Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

We are using Cohesity DataProtect for ensuring the safety of our entire system by creating backups. This includes backing up our virtual VMware environment, as well as some standalone servers that we use.

Cohesity DataProtect is user-friendly and straightforward. The setup process was effortless, and both the backup and restore operations are speedy.

When a new release is launched, there may be some bugs that need to be addressed by the developers. However, they promptly resolve these issues, and the software runs smoothly once again.

I have used Cohesity DataProtect within the past 12 months.

The solution has been stable overall. There has been some issue with updates causing issues but they are resolved quickly.

The solution is scalable, but it requires purchasing of hardware.

I rate the scalability of Cohesity DataProtect a seven out of ten.

I did not use the support from the vendor.

The initial setup required some assistance to complete. However, it was not a long drawn-out process.

I rate the initial setup of Cohesity DataProtect a seven out of ten.

We have one systems engineer for the maintenance of the solution.

It's important to obtain an accurate count of the number and size of servers that require backup. By gaining insight into potential future growth, you can correctly size your environment and prepare for the upcoming expansion. This way, you can avoid the need for additional investments in the future.

I rate Cohesity DataProtect an eight out of ten.

We use this product for the enterprise data life cycle and data retention.

With the ability to stage an entire lifecycle through versioning, integrated with AWS, it has made it possible to protect our corporation from end to end.

Integration with AWS has been invaluable to us. To have one platform that can leverage a cloud platform, as well as on-premises, has given us a full solution.

Technical support being outsourced is a downside but not different from every one of Cohesity's competitors. I was an early adopter when technical support was with actual developers and engineers, and not technical support staff. So, you can understand my point of view.   

Features I would like to see include a more visible data lifecycle monitoring tab, and an easier to read backup status dashboard. For example, I would lie to be able to see the status of all VMs for all jobs without drilling into each one.

Chat customer/technical support would also be great.

We have been using Cohesity DataProtect for three years.

I've used many different solutions including Veeam and Rubrik.

We switched because the return on investment was much greater with Cohesity.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to have a high-level understanding from your engineers before committing to a package. Cloud integration is a must. Do not pass up the licenses even if you are not currently using them.

Veeam and Rubrik were both evaluated and turned down.

We did not choose Veeam because the technical complexity was just not there to give us a full solution. Rubrik was passed over, due to the price. 

In my opinion, Cohesity is the way to go, with no doubt.

We were backing up about 160 TB to tape per week. We are still moving over to Cohesity, however, we will not have the need to have the hardware related to tapes next year. Also, the money we spend on new versions of tapes is not going towards more clusters. In Cohesity, my backups are running faster and I have more frequent crash consistent data. 

Cohesity will save us money, time, and manpower. We will have quick redundancy to AWS for our Cohesity node. I am new to backups and I have been able to quickly learn the basics in the tool. 

This tool is very straightforward and clean. The menus are not over complicated or cluttered. I have very little experience with backups, but Cohesity has made it simple to learn the basics. There are also more complex integrations and programming that can be done if desired.

Cohesity is working on this, however, I would like to see a more expanded KB section. They have created a few videos also, more would be great. Their documentation is also currently being expanded.

We chose to go bleeding edge with the 6.0.0a release. We have encountered a few cluster crashes because of indexing on XFS file systems this should be fixed in 6.1.0

Not yet. 

So far support has been amazing. 

We used NetBackup. We are tired of using tapes and Cohesity has the features that we're interested in.

With the help of our local tech, the setup was quite easy. 

We used our local Cohesity sales and tech team. 

During your implementation stage, make sure you have a good Cohesity rep. Ours had completed over 200 implementations. He was very knowledgeable.

Rubrik was the main tool we looked at. 

At this time I don't, as I learn more I will update my review. 

I'm a consultant, so my clients use it, and I assist them.

It is used as a backup solution.

It gives my clients an enterprise-wide solution for managing backups.

Standardization across the enterprise and ease of use are the most valuable features. 

There is room for improvement in terms of price. 

In future releases, I would like to see a more comprehensive cyber resilience capability.

I have experience from an architectural standpoint.

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

I've used NetBackup and TSM.

It was already deployed when I started engaging with the client.

I would recommend using it. Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use this product for backups, reporting, and auditing.  As we are a publicly listed company, we rely heavily on the reporting that comes out of Cohesity to ensure that we are compliant across all aspects.

