Cohesity SmartFiles: Unified File and Object Services for the Hybrid Cloud

Why Is SmartFiles Smart?

SmartFiles provides modern data management that uniquely combines intelligent data management, hybrid cloud flexibility, and active threat defense, along with multiple features and options to extract value from your data. Unlike traditional NAS and object storage, the Cohesity Data Cloud platform with SmartFiles is data-centric, not storage or infrastructure centric. This means there is no need to move data to apps and add-on data services as we deliver them in the same platform. This removes the complexity and cost of integrating multiple ecosystem apps to enable file and object data management. Cohesity Marketplace apps and machine-learning assisted management also provide intelligence and ease-of management.

The bottom line is that SmartFiles is smart based on its deployment flexibility, broad compatibility, stress-free management, integrated security, visibility and control of unstructured data across the entire geographic enterprise, and lower storage cost.

Freedom of Choice

Software-defined means customers have the freedom to choose the most appropriate hardware for any file or object workload. It’s the freedom to match capacity, performance, and cost with workload requirements. But this is not just about today, it’s about tomorrow. SmartFiles future-proofs unstructured data workloads on the assurance that workloads are not bound to proprietary hardware— or even the data center. SmartFiles runs at the edge, in the data center, and in the cloud. Unified NFS and SMB protocols support file management on-premises and the cloud. SmartFiles is also an easy on-ramp to the cloud through its native S3 protocol. 

Broad Compatibility

SmartFiles has you covered if you have a mixed OS environment or hybrid cloud environment. File permissions across NFS and SMB environments are mapped for transparent file access from either protocol. Files and objects can be accessed simultaneously, and all data is always available as S3. Hybrid environments are easier as SmartFiles speaks the language of Windows/Linux/Unix and the cloud. Seamless data interoperability helps make complex hybrid and multicloud environments easy.

Stress-Free Operation 

It begins with an intuitive UI and “click-and-go” ease. It ends with a bit more time to focus on strategic matters—or just extra time to relax. Machine-learning driven management acts as a hidden smart assistant to remove complexity and save time. Data migrations are easy using Cohesity’s backup solution—which removes the complexity of other migration tools. Automate operations through rich APIs. Cold data on costly Tier 1 storage automatically moves itself to a cost-optimized tier or the cloud. Utilize policies to ensure consistent management. Manage across multiple clusters and locations from a single management pane. Cloud or on-premises. Core or edge. Physical or virtual. Data movement is always easy and transparent to applications. Cohesity SmartFiles alleviates the stress and complexity of traditional scale-out NAS.

Integrated Apps

Integrate an entire ecosystem on a single platform with apps from the Cohesity Marketplace. That means anti-virus protection, file audit, and content search all run on the Cohesity Data Cloud platform with no additional infrastructure required. Detect anomalous file accesses from file logs. Index and search content for compliance and security reasons. The SmartFiles solution eliminates the cost of infrastructure for an application ecosystem while removing the management effort required to manage ecosystem hardware.

Eliminate Security Risks

SmartFiles integrated cybersecurity makes security, including ransomware protection, easy to deploy and manage. It’s a multilayered security approach to protect, detect, and recover your data:

• Prevent – Immutable file system, software encryption, over the wire encryption, multi-factor and quorum authentication, DataLock (WORM), and adherence to multiple compliance standards. 
• Detect – Detect infected files and prevent files from being compromised. Observe user and behavior analytics for security and compliance reasons. 
• Recover – Rapidly clone your last good snapshot and connect to it for instant access to data. 

“Google-like” Enterprise Search

It’s not just simple, it’s deep and data-centric. Get fast search results across file metadata and file content as both are indexed. Unlike traditional solutions, use results to drive data-driven services and make decisions on actual data contents, and not just data about the data. Data is no longer dark. Rather, it’s a renewable resource you need for insights and smart operations. Conduct a single simple search across the entire enterprise. Search any data—anywhere. Across silos, VMs, backups, data centers, remote sites, and multiple clouds.

Low storage cost

Being software-defined, SmartFiles customers have a variety of hardware price points to choose from. SmartFiles provides as much as 96x data reduction or more through deduplication across data center volumes, compression, and small file optimization. 

Cost of ownership can be reduced by as much as 51% through consolidation of silos and moving data from Tier 1 storage to a cost-optimized Cohesity tier. Let’s explore this technology.

• Data deduplication – Based on advanced sliding window variable dedupe technology. This means that duplicate data that has been slightly changed is still deduped—which is beyond traditional dedupe capabilities.
• Compression – Zstandard compression algorithm for high compression ratios.
• Small file optimization – Eliminated the small file amplification penalty common to traditional NAS file systems. Small files are stored efficiently and without the need for triple-mirroring inefficiency. Put simply, 50TB of small files under SmartFiles consumes about 50TB of capacity.
• Cross-volume dedupe – Unlike many traditional NAS appliances, data is deduped across storage volumes and application silos across the data center. Duplicate data that can’t be reduced by traditional silo-by-silo dedupe is eliminated by the Cohesity SmartFiles. 
• Data Insights – SmartFiles provides the built-in capability to scan third-party NAS solutions to analyze file access trends. A policy can be created to transparently tier or migrate older inactive data from third-party and generic NAS solutions, including NetApp, Dell-EMC Isilon, and Pure Storage, to Cohesity. Data can be seamlessly accessed on SmartFiles while NAS storage costs are instantly and drastically reduced.