Cohesity Inc., the storage startup that raised a massive $250 million round led by SoftBank Corp.’s Vision Fund in June, is marking its first major product release since the investment.

The company today unveiled an artificial intelligence-infused cloud service called Helios for managing deployments of its DataPlatform software.

DataPlatform is designed for storing the “secondary data” that, according to Cohesity, makes up most of the information in the enterprise. The term covers noncritical records such as file copies, copies of copies and backups.

Cohesity said Helios enables organizations to manage all their secondary data environments through a single dashboard. That includes DataPlatform instances running on-premises, in the public cloud and at edge locations such as branch offices that are far away from an organization’s backend infrastructure.

Centralizing management operations in a single interface can theoretically save a great deal of work for administrators. However, it’s something that other storage providers offer as well. What makes Helios stand out, the company said, are the automation features built into the service.

One feature can automatically detect configuration issues, such as if a company neglects to encrypt the data in a deployment, and then suggests a fix. Another, dubbed SmartAssist, provides recommendations on how best to deploy workloads based on hardware requirements specified by administrators.

Helios can provide advice about longer-term operational decisions as well. According to Cohesity, the service uses machine learning to analyze how a company uses its infrastructure and determine when additional hardware resources will have to be added to keep up with data growth.

Major changes such as expanding a storage environment tend to require a great deal of advanced planning. To speed up the overall process, Cohesity has also equipped Helios with an AI-powered modeling tool that lets administrators test a modification before rolling it out to production. Cohesity said that the capability makes it possible to evaluate multiple ways of implementing a given change to find the most suitable approach.

Helios’ features rely in part on anonymized metadata that the startup aggregates from customer deployments worldwide. The startup uses the same information to power a dashboard that lets companies compare their deployments with that of others, which provides another way to assess operational efficiency.

Cohesity Chief Marketing Officer Lynn Lucas recently spoke with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio, about the company strategy versus traditional data backup providers:

Photo: Cohesity