Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

Most customers use the solution for file backups, particularly for NAS file sharing. They back up files from Microsoft Windows OS to ensure they can restore data when needed. They also perform periodic temporary restores to verify the functionality of their backups.

The platform is highly customizable and adapts well to changing conditions. The snapshot features are the most valuable because they allow rapid restoration and provide dedicated space for longer snapshot retention.

I would like security improvements, such as enhanced backup immutability and better tape storage connectivity. Reducing storage capacity requirements and improving security features are also areas that could be enhanced.

I have been working with Cohesity DataProtect for one year.

The solution is stable, with regular updates and patching. 

I rate the stability an eight. 

I rate the product's scalability as an eight.

The product's technical support is quite good. It is available 24/7 and has a high response rate, although it sometimes requires multiple communications to resolve issues fully.

Positive

The initial setup is relatively easy and involves configuration, integration with backup targets, and virtualization management. The deployment process usually takes about two weeks from the initial setup to installation, depending on the availability of hardware. It typically involves preparing the server, configuring it with either Linux or Windows, integrating it with the backup solution, connecting it to source storage, and managing the backup targets.

I rate the process a nine out of ten. 

Integrating the platform with the Acropolis Nutanix management solution is particularly valuable. It simplifies management by providing a unified interface for backup solutions.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven.

We are using Cohesity DataProtect to protect our internal data, specifically on the servers. We are also incorporating some capabilities for SQL and Java.

Its flexibility is the most valuable. Being a cloud version, it has more flexibility, and it allows me to incorporate different workloads and consolidate all the data in one place. It has good high availability, and it is also easy to maintain.

We would like it to have more capabilities for different kinds of PaaS or SaaS services in the Azure cloud, such as Azure SQL or Azure Cosmos DB.

We have been using this solution for less than a year. We got it last year, but we implemented it in our company this year.

It is a very stable product.  We don't have any problem with the solution at the moment.

Its scalability is very good. You just need to add another node. Currently, we have ten users who use this solution, and they belong to the IT group. However, we are using it to protect the data for the whole company in some of the cases.

Their support works very well. From the technical aspect, they are very good. I would rate them a nine out of ten because it is always possible to improve.

It wasn't easy, but it also wasn't complicated. We completed the deployment in two or three months.

It is important to establish beforehand what you are going to use because you need to pay for the license based on your subscription. It is a very good product. We have a good experience in using this product.

I would rate Cohesity DataProtect a nine out of ten.

One of the most valuable features is the restore functionality that they offer.

They are really ahead of the curve concerning development and telling it to the market. We are a partner, and we know that sometimes a certain technology about which they have been telling a broad audience is not really production-ready, or it is in a feature release. There is always a difference between general availability and general deployment. Sometimes, we sell the feature, but it is not in the GA. It is in one of the future versions. That's one thing.

The other thing is that they lack visibility. When talking about backup, the first thing that everybody says is Veeam. If you are talking about the appliance part of the backup market, Rubrik is the first one they're mentioning, but a lot of the Rubrik customers don't know Cohesity.

I would like to see the management of multiple nodes inside a tenant. If you want to manage a Cohesity environment, you either go on a per-node base, and you can hop from one node to the other, or you need to implement their SaaS capability but it always needs an internet connection. We would really like to have some kind of local management entity so that we can see all the Cohesity nodes in a customer environment and manage those nodes centrally. That's something that we would really like, and they are really working on it.

I have been working with them for the past two and a half years.

It is stable.

It is very scalable, and the nice thing is that you can use it in combination. You can use it as a backup solution, but you can also use it as a file system solution with NAS capabilities.

They're really good. A technical support guy can be a co-owner of a case. They are very good at connecting with the customer. The tools they provide to solve problems are very useful.

We also use Commvault. We see Commvault more as the Swiss army knife for backup solutions with a lot of features and functions. When we want to make backup more easy and robust, then we're positioning Cohesity. We see that one part of the market really likes the Commvault features and functionality, but there is another part in the Dutch market that says, "I don't want all that complexity. I just want it set and go," and that's when we're positioning Cohesity.

It is really easy.

It has reasonable pricing, and we know they can give discounts. If you look at the primary pricing or the list pricing, it conforms to the market pricing, but you have to have a discount on it. Otherwise, it is way too expensive.