The backup and restore solution is a big step forward from our last solution and packs more than just backup in a box, allowing for additional features such as Disaster Recovery and utilising the space available in the cluster for storing files.

The auditing and reporting features are as important as the backups themselves.

We moved over from another backup solution that wasn't as innovative, which made it an easy solution to move away from. Cohesity uses up less rack space in the datacentre and allows for more than just backups, paving the way for more hyper-converged solutions, not just physically.

The initial contract with Cohesity is an improvement in terms of pricing above our previous solution but it remains to be seen what will happen after the contract comes to an end. The fundamental tasks of backups are restores are ahead of its game, relative to our previous solution.

The backup and restore feature is the most valuable.

Instant recovery options are a big benefit for urgent restores, as we don't need to wait for hours or days for a restore to complete before being able to access the files.

The restore to the appliance itself allows for faster (instant) access that saves us from waiting for the restores to happen to the datastores/volume/containers, which can take upwards of weeks in our case if we were to restore the larger VM guests.

We have seen many iterations of this such as restoring to the cloud but the outcome has always been a hit-and-miss solution.

The canned reporting could be improved. Many of the reports are basic, at most, and at times we had to open a support ticket to help find or develop a report for our needs. This is something that even our last solution had in place already.

Error reporting could also be improved. Rather than 'errorcode -2', it needs to be more descriptive or at least, provide KB articles related to the error or problem. This would save time in creating a ticket and try to describe to the support engineer what happened to cause an 'errorcode -2' that most of the time, we don't know either.

We have been using Cohesity DataProtect for seven months.

Stability-wise, so far so good.

The initial implementation requires a lot of babysitting and reporting on issues is a bit lacking. Hopefully, you've purchased a good support contract to help with those teething issues.

The solution is very scalable. It doesn't require a replacement appliance to expand for more capacity. Simply purchase another block/node and it's done.

My experience with support is mixed. There are times where the response and resolution are quick but at times, there are large gaps in the response. I'm not sure whether this is timezone-related. 

We switched over, as the previous solution was very lacking behind in innovation. It was missing basic features such as finding VMs and we were told to simply use "ctrl+f" to find them. However, this didn't help if the screen spanned across multiple pages.

The initial setup was straightforward, as we engaged with the company to help with the deployment. As long as the provided templates are completed and networking is done properly, it should be a smooth ride.

Our deployment was completed by a mix of both. The vendor team was very qualified and personnel was made available at each region to assist the local teams with implementation.

This is difficult to measure and quantify but the time saved across the regions baby-sitting the previous solution would be about eight hours per week.

My advice is to always negotiate for better pricing.

A contract with any backup vendor will always be a long-term deal, so think ahead and force them to sharpen their pencils. Never sign up without evaluating the price of other vendors over a three to a five-year term.

We evaluated Rubrik, Veeam, Nutanix Mine, Barracuda Backup, and Commvault.

Although the NPS score was rated highly, this should not be the only factor to consider.  There may be other factors involved that affect this score and as mentioned, backup solutions are a long-term deal. Not many companies will be willing to jump ship, risking their backups that are kept on proprietary platforms.

We primarily use Cohesity as our backup solution, however, we are leveraging Views to replace our MS Cluster file shares. We run these in 2 separate clusters. We are backing up 600+ VMs, multiple file shares, and leveraging other pieces, such as Kroll for Exchange, to recover our data quicker. With Views, we currently have what were once FileShares stored in an MS Cluster leveraging the speed and protection of Cohesity. We are also using Insight and Spotlight from the Marketplace to gain further insights into unusual file activity and audit trails.

We have been able to not only backup more of our data at faster speeds, but also recover that data quicker. What used to take us hours to recover is now done in minutes. Since deploying Cohesity we've been able to help our end-users get their data back quicker than ever. This savings in time has increased their productivity and helped them avoid complete data loss. On top of this, the performance boost we've gained in using Views has made our file shares much quicker to access and use, not only for normal file explorer use but for applications that write to those Views as well.

The ease of use and the GUI have really been most valuable to us. Configuring the system to do what we need is simple and straight forward and a lot of guesswork has been removed. One of my favorite features with Cohesity is Kroll for Exchange item-level recovery. The software is simple to use and fast. We've been able to recover individual emails in minutes instead of hours, some of which were time-sensitive matters. Helios has also proved useful to give us a look at all of our clusters and their performance.

