Turbocharging NetBackup: How DirectIO will boost your cyber resilience, slash TCO, and unlock AI insights

Enterprises are under pressure to better protect their data against cyber threats, recover faster, and provide AI-powered insights—all while working within tight budgets. To help NetBackup customers keep pace, we’re building NetBackup DirectIO—a deep integration between NetBackup and Cohesity Data Cloud.

As you heard during our Catalyst 1 event, DirectIO will allow customers to retain NetBackup’s reliability, enterprise scale, and breadth of workload support while gaining access to Cohesity Data Cloud’s advanced data security, management, and analytics platform. The result will be stronger cyber resilience, faster recovery at scale, and the ability to unlock more value from data—all without disrupting your existing workflows.

NetBackup DirectIO: The bridge to SpanFS®

DirectIO will connect NetBackup workloads directly to SpanFS—the flexible, fast, and distributed file system that powers Cohesity Data Cloud. SpanFS is Cohesity’s secret sauce—it provides native support for multiple protocols like NFS, SMB, and S3, a web-scale architecture that scales to an unlimited number of nodes, built-in immutability, user-friendly indexing and search capabilities, and much more.

Building on proven NetBackup features like optimized deduplication, synthetic backups, auto-image replication, and granular recovery, DirectIO will expose SmartFiles content views for NetBackup workloads—enabling read-only file & folder access to backup images. The result? A single, optimized data image in SpanFS that NetBackup treats as familiar backup sets, alongside SmartFiles content views for secondary processing. This convergence will eliminate multiple silos—between backup target storage and file/object access, between backup workflows, between backup data and Cohesity security/analytics services—but most importantly, it will pave the way for a rich and exciting set of new capabilities for NetBackup users.

Elevating cyber resilience 

Looking ahead, DirectIO will open the door to advanced threat scanning and hunting. You'll be able to integrate the malware scanner of your choice for your backups via an easy-to-set-up scan host, fully supported in Cohesity Data Cloud. Data classification will become seamless, helping you identify sensitive information and prioritize protections. And recovery operations will be virtually instantaneous, ensuring that you can bounce back from a cyber event quickly, securely, and keep your business running. 

You’ll be able to create air-gapped vaults or leverage cloud-based isolation without complex setups. And with additional AI-powered insights on the horizon, you'll gain access to enhanced proactive analytics to spot anomalies before they escalate. You’ll also gain access to Cohesity Gaia—our RAG-based AI tool that allows to you search and summarize across your enterprise’s unstructured data stored in the platform. 

Unmatched TCO: Efficiency meets flexibility

Every IT team is tasked with doing more with less. DirectIO will help you reduce both CAPEX and OPEX:

• Efficiency from deduplication – By minimizing duplicate data at the source and across workloads, storage and bandwidth requirements drop significantly.
• Scale without limits – Cohesity’s scale-out architecture ensures performance remains consistent as data volumes grow—eliminating the potential choke points and expensive forklift upgrades associated with traditional storage targets.
• Unified operations – Simplified administration and fewer tools to manage reduce the time and cost of day-to-day operations.
• Future-ready investments – A single copy of data supports multiple use cases—from recovery to analytics to AI—maximizing return on investment.

With these advantages, enterprises will achieve the lowest TCO ever for NetBackup deployments, making it possible to modernize infrastructure without overspending.

Evolution, not revolution

Modernizing your data protection capabilities doesn’t have to mean starting over. You’ll retain everything you love about NetBackup – reliable backups, broad workload support, and granular restores – while gaining stronger cyber resilience, AI-driven analytics and insights, and a seamless experience as you pursue your modernization journey. Integration with DirectIO is designed as an evolution, not a revolution.

And of course we remain committed to providing you with plenty of choice. Our Data Cloud runs on hyperconverged setups from leading OEM vendors HPE and Cisco, and NetBackup still supports hundreds of storage targets. While this integration brings amazing benefits, we aren't removing any of those options. Our strong partnerships with Dell, HPE, AWS, Azure, Google, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Quantum, and others remain intact. 

A future-proof path for NetBackup

As a NetBackup customer, DirectIO will offer you the best of both worlds. It will strengthen your defenses against cyber threats, lower total costs, offer flexible deployment choices, and future-proof your data strategy. No rip-and-replace—just enhanced capabilities at exabyte scale.

Reach out to your Cohesity sales representative or partner today. We’d love to talk with you about how DirectIO will build on what you already have in place—turning your data protection investment into a powerful business advantage.

• Download the white paper: NetBackup DirectIO – Powering the Next Era of Cyber Resilience
• For more business context, check out our companion white paper on the evolution of Cohesity Data Cloud.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this blog are not currently available and may not be made generally available on time or at all, as may be determined in our sole discretion. Any such referenced services or features do not represent promises to deliver, commitments, or obligations of Cohesity, Inc. and may not be incorporated into any contract. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services and features that are currently generally available.