Cohesity this week announced that the provider of secondary storage systems for on-premises IT environments had deepened its alliance with Cisco to include a reseller agreement.
The company has joined the CiscoSolutions program under which Cisco and its channel partners will be able to resell Cohesity storage systems that can be integrated with either Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers or Cisco Hyperflex software that is the basis of a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform based on virtual machines from VMware.
Cohesity also noted that its Hyperflex implementation had been certified as Cisco Validated Design (CVD). That CVD capability is based on integration work Cohesity has done to make the software it provides for managing secondary storage to be a native extension of the HyperFlex management framework, says Sanjeev Desai, senior director of solutions marketing for Cohesity.
That approach will enable end customers to unify the management of highly-fragmented secondary data by having a single platform to manage backup and recovery, copy data management and archiving, says Desai. The opportunity for partners that creates is potentially immense because even in the age of the cloud the bulk of most data in the enterprise still resides on-premises, notes Desai.
Rather than asking partners to integrate the Cohesity and Cisco platforms to avail themselves of that opportunity, all the integrations required is now being done by Cohesity and Cisco.
“Before we had more of a meet in the channel model, says Desai.
Cohesity partners welcome the deeper ties between the two companies because, for one thing, they no longer need to invest as much in building reference architectures, says Kristin Struttmann, vice president of the partnership organization for Trace3, a solution provider based in Irvine, Calif. In fact, as a partner of both companies, Struuttman says having Cisco certify systems from Cohesity is essential.
“We live and breathe CVDs,” says Struuttman.
Partners should also expect to see the amount of pre-sales effort required on their part to build a proof-of-concept (PoC) to be reduced as well.
Of course, both Cisco and Cohesity have multiple technology alliances in place. But in terms of alliances that go beyond simple reselling to include technology integration, the relationship between the two companies clearly goes well beyond any single transaction.
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