The product is still young and is continually improving. There have been a couple of buggy releases in the software that have caused us minor issues, so possibly some better QA before releasing would prove to be useful. We have also been inquiring about new app and functionality via the Marketplace that was teased months back but has yet to come to fruition. The apps are coming, but slower than expected. While we know they are working at getting more of these features out and doing so as fast as they can, a better product roadmap would be helpful.

We have been using Cohesity for over a year now.

Overall, Cohesity has been very stable. We've had a few hiccups with some software releases, but have been able to get Support involved and resolve those in a timely manner.

Cohesity is easily scalable, simply adding more storage or nodes when needed.

Customer Service and Support are top notch. Each issue we've thrown at them has been answered and addressed quickly. We've even had times where we're not expecting to hear anything until the next day and we'll have a Tier 3 engineer on the phone within minutes. Overall their Support has been one of the most impressive things about them.

We previously used CommVault. We switched due to costs and speeds primarily.

Setup, with Cohesity's Support, was very straightforward. We had it up and running jobs in a matter of hours.

We used Cohesity's team to implement our solution.

I don't have an exact figure, but when you save dozens if not hundreds of hours for multiple engineers, the savings add up quickly. We've been able to focus our attention on bigger issues and some other lingering problems instead of worrying about our backups.

Setup was very easy and pricing/licensing were very straightforward. We didn't feel like we were getting nickeled and dimed for every little thing.

We looked at CommVault, Cohesity, Veritas, and Veeam.

If you're on the fence about moving to Cohesity, I suggest making the jump. We have been amazed at what we've been able to accomplish with it in such a short time.

We were looking to replace our legacy tapes and Veritas Backup Exec. We were tired of spending money on tapes and the time it took to physically handle and transport the tapes as they cycled through the system. We were also looking to do something to get rid of some of our older legacy NetApp devices. In the end, we were looking for a solution with redundancy and support for encryption for data at rest. We were also hoping for something that would enable on-prem storage, but at the same time, give us cloud capabilities down the road when the organization was ready to make that leap.

We were able to eliminate tape backups by utilizing Cohesity to backup our VMs. We then replicated the backup data to a second offsite Cohesity cluster. In the future, we will archive older backups to the cloud as well via Cohesity. We have also been able to utilize Cohesity as a replacement for our older legacy NAS devices  - serving up unstructured data on file shares. This was a major win for us, as it greatly simplified our environment and we saw a substantial increase in speed from our legacy NetApp devices.

The overall ease of implementation and use has been outstanding. Upgrades are easy because of the way that redundancy is built into the Cohesity solution. You simply go to the web-based GUI, download the update, and apply. 

The system automatically takes down the nodes one at a time and performs the upgrade and brings the node back up before proceeding to the next. Upgrades can now be done at any time with a high level of confidence. 

The engineering team also seems to be working hard to constantly add new features. Since we purchased the product, Cohesity added the ability to perform Office 365 backups and AD backups at no additional cost. The features just showed up in the new release, which was great.

There have been a number of improvements since we purchased the product two years ago that has since made it even more attractive to users. Things liked education and training have been a greater focus. Cohesity now offers "Cohesity Academy" for education, and recently launched Cohesity User Groups for people to join other Cohesity users in discussing best practices, use case scenarios, etc.  

In terms of the product itself, there have been a handful of patches that have had to be applied outside of the GUI via the command line. It's very straightforward and easy and in the same redundant fashion, but not quite as simple as one or two clicks. I'm hoping that will decrease going forward.  

I've used the solution for about two years.

The stability is absolutely rock solid. I'm not aware of any issues with file services and the backups have been 100%.  We have not had any file share outage or issues with SMB which is awesome as SMB fileshares were a critical part of decision to purchase Cohesty.

The solution is very scalable. If you want to buy the boxes, this solution will work at the largest of enterprises.

Support has been very good - particularly in the last 6 months. They seem to have grown the support organization as the install base has increased and the quality of the engineers is very good. The remote support functionality in the product makes it very easy for Cohesity staff to diagnose problems and either guide you through the fix or even perform it themselves.

Previously, we used Veritas Backup Exec and LTO tapes. On the storage side, we had legacy Netgear and NetApp NAS devices that Cohesity replaced with a single device.

