This post is a follow-up to my previous one written in August after my participation to Cloud Field Day 4. In that post, after a brief introduction of Cohesity and the problems their technology solves, I went deep dive on the Cloud-specific features showcased at CFD4.
As a matter of fact, just a few days after returning from CFD4, Cohesity made an impactful announcement, presenting Cohesity Helios. Back then I did not have the time to look into the announcement and write about Helios, but attending a private briefing (presented by Rawlinson Rivera) at VMworld Europe 2018 gave me the opportunity to focus on the solution and briefly report about it.
In my previous post I highlighted how Cohesity is a versatile DataPlatform, not only because it allows to solve many of the common (Secondary) Data pain points, but also because Cohesity does so by means of a coherent platform that can be deployed in multiple fashions and across different locations: Cohesity Hyper-Converged Clusters on-prem, installed on partner HW (Cisco or HPE), as Virtual Edition in ROBO/Edge locations or in Public Clouds. All with the same features set and same UI/API endpoints. Great, but you see a problem coming, right? Cohesity addresses the Secondary Data sprawl, but how do we address Cohesity deployments sprawl? How do we manage, connect and control all those islands of Data? In other words, how do we bring it all together?
The answer is Helios, a SaaS-based unified Global Management system for all Cohesity-based Secondary Data and Applications, that is much more than just a passive dashboard connected to the customers’ many global deployments. Helios aims to be Simple, Smart and Proactive.
Simple because of its sleek UI providing a unified dashboard to manage the customers’ global multi-cluster environments, with real-time monitoring and reporting.
Smart because it has a complete, collective vision and understanding of the customers’ global deployments and ensures that automation and orchestration kicks in whenever SLAs have to be met, again, globally. SmartAssist is the technology behind Helios’ “intelligence”: it compares and optimizes customers’ infrastructures performance against that of their peers with Helios’ industry benchmark data.
Finally, Proactive as it is capable to forecast downtime caused by impending HW failures or predict issues related to insufficient capacity possibly triggered by changes in data utilization patterns or upcoming new projects.
Coming from a VMware background, let me make a simple analogy: managing Cohesity clusters without Helios is somehow like having ESXi hosts but not vCenter nor vROps… vCenter brings all your hosts and clusters together for unified management while vROps gives you the insight on health and resource utilization efficiency, with a bit of ML/AI here and there…
Well, if you follow me, this is exactly what Helios does with your Cohesity deployments and why you should consider it.
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