Cohesity cuddles up to Cisco. But riddle me this: Is it hyper-converged?

Joins Solution Partner Program

+Comment Secondary storage silo converger Cohesity is joining Cisco’s Solution Partner Program to flog its software on Cisco hardware.

There is a reference architecture specifying how Cohesity software can run on UCS C240-M4 servers, and a Cohesity entry in Cisco’s on-line marketplace catalogue.

A canned Cohesity quote paints the picture. Here’s Joe Barnes, head of world-wide channels at Cohesity. “Customers will now be able to realize the benefits of Cohesity’s hyper-converged secondary storage on Cisco’s industry-leading hardware. … The new partnership with Cisco empowers customers to leverage the UCS architecture, management pane and ecosystem to achieve unified secondary storage.”

The marketing-speak Cohesity uses here is magnificent, gold standard stuff:

The Internet of Everything (IoE) continues to bring together people, processes, data and things to enhance the relevancy of network connections. As a member of the Cisco Solution Partner Program, Cohesity is able to quickly create and deploy solutions to enhance the capabilities, performance and management of the network to capture value in the IoE.

So buy Cohesity software on Cisco UCS servers to capture value in the IoE - wonderful.

+Comment

Cohesity is jumping on the hyper-converged bandwagon by calling its Data Platform systems hyper-converged, as they combine storage and compute capacity in consolidating secondary storage and users can run secondary data workflows, including data protection, test / dev and analytics, directly on the Cohesity platform. They can, for example, run custom MapReduce jobs on the data stored on the platform.

As Cohesity is not saying primary storage-using applications can run on its platform, then saying it’s hyper-converged is a bit of a stretch, and something Nutanix and others would disagree with. Cohesity converges multiple secondary storage use-cases on its platform; it’s not a hyper-converged system as the world generally understands the term at all. Its adoption of the hyper-converged term is almost as obfuscatory as NetApp and other storage array hardware suppliers saying their products exemplify software-defined storage.

Cisco is not saying that Cohesity software running on its C-Series UCS HW is equivalent to its HyperFlex hyper-converged system based on OEM’d Springpath software. If we now need hyper-converged primary data systems and separate hyper-converged secondary data systems then the hyper-converged term is getting stretched beyond its original and generally understood meaning.

It may already be too late to fight this. Rubrik and Activio and Catalogic and Delphix are probably looking at hardware partners and wondering how they can become hyper-converged too; Axcient and Hedvig and Primary Data too. ®