Redefining Secondary Storage with Mohit Aron of Cohesity

Mohit Aron, the founder and CEO of Cohesity, presented aims to redefine secondary storage. Founded in 2013, Cohesity focuses on addressing the challenges within secondary storage, specifically targeting issues like inefficiency and fragmentation. Secondary storage encompasses non-mission-critical data, including backups, file shares, archives, DevOps, analytics, and cloud data. Aron emphasized that secondary storage is often neglected and plagued by inefficiencies and the problem of fragmentation as organizations rely on multiple vendors to manage different aspects of this storage tier. This results in higher management complexities, costs, and the accumulation of redundant copies, which further complicates data utilization and insights extraction from secondary storage.

Cohesity aims to consolidate secondary storage into a single, infinitely scalable platform, eliminating the need to juggle between different systems for backups, archivals, DevOps, and analytics. By doing so, the platform aims to streamline the storage management, reduce costs associated with data fragmentation and redundancy, and make the process of managing and accessing data much more efficient. Aron’s vision for Cohesity is to offer a web-scale system that can handle petabytes of data without single points of bottleneck, capable of surviving component failures, and adaptable to handle hardware heterogeneity as organizations scale incrementally over time.

Aron’s philosophy is built around moving compute to the data rather than the other way around, thereby avoiding the inefficiencies of data migration. He emphasized the importance of running mixed workloads, including data protection, DevOps, and analytics on the same platform with inherent isolation and quality of service (QoS) mechanisms. Cohesity’s approach supports efficient data management and utilization through backup integration, random I/O support for DevOps, effective copy data management, and comprehensive analytics capabilities, ensuring that dark data can be illuminated and effectively used. The ultimate goal of Cohesity is to create a holistic secondary storage solution addressing all aspects of non-mission-critical data management efficiently and cohesively.