Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

We were using Backup Exec and IBM's TSM for our Intel and PowerPC systems, respectively at our data center. Add to that the monthly tapes from our two dozen remote locations, and you had a tape mess. We started having tape drive failures at the remote locations and were tired of playing the game of upgrading tape technologies and drives. Our SME for the TSM platform was leaving the company, and rather than spend time learning that system, we wanted a single solution that could protect all our data.

While we're still new in the implementation, we are excited that we now have a single point of view for all of our backups. As we begin to roll out the virtual nodes to our remote locations, we're looking forward to not having to hassle with tapes anymore as the data will be automatically replicated across multiple locations.

The search abilities are very impressive, and we hope to soon start to leverage immutable archiving off to the cloud to replace the tapes. All of this, from a single pane of glass.

The most valuable feature is ease of use. Even our manager can figure it out. It sounds like a joke, but really, it is that simple. Being able to tell Cohesity where to put the data and when, and let the system find out the logistics of how to best do it and still have your data protected.

We were also starting to feel the struggle with secondary data fragmentation, having multiple copies of a file across locations that were different versions. The users just accepted it as business as usual, but now we will be able to serve much of that via a large NFS share.

There is limited support for legacy systems, which is something that could be improved.

We have been using this solution for a PoC for several months.

Setup can be a little tricky, but support is there to walk you through it at every step.

Prior to choosing this solution, we evaluated Commvault and TSM.

Officially, we do plan to implement this solution one day.

We're new enough to the system, and we are excited about it enough that we are still in the 'Honeymoon' phase. With respect to legacy support, we don't have funds to stay up to date with a lot of leading things. There is also a mentality of 'if it is not broken, do not fix it' with systems that we are working to overcome. This almost made it a deal-breaker for us, but Cohesity came to rescue with support for our versions.

Secure backup solutions that can replicate off-site to a variety of secondary storage solutions, including other Cohesity clusters.

We have quick, reliable, verifiable backups that replicate off-site. The system is easy to administer and troubleshoot. Support is quick to respond and helpful. We used to have Avamar, and they were none of those things.

• Replication
• Easy SQL and VM restores
• Clones for the development environment
• I can do fewer full SQL backups because the retires will auto replay the log file backups for me.
• Full SQL backups essentials happen every hour, but they are a combo of full and log backups, and restore takes no longer because of auto log replays. 
• VM backups are quick as are restores.
• Google cloud archival was easy to set up.
• The Google project side was more difficult than setting up an archive. 
• Replication to other Cohesity clusters is a breeze.

Navigation is sometimes a challenge from the aspect of drilling down into details which isn’t normally needed.

We utilize Cohesity as our backup solution, it provides tiered backup layers of our VMware and physical environment as well as replaces tape storage for archival uses.

We no longer need to use tape storage, which saves us many hours of effort managing them. Additionally, we have a very responsive environment for recoveries and test/dev.

We love the near-instant recovery windows, as well as the ability to sync our latest backups to amazon web services for offsite DR.

We don't love the Exchange integration, it works fine but requires a third-party application called Kroll. We'd rather have a built-in solution to manage Exchange messages/DB level restores such as what Veeam provides.

It's relatively new, but it's growing rapidly, and their support team has been excellent when we've needed them.

Excellent scalability, just add more nodes.

Extremely fast response both to email and phone, very knowledgeable.

We've used multiple solutions in the past, most recently Veeam for VMware backup and doing long-term archiving to tape. We liked the built-in dedupe/compression features of Cohesity, the near-instant recovery, and the cloud archival options.

Fairly straightforward, especially with a VAR assistance.

VAR and a Cohesity rep.

It's not cheap, but you get what you pay for, and it is really an all-in-one solution.

ExaGrid and sticking with Veeam.

Cohesity DataProtect has numerous features, backup only being one of them. The solution's main product involves the data platform and consists of object storage, the file server and hyper convergence storage features. Their focus is right there. So, their backup software has been very helpful in respect of object storage and the file server. These depend on the data platform. 