You have to get the network right. The network stuff is really important for Cohesity, but we see that its implementations are way simpler than, for instance, Commvault implementations. For all the features, follow the documentation. There is a really good setup guide with some fill-in forms that you can use to get all the details you need, and if possible, consult a partner just to know all the functionality that Cohesity is offering. We sometimes see that people buy a Cohesity appliance, and they're just setting it up rudimentary for backup. When we come in and talk to the customer, we say, "Hey, this is also a feature. You can also use this. Have you looked at this part?" So, it is feature-rich, and you need to consult a partner to get to know the product better.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It is a real robust product.

We have two primary use cases. The first was a replacement for magnetic tape backups via Backup Exec. We were tired of continually handling physical tapes, the increasingly long backup windows, and the cost of all of the tape infrastructure. We are backing up about 20TB of data between VMware and legacy NAS appliances.

Our second use case was a replacement for a legacy IBM/NetApp device and a legacy NETGEAR NAS. Both devices were substantially older with no inline compression or dedupe. We were running out of space at a time when we knew that modern storage features such as compression and deduplication would give us substantial space savings.

The change has been night and day. Our backups have gotten MUCH faster and MUCH simpler. Our weekend full-backups were taking close to 48 hours to write to LTO8 tape. We are capturing a full backup nightly now in under three hours for all of our VMware and NAS data. We are able to replicate that data to our colocation facility seamlessly.

The storage features have been easy to use right out of the box. We have been able to provision "copies" of our legacy NAS devices into Cohesity for testing purposes in seconds. Speed is substantially faster than our legacy devices, even with Cohesity's lowest tier of storage.

The backup features have saved us enormous amounts of time and money already. We have been able to stop buying media, stop licensing BE, stop paying for service on the physical backup server, stop paying for service on tape library, and stop paying for another Windows Server license.

The restores are easy to do and have made it so that we can incorporate restores into our troubleshooting processes. The fact that we can provision copies of storage in a few seconds has been great for testing. Cohesity has a growing pool of third-party apps that can run on your Cohesity environment. Antivirus tools and tools to analyze file usage patterns are things we are looking to utilize in the near future.

There were a few things that required quick support calls in order to get to function correctly. We were told that the issues that impacted us were going to be corrected on the next release and would not impact other customers.

We would love to see direct compatibility with HPE Simplivity, which we also leverage.

Cohesity could do a little better job communicating features in new releases and helping customers to understand when features will be released. For example, I found literature indicating that version 6.3.1 would have support for Active Directory backups when installed. That feature appears to have been pushed to version 6.4, but is still available in 6.3.1 if you call support and have them toggle it on.

We have had Cohesity installed for about six months.

This solution is very stable. Upgrades are easy and do not require downtime. Set and forget.

We haven't had to scale and don't anticipate needing to do so in that we bought enough capacity to last us for some time. However, based on my other experiences with the software, I don't think this would be an issue.

We have had a few support tickets, which have been dealt with quickly and appropriately. We did have one ticket where we requested an escalation and this was also handled appropriately. Support did a good job of periodically checking with us to verify that the fix resolved our issue, which it did.

We previously used Backup Exec teamed with an IBM Tape Library for magnetic tape backups. Legacy IBM/NetApp and NETGEAR NAS devices were also replaced by Cohesity.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It took a couple of hours for each cluster at each of our sites.

Our Cohesity sales engineer along with an engineer from our VAR assisted in getting the solution in place. Each cluster in each location took a day to deploy.

We have not calculated a formal ROI, but we have already saved tons of time. I expect the system to probably pay off within the first two years.

We looked at Rubrik and StorageCraft.

Rubrik seemed like a solid product but was substantially more expensive then Cohesity. They also did not do anything outside of backups. StorageCraft offers good value but doesn't have the same expansive features as Cohesity.

We have been very happy with Cohesity and it has solved several major problems for us. At the same time, they are aggressively adding and further refining features.

We are now backing up our O365 email via Cohesity, which is something we didn't even know it could do when we purchased it.

They really are developing a great platform for unstructured data and backups.

The Cohesity Cluster solution is a great second-tier data management cluster for the backup of various sorts of servers like VMware VMs using the VMware API, Baremetal hardware using a Cohesity Agent, but also for hosting file shares and archiving data like emails and DBs.

