Cohesity Acquires Imanis Data In Big Hadoop, NoSQL Data Protection Play

Cohesity also is expanding its data protection and management capabilities with native Kubernetes container and Microsoft OneDrive capabilities.

Data protection software and appliance developer Cohesity made its first acquisition Wenesday with the purchase of Imanis Data, a young developer of enterprise backup and data management technology for distributed databases including Hadoop and NoSQL.

Cohesity Wednesday also unveiled its release of technology based on the Imanis Data acquisition, as well as technology for backup and recovery of containerized applications and for Microsoft OneDrive.

One of Cohesity's primary focuses is to address the issue of mass data fragmentation, where data in an enterprise can sit in many silos and arrays, said Raj Dutt, director of product marketing for the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

[Related: Cohesity Closes Massive $250M Funding Round With Investments From Softbank, HPE, Cisco]

"With data so fragmented, it's hard to take advantage of it," Dutt told CRN. “Fragmentation is a big issue. Data needs to be repurposed not just for backup and disaster recovery, but also for test/dev, meeting such compliance requirements as HIPAA and GDPR, and for combatting ransomware."

Imanis Data provides backup and recovery technology for all big data workloads including Cassandra, Couchbase, MongoDB and Hadoop applications on-premises or in the cloud.

The company's technology also allows for the seamless movement, copy, and migration of data for test/dev, mirroring, and database migrations across on-premises and public clouds.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense, said Mike Piltoff, senior vice president for strategic marketing at Champion Solutions Group, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based solution provider and Cohesity channel partner.

Distributed databases and big data are markets that are now reaching mainstream status, Piltoff told CRN.

"It's crossed the chasm from nice-to-have to need-to-have for corporate business," he said. "Businesses are now asking how to protect all that data and get access to it."

Imanis Data is Cohesity's first acquisition and will help the company expand the kind of data it protects and manages for customers and partners, said Michael Porat, Cohesity's vice president of strategy and business development.

"Customers don't want multiple vendors," Porat told CRN. "Our customers don't yet have a big NoSQL business, but the mindshare of NoSQL is growing. Imanis has the best technology for managing NoSQL workloads."

Cohesity and Imanis Data are not strangers to each other. Porat said the two have partnered for some time, with Imanis Data one of the first third-party software vendors to make its technology available on the Cohesity marketplace, which was launched in March.

Starting Wednesday, Cohesity is making the Imanis Data technology for simplifying Hadoop File System big data workloads and NoSQL distributed databases available to its channel partners, Porat said.

Also new from Cohesity is technology for backing up and recovering Kubernetes-based containerized applications via native integration with Kubernetes.

Cohesity also introduced backup and recovery capabilities for Microsoft OneDrive, Porat said. That follows the earlier introduction of backup and recovery of Microsoft Exchange Online that the company introduced in September.

Piltoff said Cohesity's embrace of data protection technology for containerized applications is important for the vendor and its channel partners.

"I had dinner recently with a good friend who works with big systems integrators, and he said the software robotics space is slowing down as corporations want to focus more on containerization," he said. "Containers are a key part of digital transformation. If Cohesity is doing more with containers, it's something we need. Imanis makes Cohesity an even bigger player in the centralization of data management."