For the customer, Cohesity DataProtect allows him to have a single solution, ranging from software backup to hardware, all contained within a single contact. 

The solution boasts good retention, as it is global in a single platform and, since they have their own appliance, it is scalable as well. This makes it easier to create a retention from the backup. 

The pricing of the solution could be better, as it is quite high when compared with the competition, Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik. 

The solution offers many features, so my one reservation involves the pricing. 

The solution has a more complex setup than Veritas and Veeam. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We do not have experience with technical support, so I am not in a position to guage it. 

We do not do implementation only as concerns the data protection, but must also implement the storage and then the appliance. I consider the implementation of Cohesity DataProtect to be more complex than those of Veritas and Veeam. 

A consultant was needed for the implementation. 

The solution's pricing is quite high, more so than that of its competitors, Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik. 

Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik offer more cost effective solutions than that of Cohesity DataProtect, whose pricing is quite high. 

Veritas and Veeam have easier setups than Cohesity DataProtect. 

Cohesity is still new to Indonesia. 

I rate Cohesity DataProtect as a seven out of ten. 

Backing up of our virtual environment (VMware) by replacing our current backup software that is more of an old fashion solution: not very scalable and not really well designed for multitenancy.

I was surprised to see how well the Cohesity appliances performed and how easy the setup was. After a couple of hours, the cluster was up, and we were able to take backup of our VMware infrastructure. After that, I tested a few backups and restores, and everything was running smoothly.

The product is easy to put in place, all backups are done very quickly, and it's easy to perform restores. What I prefer in the product is its simplicity. No useless settings to define, everything is ready just after the initial setup.

I also had the opportunity to deploy new nodes and upgrade the cluster; everything is well thought and is running very well. 

Currently, the product is lacking some features like BMR and backup for the cluster, but I think these are things that would be added in a few months.

So far so good, I've never had any major issue, and deployment of the cluster was really easy.

The solution is highly scalable.

So far so good, a few little issues, nothing dramatic but support was able to help.

Their support site already contains a lot of information where most of the answers you might have can be found.

The solution we had before was not very reliable, not scalable, and the security was poor.

Very easy to do, not much documentation to read, and really easy to work with. Everything is logical, and you can easily do what you want to do.

One Cohesity team came during the POC, but it was really easy. So as a test, I also reinstall the cluster myself very quickly when all requirements are met.

Pricing is fair for what the product does, compared to our previous solution, it's even cheaper.

We will also save a lot of money on the support as we had a lot of issues with the previous product.

We also checked Commvault and Rubrik.

Commvault was also a very complete solution but much more difficult to put in place. Also, the lack of hyperconvergence on the storage side was a blocking factor.

Rubrik was very similar to Cohesity, but we liked in Cohesity the NAS, TEST/DEV and WORM options that allow us to use it for our archives.

Cohesity offers the possibility to do a free POC, so if you have any doubt, try it, and I am sure you will see a lot of their advantages.

We primarily use it for data recovery and backups. We use VMware vSphere for our virtualization, and they fit together seamlessly.

It has mainly given us peace of mind knowing that our backups are going to work, and we will be able to easily restore our data, if needed.

The file/folder search feature is great. I also love the ability to clone a virtual server in only minutes.

I would like to see Cohesity have the ability to do a file level restore from a Windows server, which is storing data on dynamic disk.

No stability issues.

We have not needed to scale over one box.

Customer support is great.

We used EMC NetWorker with Data Domain.

The setup was fairly simple.

The vendor was there every step of the way to make sure the implementation was successful.

We are not sure yet.

Cohesity comes with the software and storage/hardware together.

We evaluated Veeam.

It is a great product. I recommend it.

SnapTree

Cloud Replication

File Services and Restoral

All production backup data is replicated daily to Azure and AzureGov for offsite DR

Multi-Tenant for single cluster

6 months

Yes, but they were very quickly resolved

No

No

10

10

Compellent with Dell Compellent and Nimble storage was way too expensive.

