Last year, I met Coho Data for the first time (it was during SFD4), and I wrote an enthusiastic article about them. Too enthusiastic maybe, but I really liked their vision and I overlooked the immaturity of a product that was still on a pre-release stage at that time. This time round, my intention was to be tougher with my comments and questions. But again, I have to admit that the ideas and vision of the company overwhelmed my judgmental ability.
2.0
The company is still very young. The product has been GA for one year, and has been sold to about 40 end users. A new version of the software (2.0) came out a few days ago. The Most notable added feature to this software release is replication (all the details here in Coho’s corporate blog). BTW, this is not the only added feature since 1.0, in fact the array has seen several small releases during the entire year to cover for bugs and improve other aspects of the product.
A clever UI, APIs, VM level granularity on NFS, performance, analytics, scale-out design and many other modern features make this array very appealing in many use cases… but there is more.
The power of a vision
In any case, most of the SFD6 session with Coho was spent with Andy Warfield (founder and CTO) talking about product internals and how the company is developing next generation features instead of talking about what is effectively available today. Once again, I was impressed and fell in love. The ideas are great and even though only time will tell, the potential expressed by Coho is very high indeed.
Analytics, a potential (outside the box) hyper-converged play, QoS, smart management features were all outlined and some of them are already in the development stage. The potential expressed by this vision is quite considerable. I highly recommend you take a look at the videos recorded during this session, they’re definitely worth a watch!
Final notes
As I’ve already said, Coho data is still a very young company and the product isn’t perfect. At the end of the day, this is highly specialized storage for VMware and many features are still missing (protocols like SMB or iSCSI, support for Microsoft environments are only a couple of examples).
At the same time, their unique approach and vision make the product very compelling and interesting. I’ll be keeping my eye on it to make sure their promises are kept… and I suggest you to do the same.
Disclaimer: I was invited to this event by the GestaltIT and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku team.