In the past, we had a two-node cluster for backups and a second two-node cluster for archiving purposes. We were able to replace these four other systems with a two-node Cohesity cluster solution. 

The new web-based UI has made administration much more central and a lot easier than it was with the software-based tool for the old systems.

It makes our administrators' lives much easier to combine backup, archiving, and services like hosting file shares in one central system with only one user interface.

One dashboard for all services, no need to have multiple ones to check.

An instant recovery capability that includes indexing of the backed up data helps a lot.

I would like to see minor features added to the user interface, such as the software version in the dashboard.

I would like to see Microsoft Exchange DAG supported as soon as possible. I have been told that it's on the roadmap.

I have been using this solution for four months.

The cluster is modular and can be expanded without any problems.

We have moved from Actifio Data Management and a Dell EMC Centera archiving solution to a Cohesity Cluster.

Cohesity is available on your own hardware or on hardware like HPE.

We purchased support from Cohesity to ensure that should we face an issue, we don't have to deal with different service providers. This makes the solution probably a little bit more expensive, but I'm sure it will safe time and money later on when support is needed.

We evaluated Cloudian Hyperstore prior to choosing this solution.

To me, the Cohesity Cluster solution is almost complete. There are only minor things that I would like to see added to the user interface.

Replacing our old disk-based backup system with a modern hyperconverged solution. Also, we are saving valuable datacenter rack space, which is critical as we evaluate co-location options.

Administratively, my staff is relieved at the ease of management and ongoing administration with Cohesity. Backups are quick and painless to set up.

• Integration with VMware
• We are looking forward to the next release, so we can take advantage of the AHV backup for our Nutanix environment.

• I thought physical RDM's were supported, but apparently that is not the case. 
• The rack mounting instructions did not appear to be correct, but we were able to overcome it.

No issues.

No issues.

I have not had to call them yet, but we have heard great things.

We used a previous solution. We switched because the ongoing maintenance costs were growing astronomically, and it was not really built for the virtual datacenter environment.

Super easy!

Vendor team and in-house team together. Our Sales Engineer was awesome.

Unsure at this time.

Ensure that you understand the per TB licensing model. Also, Exchange backups are not native to Cohesity and require Kroll.

We evaluated Rubrik, Commvault, and Veeam.

We are using Cohesity DataProtect for all our platforms, including the VMware platform and the site server. 

I like that Cohesity offers the chance to have data on-premises and on the cloud. All the data is automatically sent to the cloud.

DataProtect's recovery time is too high. It takes a long time to recover things from the cloud. I'd also like them to increase the capacity of the file server. 

DataProtect is very stable. We haven't seen any great problems with the platform.

DataProtect is totally scalable. 

We've contacted Cohesity support at times. It's good.

We were using Symantec. It was so expensive to add new hardware. We have more capacity on Cohesity than with the Symantec appliance.

Setting up DataProtect was very easy. With two people, we could deploy it in a couple of weeks. 

We had help from a consultant to deploy DataProtect.

We evaluated Rubrik. Cohesity is less expensive, and I think it gives us more capacity.

I rate Cohesity DataProtect 10 out of 10. I would advise new users to be careful with traffic from the cloud. If you don't manage your traffic, it might spike one month, and you end up paying a lot. 

It is used to backup our VM environment plus the few physical servers we still have. 

It is also used to replicate our backups offsite. We have used it several times to spin up a test environment. Cohesity makes it easy to test backups to ensure that they are valid.

It has allowed us to focus on other aspects in IT. No longer does it take several hours to backup a VM or troubleshoot a backup issue.

The dashboard is very easy to use. 

It is also very easy to determine which VMs are being backed up and which ones aren't. This is helpful to make sure nothing is being missed.

We are waiting on the AIX agent to be released. We are also waiting for SQL Clustering to go from testing to live.

Support has been great. The response time has been very quick. I have even received responses on the weekend.

We used EMC Data Domain and NetWorker. We switched because of cost, but also because of how hard it is to use EMC products. We do not need separate VMs with Cohesity to back up.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It can be complex if you need to change IP addresses. Hopefully, they improve that in a future release.

We implemented with a Cohesity engineer.

Cohesity came in at the best price. Setup was included and done in half a day.

We evaluated Rubrik as well as Veeam.