Cohesity looks to become Nutanix of secondary storage

Cohesity offers hyper-converged solution for secondary storage, while vendors like Nutanix and SimpliVity focus solely on primary storage

While the likes of Nutanix and recently acquired SimpliVity are stealing the headlines when it comes to hyper convergence, California-based start-up Cohesity is addressing an area of the market that is says has been largely forgotten in the emerging technology world.

Nutanix and SimpliVity focus on primary storage within the enterprise - where mission-critical applications are run - but below that is secondary storage built up of backup data and archiving that remains largely fragmented.

Speaking to CRN Cohesity boasted rapid growth over the last 12 months that has seen its global partner base grow from 25 to over 100 in 2016, while its customer base grew from seven to over 80.

Who they are

Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by Nutanix founder Mohit Aron. The vendor raised $15m in Series A five months later, before a Series B round raised a further $55m in May 2015.

Cohesity has three mainland European offices - in Italy, the Nordics and Benulux - and one in the UK which has a team of three headed up by Trevor Cooper.

Patrick Rogers, head of marketing and products at Cohesity, told CRN that in the long term Cohesity will look to follow the likes of Pure Storage and Nutanix in going public and not look to be acquired like others in the hyper-converged space; adding that in the short term another funding round is on the cards this year.

Cohesity's funding has dwarfed the amount Nutanix had raised at this point, with Nutanix raising $13.2m in Series A funding and $25m in Series B funding. Nutanix did however hold its Series B funding round just six months after its Series A round.

"The concern that I've heard from some VARs is ‘I am going to start working with this small player then they're going to get acquired by a larger company that I don't do business with today'. That's the concern," Rogers said.

"We have no intention of being an add-on technology that will be part of a broader portfolio.

"This is really a large market in itself and we're building a long-lasting business. It is not our goal to get acquired."

What they do

Cohesity is a hyper-converged infrastructure player operating in the secondary storage space, meaning it does not compete with the likes of Nutanix and recently acquired SimpliVity who focus on primary storage.

While mission-critical applications run in the primary storage, this typically makes up only 20 per cent of an enterprises infrastructure, leaving the likes of file sharing, archiving and back up as the remaining 80 per cent in the secondary storage.

Channel strategy

Cohesity's target end-user is the mid-to-large enterprise and with this in mind it is typically looking to partner with larger VARs. So far in the UK it has partnered with Viadex, Softcat and Solid State Solutions - which was acquired by Capita in 2014.

UK boss Trevor Cooper told CRN however that he would not rule out working with smaller VARs, providing they have enterprise ambitions.

"Obviously a lot of the SMB business is moving more and more to the cloud so a lot of VARs are looking to become cloud providers themselves or look to sell solutions to larger enterprises who are more likely to retain on premise equipment," he said.

"You have some small VARs that have very good relationships with a smaller number of large customers, but it tends to be the VARs that are selling to the large customers or have aspirations to do that [that we are looking for."

Distribution

Cohesity is distributed in the UK through Ethos Technologies and Data Solutions.

Ian Little, head of channel at Ethos, told CRN that one of the main benefits of Cohesity for partners is that it is not a "rip and replace" solution, so they can introduce initially to one of a customer's secondary storage silos, before expanding it across the others.

"Essentially it's a play that addresses from the top of enterprise down so you're looking at larger enterprises with maybe 500 applications and above, so typically we're aiming for the larger VARs," he said.

"The way that some technology works, and it's not limited to storage, is you buy technology A to replace technology B - or if you're buying Cohesity you're buying technology C to replace technology A and B - but one of the great things about Cohesity is that it's not a rip and replace, big bang solution.

"What people typically do, and where we see our best leads currently, is sell into an enterprise as back-up and recovery and then we can demonstrate the benefit of Cohesity in that market, before picking off the other silos of secondary storage like archiving and so on.

"Because it's a lot more modern than some of the vendors we're looking to replace - Commvault and Data Domain for example who were very active traditionally in that large enterprise area - we've got a really play in replacing those.

Sam Routledge, CTO of Cohesity partner Softcat, explained to CRN that a benefit of adopting Cohesity as a new vendor is that it usually doesn't directly replace another vendor.

"Clearly most of the market - the likes of Nutanix and SimpliVity and so on - have been very much targeted at primary infrastructure and it just feels now that there is a bit of a new category developing," he said.

"It makes it much easier to adopt a new vendor if they're not directly in conflict with any of your existing players because you're trying to create a new category.

"The secondary storage market, back up, object storage etc - has a fair amount of players in it, but bringing it all together, there's not many doing that."

What the analysts say

Tony Lock, analyst at Freeform Dynamics, explained that there is market potential for a vendor like Cohesity to tidy up enterprise secondary storage, but warned not to expect a dramatic market shift overnight.

"There are a lot of vendors running secondary storage - everybody has it - but people have usually lots of silos, so the question is are the potential customers ready to consolidate all of their islands of secondary storage into a single platform?

"Many organisations are also reluctant still today even to move things out of secondary storage to tertiary storage and archiving scenarios so there is clearly a huge potential market.

"There are many good reasons to do that, not least it enables you to understand all of the data that you had there in the first place, and if you can homogenise your data resources it usually makes your management of them simpler.

"The thing that's clear though is that this is not an overnight revolution. These are things that change slowly."