Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

Primary backup of our VMware environment with archiving to the cloud. By archiving to the cloud, we can cut out the need to purchase additional hardware for replication at our DR site.

Cohesity will reduce the complexity of our backup and recovery system. Our current system requires us to set up and maintain many proxy servers to facilitate the backups. Cohesity does not need this and out performs our current system.

Converged system. It makes much more sense to have the backup server running on the same hardware as the storage for backup and recovery. This reduces the complexity of the environment and ensures that it just works.

Add the ability to delete View Boxes and External Targets in the GUI. Currently, once you setup a View Box or External Target, there is no way to remove them (if you set these up for testing, for instance).

No issues.

No issues.

Cohesity customer service is the best that I have ever used. They are extremely fast in responding to cases, fixed all issues, and answered every question in a very timely manner.

Yes, we did. Cohesity out performs our old system at a reduced cost as well.

It was very straightforward.

Vendor team. The vendor's expertise was excellent. They included all the knowledge transfer that we needed to begin using the unit.

Not sure.

Setup was extremely easy from racking to backing up was about one hour.

Yes, we also evaluated Rubrik.

• It just works.
• Backup times are very fast.
• The UI makes sense, it is responsive, and it is easy to setup jobs.
• The ability to add nodes on the fly to increase storage needs is invaluable.
• You get a product engineer to set up the appliance with you and they continue to follow-up with you, making sure to answer all of your questions.

• Because of the excellent data reduction, we are able to back up all of our systems for the first time and use less space than our old backup appliance.
• We always have current backups; our old system would sometimes take days to back up larger systems.

• Cannot exclude certain drives from VMs.
• Cannot back up just directories.
• You have to reboot physical servers after installing the backup agent BUT this is because of the CBT driver that it installs. I totally understand the need, but I figure it is worth pointing out.
• Only archive options are to the cloud or tape; would like to have a disk option.

I have used it for a month.

We had an issue backing up a large VM with a crazy configuration the second time, but support quickly adjusted a setting and it has been working flawless ever since.

It has been rock solid!

We used to use Unitrends and wanted to get away from the following issues:

• Slow backup times
• Jobs randomly failing
• Poor and unresponsive UI
• Forklift upgrades (space issues)

Cohesity was able to resolve all of the above issues, no problem.

The initial setup was very quick and easy. We had an engineer on site to answer any questions that popped up during first-time configuration.

The vendor came on site, set up the appliance and worked with us to answer any questions we had.

Our primary use is to back up our server from VMware ESXi, including MSSQL and Exchange. We also have a file server and it's possible to search for specific files in Cohesity.

You can create Auto BackUp Groups. As s soon as a VM is moved into this folder, Cohesity starts the backup process.

We use it also for archiving our e-mails and Metalogix data. That works fine, and also, the migration from our old archiving solution was done well.

When you restore a VM, it starts immediately. This means that you can have your downtime very short. After the completed file and data restore, it will be moved to your storage.

You can create BackUp Groups and sync them with vCenter. As soon as you create a VM in the specific folder, it will be backed up. That is very useful and you don't have to configure every backup for each VM.

We used to have to create a backup job for every VM and also SQL and Exchange Backups. This process was very complicated. 

With Cohesity, you have a template that helps you to backup and restore the right thing to the right place. There is no configuration overhead. The admin can restore within seconds.

The SQL Backup and Restore is very easy. Also, File Search is a key feature. 

It doesn't take very much space in the rack and has enough disk space available for you to use.

Once you have configured your backup groups and have them in vCenter, they will start automatically and you never have to worry about forgetting because it will do that for you.

You can start an SQL Database wherever you want. From production to testing, it will perhaps only take a few minutes to set up.

The support team sometimes takes a long time to resolve issues, although, in our experience, these have been specific things like SQL blobs.

It can be that some Bugs will be fixed in future updates and you have to wait. But normally they will release a Hotfix for you.

One thing that would be great to see in the next release would be an complete restore for an SQL Instance (or multiple Databases). At the moment you have to restore one by one.

We have been using Cohesity DataProtect for one year.

Cohesity support will help you with every problem, regardless of the environment.

Prior to Cohesity, we used Actifio. It was an old solution and we wanted to switch to a new one.

As is the case with any product, I recommend running a proof of concept before fully implementing it. This will help you to make sure that it fits the requirements.

