Cohesity Pegasus 6.8: Enhanced Next-Gen Data Management

One of the questions organizations are desperately trying to answer today is how far and fast can my data grow?

Between the increased pressure to combat ransomware threats and cyber attacks, and the growing adoption of cloud and expanded use of diverse database applications, data management and protection are becoming more complex and costly than ever before.

With the initial production release of Cohesity Pegasus 6.8, many of these challenges are addressed through additional support for databases, expanded cyber resiliency capabilities, and simplified management to streamline complexity and reduce costs.

Let’s take a look at the key highlights:

Database and Workload Enhancements

To simplify the protection of database applications across organizations, Cohesity is dramatically expanding support for leading databases – enabling customers to eliminate the complexity of point solutions while reducing cyber exposure and TCO with application-consistent backup and recovery. In addition to existing features, key enhancements include:

• Enhancements and increased database protection. Databases continue to be a strategic part of enterprise workloads. As database choice expands, protection can become a challenge, which is why Cohesity has improved upon our solution for databases like PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, IBM DB2, and our certified by SAP solution.  With Pegasus 6.8, Cohesity is also adding Point in Time Recovery (PITR) for Cassandra* – database customers get an expanded, enterprise-grade backup and recovery, with centralized management across cloud and on-prem.
• Support for Hadoop, HBase and Hive workloads on Cloud Edition for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with improved TCO for self-managed Cohesity in the cloud.

*Some of these features are available through early access only or are in tech preview. 

Cyber Resiliency for the Modern Enterprise

In this era of sophisticated ransomware attacks, Cohesity is helping organizations keep their backup data protected against any (external or internal) unauthorized access. With this release, Cohesity will now support:

• SmartFiles S3 Object Lock & Legal Hold: Unstructured data continues to be an attractive target for cyber criminals. The new functionality provides standard S3-based Write Once Read Many (WORM) capability, which prevents objects from being deleted or overwritten for a defined retention time based upon policy. Customers can now take advantage of immutable storage with the flexibility to apply WORM settings at the object level.
• Granular DataLock. By adding a time bound security lock on a snapshot, customers can WORM-lock backups so they cannot be maliciously deleted by anyone. Starting with this release,customers can choose to apply DataLock on select objects (as opposed to an entire snapshot) to meet their security requirements while optimizing storage consumption and costs.
• CloudArchive support for WORM in Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides end-to-end WORM capability through DataLock from specific AWS storage targets.

Ease of Management for SmartFiles

As the number of SmartFiles multi-petabyte-scale deployments continues to grow, ease in management and resource provisioning is paramount. With this release, Cohesity is excited to provide a new SmartFiles Dashboard that enables proactive trend monitoring of performance and capacity to optimize deployments and accelerate issue resolution, along with the ability to visualize volumes of performance and management data into a set of actionable metrics. Furthermore, the dashboard  provides up to the minute resource management metrics for highly accessed Cohesity views and clients.

As mentioned above, alignment with compliance and ransomware prevention requirements has also been tightened for SmartFiles customers through object-based locking for WORM and legal hold.

Pegasus 6.8 Sets the Foundation for Data Isolation

At Cohesity, we want to ensure that our customers are able to effectively manage and protect their data in a time of rising ransomware attacks. We are pleased to announce that Pegasus 6.8 now supports the Quorum Policy Framework, which allows customers to add an extra layer of control and protection to critical operations on their Helios tenant. With this functionality, enterprises will be able secure data on Cohesity clusters against malicious insiders and external hackers, enforce control and protection to critical operations and reduce the risk of direct attack due to over-privilege or compromised credentials. As a result, Pegasus 6.8 has set the foundation for Cohesity FortKnox, our data isolation and recovery as a service solution. FortKnox enables businesses to meet stringent backup and recovery SLAs as well as regulatory and cyber insurance requirements. By storing an immutable copy of data in a Cohesity-managed cloud vault via a virtual air gap, businesses can easily recover data back to source or an alternate location in case of a data disaster. To learn more about FortKnox, check out our blog Going Beyond the Air Gap – Data Isolation and Recovery for the Modern Era.

Conclusion

In an era of digital transformation, organizations worldwide are not only challenged with ensuring their data is safe and secure against ransomware and other cyber risks, but must manage the complexity of their diverse IT environments. With the increased usage of cloud and edge infrastructure, and a wider array of database applications than ever before, the latest Pegasus 6.8 release enables businesses to unlock the value of their data and protect backup data against internal and external threats, all delivered through a next-gen data management platform that provides simplicity and ease of management at its core.