Cohesity - John Hildebrand VMware Explore 2022
Transcript
welcome to VMware explore 2022 with the CTO advisor Studio come on in and consume some content welcome back to coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 it has been kind of a tech a geek Tech reunion of sorts a lot of these people I haven't seen in three or more years it has been amazing having conversations about tpus gpus Cloud securing secondary processors just a geek Fest we're going to continue that geek fest with a good friend from the community John Hildebrand principal technologist at cohesity John welcome to the program thanks for having me Keith thanks for sponsoring the CTO advisor Studio at VMware Explorer 2022.
John first off how's the conference been for you well it's been fantastic I mean as you mentioned it feels like a family reunion all over again so getting to see see people you haven't seen in quite some time or that you've only seen on Zoom for an extended period of time so to be able to handshake hug I'll say mostly hug I'm a hugger so um been able to uh just to get back with the community and feel involved once again so earlier today we had on the program Sanjay poonen so you have to follow him up but more importantly you you get to put some meat some technical meat around some of the stuff that he was talking about you know Sanjay poonin sharp guy but you know CEO talking CEO CEO things I want to talk data protection with you okay and data management I think one of the things that we talk a lot about in this space is that data protection is a subset of data management and a lot of these Solutions especially cohesity has data management capabilities Beyond data protection correct what are some of the data management capabilities that are less obvious because the the normal buyer of the cohesity solution is the backup or data protection group correct so we get a lot of folks who as you mentioned buy a lot of cohesity for data protection purposes but we also have a lot of built-in other features things for like file and objects so you probably maybe you've heard of smart files from our portfolio so being able to consolidate down some of those second third tier kind of workloads that you've got to that you've traditionally put on things like say isilon or some other Nas Solutions within your data centers so that's one more component so being able to take file and object Solutions and bring those down into the platform along with data protection and one of the other unique things that we like to well I wouldn't say it's Unique we've seen other companies try to do it beforehand but an application layer third-party extensibility being able to install different applications to provide an extract more value from the data that's being accumulated on that particular platform so these are the sorts of applications that you've probably seen out there in the past we've done things with Splunk to be able to do some data retrieval from say cold storage from a Splunk perspective we've also got things like security vulnerability scanning being able to crack open some of those uh backup copies of virtual machines as an example and be able to run vulnerability scanning against that on our platform so so you guys kind of blur the line between secondary third tier storage and a backup solution which initially I'm going to be honest back four or five years ago that was the knock against cohesity what is it is it a backup solution is it a second tier storage as that story started to resonate with customers you talk to a lot of customers yeah I'd say it has been if you consider to some degree what VMware originally did to the data center where it Consolidated down a lot of physical workloads into virtual platforms what we're trying to do is kind of the same thing with a lot of data center operations when it comes to things like lower tier navs data protection Solutions some of these applications that you can run for things as I've already previously mentioned with the things like Splunk things uh things like vulnerability scanning plenty of other applications out there to provide more data and insight for your organization at the same time but that's starting to resonate we're seeing more customers we've even actually sold some customers based off of the smart file solution first and then they went to the data protection side of the equation so some of those other components are starting to definitely resonate with the with the customer base and get some traction behind them so let's pivot the conversation to security a little bit one of the things that uh uh data protection companies like to brag about is that eventually your mission critical data is going to end up on backup and what better location to scan obviously for viruses but more today for malware and other vulnerabilities at the secondary tertiary backup copy what how does cohesity differentiate themselves between between competitors and your solution well again from our perspective being able to extract it on using our own metal essentially or I should say with our OEM Partners the software capabilities regardless of who you choose from a metal perspective you've got the ability to run that particular piece of software from just about anywhere including in some cases from our Cloud Solutions at the same time you can run some of these applications because at the end of the day that particular layer is for all intents and purposes running kubernetes so we're utilizing kubernetes for the application layer to be able to install these applications and gain access to the file system so that we can perform these operations so do I have some type of partner store I can go to and download these apps or is this something that I have to go out to a GitHub repository to get how do I get these apps onto my cohesity Appliance so we have a Marketplace for that so whether it's third party developed or cohesity developed we have a Marketplace in which you can download these apps to your particular software solution pack that you have and run them as just another set of applications from another tab within our user interface so one example you just gave was Splunk Splunk is data let's call it data hunger it will store as much data as you're willing to keep but obviously if I have the ability to put CPU against that directly then there's the advantage of it is that the idea that I can have Splunk locally installed on my cohesity box do the data collection there and then do the analysis there as well yeah that's it utilizing some of the spare cycles that happen because from a data protection or from a file and object's perspective we're not exactly there are times where the system gets taxed but it's not a constant taxing that necessarily happens when uh utilizing the system so why not use some spare CPU memory and storage to be able to throw at some of these problems that are out there so let's talk about Cloud one of the challenges I threw at Sanjay is that cohesity hasn't been known as a cloud company of the way that it was introduced to me is it was a data center backup solution it was a way we're at VMware and one of the beer being with most loan product is vsphere it's a great product to buy back up your vsphere environment but I have kubernetes I have ec2 instances I have cloud how is cohesity addressing those non-vspear type workloads well we're continuously adding new things to the portfolio for data sources so one of the biggest sources that we end up working a lot with I know we're at a VMware show but Microsoft 365.
com four slash projects to learn more about how we put some of these solutions to the test stay tuned for more coverage of VMware Explorer 2022.