Cohesity sent a local sales engineer out and in an afternoon we had it racked, networked, and backing up.

Cohesity sent a sales engineer out and it was done in an afternoon. They made the whole process incredibly simple.

It's hard to estimate a dollar value for the peace of mind in knowing that my files and backups are there and they work. In the face of ransomware and other threats, I can roll back in a few clicks. Upgrades are simple and Cohesity has a security focus. I wish we could have made the change years ago.

The costs vary, but the vendors will sometimes work with you depending on your purchase and what time of year it is in order to make deals happen. The Cohesity licensing was pretty straightforward, which was also attractive in that we didn't have to license a whole bunch of features. Everything was bundled together.

We looked at Rubrik, which was pricier and did not offer file services at the time. We also looked at a budget play in Storage Craft but were not sure if the product was going to have enough market support to continue. Also, the features seemed rough compared to Cohesity, which felt more polished and finished.

We have been very happy with the performance and ease of use of the solution. Support has been very good - even as they have grown and scaled up in size.

We use it for both local VM recovery, exchange, SQL recovery, and disaster recovery.

We have an on-premise exchange environment and it is really large and sensitive to backup impact, where it'll actually slow down the mailbox servers due to the stunning effect of trying to snapshot the VM. We previously had to do dedicated backup servers, which was an  additional consumption of on-premise resources of storage and compute. When we moved to Cohesity, we were able to target the passive copies of those databases so we no longer needed to have dedicated backup servers for the exchange environment, thereby reducing both the footprint of exchange and the resources consumed to support of the backup server.

I found value in the instant recovery with DataMove. I found value in the protection group model for applying policies to VMs. And in the overall UI navigation and the way that the application is laid out in the web browser.

In terms of what could be improved, their UI requires a manual refresh. It doesn't seem like it updates itself sometimes when you're moving from screens or waiting for a change to take effect, so you have to manually refresh. I would say that is an area for improvement, and I would also say that they have room for improvement for being able to roll back to previous versions after you've upgraded. They don't have a good rollback methodology to go back to previous versions if there is a problem with the new version.

I have been using Cohesity DataProtect for two months.

I feel like it's very stable.

We are running with a full no-redundancy, so we can lose an entire node in the clustering and it will operate without any downtime.

Cohesity DataProtect is very scalable. You can add resources just by adding additional nodes to the cluster and it seems to be able to scale out as large as you need it to.

It is used primarily by engineering and by a couple people in the app team on the SQL side. I'd say maybe half a dozen people total use it in our organization and they're in a combination of apps and engineering.

Deployment and maintenance are all done by me and my counterpart for the most part, just senior engineers on the engineering team. There are just two of us that are primarily handling that.

It is being used extensively in both of our data centers for all virtual workloads, as well as the SQL Server and exchange application level workloads. Those are our use cases primarily for those applications and the VM.

They have excellent technical support. I give them high marks for that. They all seem to know the product well and be willing to assist with things and have experiences all around with the support team.

We previously used Rubrik and we switched due to Rubrik tending to focus more on public cloud solutions over the past couple years and also the overall price of the solution - Rubrik was very expensive. We wanted to have more of a competitive product up against it.

Initial setup is straightforward.

It took one day for each site. We have two sites. We deployed each site in one day for a two day deployment total, and then our overall deployment strategy was to begin ingesting at the VM level and then start focusing on the agent-based deployments to equal an exchange.

In terms of ROI, the time of management is lower than what we were previously using so we are getting some cycles back from an engineering perspective. Also, we were able to reclaim our exchange environment in terms of resources, so there was some return there that we were able to recoup immediately, and then just the overall cost across the duration of the licensing and the hardware is expected to be lower than what we previously had.

It is on a yearly license. It actually includes the cost of the hardware, as well. So the cost of the hardware and the licensing is all rolled into a single bundle with the support.

Before going with Cohesity, we spoke with Pure, Commvault, and with Rubrik and Cohesity and Rubrik were identified as the two finalists and we did a proof of concept for both of those.

My advice to anyone considering Cohesity DataProtect is to try it out because the performance seems to exceed the competitors in the market. If it fits well in your organization or your use cases, then give it a shot.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cohesity DataProtect a nine. I did a lot of research into the different products and found this one to be pretty much top across the board and after using it, we are very happy with the performance and the results that we are getting.