Corporate file shares and home directories. These use cases haven’t changed in dozens of years. All the problems and challenges of deploying and managing file shares and home directories were solved years ago… or were they?
I found no challenge using my manual electric heater appliance years ago. It was easy… just turn it on, set it to high or low heat…and wait for the room to get warm and toasty. It was only when I bought another heater that had thermostatic temperature control…and remote control that I realized the insufficiency of the manual heater. And so it is with file shares and home directories managed by IT. Yesterday’s basic features such as quotas, user permissions, and non-disruptive scalability have become table stakes. But like my heater experience, you often don’t know of new and helpful features and functions until you look at what’s available.
Cohesity adds unexpected “spice” to what is often considered one of the most boring and static use cases in all of IT. We do this with a few really cool “spices” that provide supercharged search, integrated anti-virus protection and file audit, small-file optimization, and cross-volume sliding window dedupe. In a word, this is not your grandfather’s file environment. It’s the features you may never have thought about, but can create large time- and cost-savings in managing corporate file shares and home directories.
Here are the Cohesity spices we’ve added to our delicious file sharing and home directory recipe…
Did you sense my bias for spicy food? You are smart. And why do I like it spicy? No complicated answer here – it’s simply because it tastes better spicy – for me of course. And for age-old and “bland” use cases such as file sharing and home directories, Cohesity serves it spicy: more cost-effective, easier, less-time consuming… and possibly even more “fun”.
Squeezing more data into fewer disks across each enterprise storage volume can be exceptionally cost effective. When combined with other powerful data reduction technologies such as compression, sliding window variable dedupe, small file optimization, and no-cost clones, overall TCO can be shockingly lowered. We have customers reporting overall data reduction improvements of 200% and 300% versus other file storage products. When lots of similar data is spread out across multiple storage volumes and applications…the cost per TB drops substantially. Dedupe on a per volume basis can be substantially more expensive than cross-volume dedupe.
Single-search across a geographically dispersed hybrid enterprise saves lots of time versus having to execute multiple searches across various global silos. Integrated file audit and insight saves time when trying to understand file content, who did what – and when, or just monitoring for unusual file accesses that merit greater scrutiny. IT can search for prohibited file content – such as credit card information and personal information. Integrated anti-virus protection not only eliminates the high cost of an external ICAP server farm for AV processing, it also eliminates the management effort of external AV infrastructure. As the Cohesity file and objects environment seamlessly grows, anti-virus processing automatically grows with it.
Spicy or not spicy, what matters most is an enjoyable dining experience. A slice of key-lime pie for dessert can turn a good dining experience into a great one. As for file sharing and home directories, extra spice won’t matter if a platform is complicated, hard to manage and scale-out, encumbered with multiple silos and point solutions, or just simply isn’t cost effective. And just like a nice dessert can make a big difference, so can a file and objects platform with integrated backup and recovery, cloud integration, and the ability to consolidate multiple silos and point solutions under a single pane of glass.
We obviously didn’t invent file shares and home directories, but we have taken a big step in making sure these use cases are a positive experience for customers.