Tim Smith gives a look at what he saw from ClearSky Data at Tech Field Day. The company has an interesting approach to storage, providing it as a managed service remotely, over private fiber. This is able to achieve production level speed and capacity. Tim thinks it could be the perfect way for companies firmly invested in on-premises or private clouds to dip their toes into more public waters.
Secondary Storage is Cohesity’s Primary Goal
It says something about Cohesity that they’ve energized a lot of Tech Field Day delegates. After all, their solution is about secondary storage, which might ordinarily be relegated to an afterthought. But Tim Smith appreciates their focus. He puts in succinctly at the end of his piece: All too often, vendors forget that not all data is created equal, and thus should not be treated equally. It’s a really great point and one that Cohesity takes to heart. Their hardware and storage platforms are designed from the ground up to address the specific needs of secondary storage. This encompasses not just backups, but all data not actively used in production. It’s a huge swath of data that’s just waiting to be property leveraged. Tim thinks Cohesity has developed a way to do this.
Time to bring back the middleman
Tim Smith reconsiders the idea of a middleman. The term hardly has a positive connotation, generally a derogatory term for someone imposed by bureaucracy. But with DriveScale, Tim sees something different. He sees their disaggregated approach to hardware as liberating storage from compute, particularly useful for scaling Hadoop clusters. Overall, he seems pretty bullish on their agile solution.
