Anyone who’s read my stuff, or paid attention to what’s happened in backup over the past few years are aware that backup itself is only part of the game. I’d add, that no backup is viable unless you can recover that data/image/snapshot quickly and accurately into your home environment.

But the value of data today brings way more significance to how the business leverages that data toward the potential analytics against it. There are many players in this field. The backing up and storage of that data in a format that’s accessible is also only part of the equation. Even more important is the ability to draw conclusions from that data that will help your organization to extract business information, HR, staffing, financial, stocking of inventory, business trends etc. from it.

I believe that today, the analytics tools necessary to cull the appropriate datapoints out of it are Elk and Splunk. Both of these tools are essential to pull out the kinds of visualizations quickly and easily from the raw data, and from the diverse parts of the data, which may reside all over the various pieces of data within the structures stored in various locations and in various formats across the data presented. Neither of these tools are simply SIEM tools any longer. Though they do this job exceptionally well, they both have functional capacity to draw out these datapoints.

When Cohesity presented at Storage Field Day 18, they (Chris Colotti [@Ccolotti] and Jon Hildebrand [@SnoopJ123]) showed us a very interesting approach. Cohesity now has an ability to link to a suite of applications within their “App Store.” I think that any team looking to leverage a Splunk type of architecture within their environment, and to implement these without any undue strain in the implementation of the architecture will see the benefit of being able to download and install an image very quickly of these architectures.

Cohesity understands this, and has eased the pressure of how to go about building these implementations. At the click of a button within the App Store interface, a Splunk image gets downloaded and built.

I am curious how this concept will grow, to see which applications make the cut, and to see how this builds further solutions into the architecture. As the need for backup becomes more apparent, and the hopes for working with that data grow, at what level do we anticipate this app store functionality to grow?

It used to be that Cohesity was designed as a “Secondary” storage environment, maybe a temporary holding zone for data. At this event, it was clear that they’ve actively made moves to ensure that this storage environment, built into the Cohesity devices, is more than secondary. The goal is to envision these devices as primary (if not Tier0) storage targets. The intent is to be able to stand up VM’s on that storage, or be able to run these analytics I’ve spoken of above, on the Cohesity architecture. Ample compute and storage IO must be part and parcel to these in order for that type of workload to be run actually on the Cohesity device. Seems clear to me that this is a truly converged solution, wherein these types of functions will be viable. To insert my own thoughts, I’d have to say that the divergence of Rubrik and Cohesity has never been more apparent, and that this can only be good for the industry.

Once again, a quick disclosure: I was able to attend this event because of the largess of the Tech Field Day group, and as part of a spectacular group of bloggers, presenters, and cast of characters. All travel, lodging and board were covered as part of this event.