Cohesity’s unveils Cohesity SmartFiles, an intelligent NAS solution designed for web scale

Cohesity announced Cohesity SmartFiles, a software-defined solution for files and objects that goes beyond traditional scale-out NAS (network attached storage) capabilities.

SmartFiles empowers organizations to utilize integrated applications to bring exceptional intelligence to file-related IT infrastructure. SmartFiles also reduces storage costs with unique capacity efficiency and multi-tier data management capabilities.

Unlike competitive products, SmartFiles integrates multi-layer cybersecurity to defend valuable business data against cyber threats.

SmartFiles is ideal for a variety of workloads including collaboration and productivity apps, large-scale document management, life sciences and medical research, digital archives, and video and surveillance. SmartFiles offers benefits to customers that are unlike any NAS solution on the market today.

Integrated apps provide intelligence and simplify management

One of the breakthroughs with SmartFiles is that applications built to support the NAS ecosystem are integrated within Cohesity DataPlatform. Available through the Cohesity MarketPlace, apps such as antivirus, file audit with anomalous access detection, and content search can all be run directly on the platform.

Traditional NAS implementations often require organizations to purchase and run separate infrastructure to accomplish these same tasks. This approach of bringing compute to the data reduces costs and complexity and makes it easy to extract value from data. It also means that as the storage cluster scales, so does the scale of the integrated applications.

Integrated cybersecurity improves security posture

The SmartFiles solution provides layers of cybersecurity through Cohesity DataPlatform to guard against ever-increasing security threats. This includes end-to-end software encryption, multi-factor authentication, an immutable file system, data-lock, and other security benefits.

The integrated apps also protect data against a wide range of cyber threats including the detection and blocking of malicious files, detection of anomalous file accesses, and identification of high-risk information with actionable results.

“Google-like” enterprise search makes it a snap to find data

As part of the Cohesity DataPlatform, SmartFiles provides nearly unprecedented enterprise search capabilities – allowing users to search for and within files across an entire site.

Using optional Cohesity Helios, searches can extend to multiple sites as well as across Cohesity instances running in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The solution makes it easy to find files regardless of where data resides.

Customers no longer need to commence a lengthy, multi-step, complicated process to find data, one silo at a time. Instead, this capability makes eDiscovery and business research much easier and can play a key role in compliance readiness.

Capacity efficiency reduces costs

SmartFiles delivers substantially greater storage capacity than legacy solutions for the same raw storage space by leveraging advanced deduplication, compression, and small file capacity optimization.

Additional dedupe benefits are achieved by eliminating duplicate files across siloed data center volumes. This can translate into immediate total cost of ownership (TCO) savings.

Automated policy control enhances multi-tiered data management

SmartFiles delivers transparent data tiering both on-premises and to the cloud. Many traditional NAS solutions frequently store between 70-90 percent inactive data – data that no longer requires low-latency performance.

With SmartFiles, it’s easy to create an automated policy to tier select data from an existing NetApp, Isilon, or Pure Storage device to SmartFiles, as well as to archive even “colder” data to the cloud. And, with SmartFiles, the need for third-party tiering software is eliminated.

Effortless policy-based movement of data to the Cohesity DataPlatform is transparent to applications and can result in Tier 1 storage cost savings and improved backup performance.

“Cohesity SmartFiles represents a paradigm-shift for file and object services. It is the first unstructured data solution that bring apps to the data, giving customers the ability to easily run antivirus, file audit, and content search natively on the platform,” said David Noy, vice president, product management, Cohesity.

“SmartFiles also provides boundless scale, exceptional capacity efficiency, robust cybersecurity, and transparent heterogeneous data tiering that transcends traditional scale-out NAS appliances.”

“Cohesity’s cloud-native approach to merging file and object services promises to be more scalable, manageable, and cost-effective than traditional NAS storage,” said Steven Hill, senior analyst, applied infrastructure and storage technologies, 451 Research.

“We believe this approach is the way that storage needs to evolve to support today’s increasingly complex, multi-cloud data management requirements.”

SmartFiles also provides value to customers as their needs change and expand:

• Multiprotocol support with unified permissions accelerates application development: Native multiprotocol (NFS, SMB and S3) support for files and objects with simultaneous access and unified permissions enables developers to easily move applications and data to the cloud now or in the future without disrupting workflows.
• Web-scale architecture removes scalability challenges: There is no fear of hitting scalability “brick walls” due to hard limits of a given solution. SmartFiles overcomes common limitations for file and object solutions including capacity, file size/name/path, and performance degradation from frequent snapshots. Built atop a web-scale architecture based on a shared-nothing, fully distributed file system, SmartFiles scales as required for data consolidation, large archives, media repositories, and large-scale file or object storage pools – all on an easy-to-manage platform.
• Software-defined flexibility: SmartFiles supports a variety of hardware platforms and can run in the cloud with the same functionality as on-premises, providing choice and flexibility.
• Heterogeneous support makes forklift upgrades a thing of the past: SmartFiles ensures seamless horizontal scaling as well as support for heterogeneous older and newer nodes working together in a single scale-out cluster.

“At Expedient we see 2X growth year-over-year, and operating at such a fast pace requires us as a service provider to push our partners and engineering teams to continuously innovate,” said John White, chief innovation officer, Expedient.

“We provide the back end for leading companies all over the world, and as an example, just one of our customers has more than 2.5 billion files, so it was imperative to enable a scale-out, software-defined file and object solution across our environment.

“Beyond meeting our requirements for cost per GB, Cohesity also created tremendous efficiency for our organization, including the ability to automate and offer self-service, reducing our data management burden. Cohesity delivers what they promise.”

“Cohesity SmartFiles is fantastic for our customers because they can integrate their file ecosystem, including antivirus, file audit, and content search, on a single infrastructure, which is beyond the capabilities of traditional NAS,” said David Able, president, Edge Solutions LLC, a Cohesity partner.

“All of this is packaged within the Cohesity DataPlatform to provide enterprise file and object services, data reduction, backup, disaster recovery, and cloud integration.”

“As America’s largest automotive retailer, AutoNation continually looks to partner with technology companies like Cohesity, which enables our business to move to the next level and differentiate ourselves from the competition,” said Adam Rasner, vice president, technology operations, AutoNation.

“Our use of the Cohesity data management platform has provided significant savings for the company. We look forward to expanding our partnership with Cohesity and further leveraging innovative use cases for scale-out NAS to drive technology efficiencies and cost optimization across multiple lines of business at AutoNation.”