. Janey Hoe, VP at Cisco Investments, stated, “Ransomware has been a perpetual Cybersecurity pain-point for enterprises across the world.
“Halcyon’s deployment of bespoke artificial intelligence models to proactively identify ransomware strains, as well as instantaneous recovery of hijacked data, represents a robust AI enabled response to an endemic problem. We are proud to have Halcyon become a part of our $1B global AI-investment fund, announced earlier this year.”
Only last month, Cisco blogger Jeremy Foster wrote that since formulation of their agreement in 2019: “Cisco and Cohesity have produced five Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) and multiple open-source contributions in GitHub repositories. These prebuilt integrations, reference architectures, and solution guides cover a number of use cases for simplifying data management and strengthening data security, including backup, archiving, disaster recovery, ransomware protection and recovery, file and object services, dev/test, and analytics.”
Cisco and Cohesity had more than 460 joint customers and their alliance expanded to include Cohesity Cloud Services, described by the pair as “a portfolio of fully managed, cloud-native, as-a-service (aaS) offerings that provide backup and recovery, threat detection and data classification, and cyber vaulting services.”
Foster wrote: “With more apps and workloads generating more data than ever before, there is a historic demand to derive value from this data. But that also means there are more points of complexity and vulnerability than ever before for companies who need to manage and secure all that data across multiple environments.
“As long as this is the reality, Cisco will continue to work closely with strategic partners like Cohesity to ensure that our customers can protect and manage their data better so that they can unlock real value from what is likely to be their most important asset.”
Furhter back in August 2023, Cisco integrated Cohesity DataProtect data protection and DataHawk ransomware protection capabilities into its extended detection and response (XDR) offering.
We have asked both Cisco and Cohesity for an explanation of why this EOL notice is being issued and what it means for their relationship. A joint Cisco-Cohesity statement said: “Cisco and Cohesity’s strategic relationship remains unchanged. This EOL notice simply pertains to SKU’s being deprecated as part of a price list update and retirement of certain offers by Cohesity.
“Four of the offers have been replaced with new SKU’s; the EOL notice is updated to reflect that. The remainder are offers being EOL’d by Cohesity have been rolled into new offers. There are currently 38 Cohesity “as-a-Service” SKUs on the Cisco price list. Additionally, the Cisco price list includes Cohesity Service and Support SKUs including Cohesity data replication and management software, such as Cohesity DataProtect, Replica, SmartFiles and Archive, as well as Cohesity’s catalog of professional services, training and data platform SKUs.
“Our hundreds of joint customers can expect Cisco and Cohesity to continue their strong relationship, and we’re committed to working closely together to continue to offer innovative solutions. The small number of customers impacted by the EOL announcement will be provided, where appropriate, migration paths to newer offerings.”
