Cohesity has hooked up with AWS, which is already a backer of the very well-funded data protection business, to sell its Data Platform facilities as a service, with backup being the first product.
Update; 8pm BST Oct 14. Commvault-Azure relationship added.
Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) is the new thing and builds on from Cohesity’s Helios cloud-delivered management service for its 1,500 customers with Cohesity DataProtect offered as a service. It also comes days after Cohesity announced its SiteContinuity automated disaster recovery product.
Amazon made an investment in Cohesity in its April $250m E-round. AWS’s Doug Yeum, its head of Worldwide Channels and Alliances, said of the deal: “Working with Cohesity, we are charting a new course in how data is managed in an as a service model, leveraging disruptive, modern data management capabilities from Cohesity, and industry-leading cloud services from AWS.”
Backup as a service (BaaS) will provide backup of on-premises workloads, via a Cohesity SaaS Connector agent, and also of in-cloud application. Backup data can be restored from AWS to AWS or to an on-premises site. The service will be managed by Cohesity and have consumption-based pricing, with a pre-paid alternative. Customers will get a global and searchable view of all their data backed up with Cohesity, both on-premises and in the cloud, through the Helios management facility.
The umbrella brand for Cohesity’s DMaaS will be Helios and the DataProtect will be the first of a series of data management offerings for mid to large enterprises. The general idea is that Cohesity services will ingest data into AWS and then upstream Amazon services will process it. For example AWS Macie (security services), Glue (extract, transform and load into data warehouse), Redshift (data warehouse) and SageMaker (machine learning training).
Other potential Cohesity-AWS products include DRaaS, Files-aaS and Test Data Management-aaS. The latter would deliver zero-cost clones for developers in the AWS cloud. We understand DRaaS will follow quite soon.
Mohit Aron, Cohesity CEO and founder, offered his thoughts on this: “Cohesity and AWS are also focused on helping customers derive value from data. Through AWS, customers can access a wealth of AWS services, including Amazon Macie, to help customers meet compliance needs, and Amazon Redshift for analytics.”
Cohesity’s Data Platform software converges a customer’s secondary data into a single storage vault covering on-premises and public cloud environments. Data is backed up and protected with immutable snapshots, and the public cloud can be used as a file tier and to store backup data.
The Backup as a Service (BaaS) offering is currently in early access preview with general availability planned by the end of the year. Cohesity will continue to sell its on-premises product.
Comment
Cohesity and AWS call this deal a strategic collaboration and its impact could be widespread. The largest public cloud has taken a massively-funded data protection and management supplier on board and invested in it. Cohesity customers could look to AWS for in-cloud storage and upstream data management services and AWS customers could now move to Cohesity to look after their on-premises data.
Although data protection and management suppliers like Actifio, Clumio, Dell, Delphix, Druva, HYCU, Rubrik, Veeam, Veritas and others have varying degrees of public cloud involvement, none have as close a relationship as this with with a top 3 public cloud supplier; except one.
Commvault is the exception. In June it announced that it and Microsoft were integrating Commvault’s Metallic SaaS data protection with Azure Blob Storage and will develop other product integrations with native Azure services.
The two have a multi-year agreement and Metallic will be a featured app for SaaS data protection in the Azure Marketplace. Metallic Backup & Recovery for Office 365 is already available on the site.
The Google Cloud Platform does not have any equivalent relationship with any supplier like Cohesity.
B&F can envisage exploratory talks between the public cloud companies and the data management companies as suppliers try to become the GCP preferred partners or enlist with AWS alongside Cohesity or Are alongside Commvault.
A second follow-on from the Cohesity-AWS and Commvault-Azure deals could be that mid-to-large enterprise organisations could look to reduce their multiple data protection and management supplier lists and data silos by converging onto fewer suppliers. This would simplify their management burden and make accountability more manageable as well.