Very much so.

Vendor team and I would rate them as a 10.

Still calculating.

Very simple pricing and purchase process

Yes, Veeam

Fantastic product and the team developing it are top notch. Very excited for future releases from Cohesity!

We are primarily using Cohesity for Backup and Recovery (and compliance). We can use it for "basic" disaster recovery, but we are looking to implement CloudSpin and a cloud Cohesity node in Azure for replication and to bring our DR to the next level.

This will allow us to collapse our secondary/DR datacentre, retire aging hardware (avoiding maintenance costs and/or new equipment costs), and move to a cloud disaster recovery solution.

Our old backup and recovery solution was much too big for our organization, whereas Cohesity is powerful and simple!

I would say one of the most impressive features of Cohesity is the ease of implementation. During our Proof of Concept, I had the virtual edition set up in our VMware environment, licensed, and backing up virtual machines within an hour.

When we installed the physical nodes as part of the production implementation, the longest part of that process was unboxing, racking, and cabling the hardware. Bringing up the cluster was dead simple and having done the Proof of Concept previously, I was able to get all of my sources added very quickly.

Cohesity is extremely easy to use and intuitive. I have done a couple of demos of the product to my team and they are all very impressed with the GUI and how it works. The indexing/searchability that Cohesity provides has also been a huge hit!

The indexed search is amazing! It has already proved itself useful when trying to help our end users find files that could be in any number of different locations on our NAS. We're able to find and recover them quickly, which saves our end users time and the company, money!

Dev/Test is something we are also playing with and has some really cool applications.

Being able to create a NFS mount using a Cohesity view has been really useful.

We've been using O365 backups for Exchange Online and backing up the mailboxes on-premises.

We're still waiting for the ability to backup SharePoint Online & OneDrive but have been told it is coming soon. As we move towards a "cloud-first" implementation strategy for new solutions, these types of backup/recovery features will become more important.

We have Oracle databases running on Linux servers in our environment and we have found the Oracle backups were quite complex to setup. Simplifying the backup and recovery of Oracle would go a long way.

NAS incremental backup performance is a bit slow. This has apparently been fixed in version 6.4.0, but we waiting for it to go LTS before upgrading.

We implemented Cohesity in October 2019, so we've been using it for about four months. We completed a Proof of Concept with Cohesity over the summer of 2019, which solidified our decision to go with their solution.

We've already had a power failure to the Cohesity cluster where a UPS went down. In our environment, we have 2 UPSs (an A-side and a B-side) ... we lost the A-Side, but because the Cohesity chassis has dual power supplies that support the same power backplane in the chassis, all 3 nodes of our cluster stayed up. The Cohesity cluster also has a call-home feature that generated a problem ticket with Cohesity support automatically, which emailed our team that a power supply issue had been detected.

Upgrades are also very easy; in a multi-node cluster, the upgrade process takes one node out at a time and upgrades it before moving on to the next node. No downtime required. 

The scalability is one of the best features. Basically, you just need to add hardware and licensing to expand the cluster.

Customer support from our local team has been great. There is lots of expertise and a general willingness to help. Cohesity support has been great and they are often proactive about creating service tickets if they notice an error on the cluster.

Cohesity is simple to install, configure, and maintain. Our old system was very complex and did not integrate well with cloud backups.

Setup of both the PoC and physical cluster were very simple. The most complex part of the physical setup was finding someone to help me lift it into the rack!

We have realized substantial cost savings over our old solution, as well as avoiding expenses related to aging hardware such as maintenance and possible replacement.

We evaluated Microsoft Backup and Rubrik prior to choosing Cohesity.

My advice is to set up a Proof of Concept with Cohesity. They are more than accommodating and basically treat you like a licensed customer. Any issues you do encounter get fixed during a PoC, so make sure to document them well because it makes the production implementation of Cohesity dead simple.

Just try it ... and be prepared to like it. Make sure to have a set list of scenarios to test.