A feature to effortlessly activate or schedule maintenance mode for On-premises physical servers, vCentres, and ESXi hosts with simple user interactions and an efficient solution to minimise manual efforts.
Context
Cohesity is a data security and management company that does not traditionally provide primary storage; instead, it focuses on secondary data workloads, helping enterprises protect/backup, restore, and manage copies of production data optimised for cost, security, and scale across cloud-native, virtual, physical, and SaaS environments. Additionally, provide disaster recovery, data security, AI insights, vaulting, governance, compliance and other value-added services, all under a single architecture.
With 85 of the Fortune 100, three of the top‑five U.S. banks, and U.S. health insurers, Cohesity serves over 12,000 enterprise customers, including public-facing customers such as Nasdaq, Broadcom, Nationwide, Salesforce, Cisco, and Siemens, etc, illustrating adoption across public & private enterprises, finance, tech, healthcare, education, insurance, and aerospace, etc.
Backup and Recovery are the two core activities of the Cohesity Helios product:
-
Backup ensures that enterprise data from diverse environments—cloud, virtual, physical, and SaaS—is regularly and efficiently protected, creating secure copies for disaster scenarios or data loss.
-
Recovery enables organisations to quickly restore data, minimising downtime and ensuring business continuity after events like cyberattacks, accidental deletions, or system failures.
The Problem
Managing Secondary storage for on-premises clusters presents its own set of maintenance-related challenges for customers. Ensuring data backup & recovery integrity and minimising Downtime/Blackout Window during these operations can be challenging, especially as data volumes grow.
Who are the Stakeholders / End Users?
The Storage Architect lead the technical design & architecture of backup infrastructure, ensuring it aligns with organisational data protection goals and strategic deployment of Cohesity systems at scale across hybrid data environments. Develop blueprints, sizing, integration, and automation strategies Additionally, the backup infras
Backup Admin sets up and manages day‑to‑day infrastructure operations such as backup(policy configurations), recovery, compliance, error troubleshooting and cluster health monitoring. Oversee maintenance operations infrastructure consistency, coordinate audits and compliance checks for seamless backup operations.
What is the problem?
Users report backup and recovery failures due to missing support for taking sources offline during planned or on-demand maintenance. Current manual source management forces customers to delete and re-add sources, which is labour-intensive, error-prone, and unscalable for large or frequent maintenance environments.
This approach increases downtime risks and potential data loss, harming business continuity. Scheduled updates like software patching, OS upgrades, hardware replacements, or migrations become bottlenecks, requiring excessive coordination among backup, storage, and IT teams.
What are the Observed User Behaviours / Insights?
What are the Touch Points?
Design Brief
eliminating the need to resort to cumbersome workarounds, such as manually deleting sources and then adding them back again. It ensures seamless software patch updates or hardware replacements without any data loss.
Enables seamless software/hardware updates without data loss Ensures business continues with minimal disruption during planned infrastructure, hardware, or patch update windows
Proposed UX Flow
Explorations
Prototype