In the proof of concept, you can test everything you want. Examples include SQL, Exchange, and File Backup. You should also test the replication between nodes.

• On-site disaster recovery
• Cloud disaster recovery
• Test and dev

Cohesity gives us unparalleled features. 

Instead of four different solutions for protecting VMs, physical servers, SQL, and NAS, we now have one solution with Cohesity that is lightning fast and has amazing features.

SQL backup and recovery is our favorite feature.

We use it for test and dev as well, so we can run test scripts on production data. We also like that we can use production data to run intensive reports that would otherwise bog down the production server.

I can't wait for native bare metal recovery. It would also be great to add SQL Object Level restore, so user objects, tables, etc. can be restored without having to restore the entire DB.

There were some initial issues with network setup and discovery. Also, registering MSSQL agents came up with a few errors that I had to work with support on.

No issues with scalability. Adding space or performance is as simple as adding a node to the block.

Customer service is amazing. Replies within the hour and resolution usually within four to six hours. Some conversations with engineering have taken up to 24 hours.

• VMware Data Protection
• CrashPlan
• Windows Backup
• Local MSSQL backups

Initial setup was more complex than Rubrik. Their documentation could be refined. 

Implemented in-house, worked directly with Cohesity.

The ROI is huge. Not really measurable at this point, but the price of the unit was a fraction of what a couple hours of downtime could result in.

Licensing is per node and per protected terabyte. You will also pay 10-15% annually for support.

We did extensive testing with four different competitive vendors.

• Infrascale
• Unitrends
• Rubrik

If SQL is in heavy use at your location, I would highly recommend narrowing your PoC testing to Cohesity and Rubrik. They will be competitive on pricing with each other, so really put them through the paces.

• Backup/recovery
• Indexing
• Cloning
• The space reduction for the backups.

• It has vastly improved our ability to save money by backing up and replicating the our backups off-site.
• The ability to delete a virtual machine (VM) and restore the backup copy to the original location with the same name.
• Using the indexing to browse and restore/download individual files.

It should have quicker restore times.

Over a year.

No.

No.

No.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Yes, they were outdated and bad.

It was easy. After it was up and running, it was simple to add a vCenter and start backups.

It was set up through a vendor team, who did an excellent job.

It is a great deal for what you get.

Yes, NetBackup, CommVault, and Rubrik.

The potential to use the Tier-2 storage is great to have versus other solutions. Also, to be able to backup using a NAS device for it.

We use two versions — one version is deployed on the cloud, the other version is on-premise. 

We use Cohesity with Windows Servers, SQL, Microsoft SQL Servers as well as Hyper-V, AHV and VMware VMs.

I am the primary backup operator. There are two to three people that assist me.

The Cohesity views are valuable to us just because of the speed of the backup and recovery options — Cohesity VM backups are good for us. We have both VMware and Hyper-V.

The ability to essentially instantly recover a VM and have it run on the Cohesity Platform while all those bits are technically being recovered in the background is useful to us as well.

We've certainly had our share of problems with it. Since March, I think we've opened about 150 tickets with Cohesity for support for various issues; we're averaging 4 tickets a week with them. We're working through the issues that we have, but it seems like, on many levels, we're rewriting their code to make it work in our environment.

We, as a city, a local government — we have a lot of old legacy hardware, old operating systems, and old applications.

Commvault was pretty good about supporting those legacy operating systems that we still have in our environment, which includes things like Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. I understand that Cohesity has to keep up with the times and everything, but our inability to back up some of those older platforms is a pain point for us.

I'd like to be able to pause a backup while it's running and have it resume when I tell it to resume. Unfortunately, I can't do that today. I have to basically kill or cancel a job — that's one of my biggest pain points. I'd like the ability to backup clustered file servers, which I can't do today. I have to back them up as NAS devices basically, as opposed to Windows Servers. Those are my two biggest pain points. 

I have been using Cohesity DataProtect for roughly nine months.

One of our Cohesity nodes apparently partitioned itself off from all the other nodes.
We have a five-node cluster, and that was preventing one of our SQL backups from running; it sat there for roughly two days in this partition state. Then, just as suddenly as it partitioned itself, two days later it unpartitioned itself, and the backup eventually completed. It took two days to back up what normally takes about 20 minutes.

Nobody's really been able to explain anything about that to me, other than that somehow a node partitioned itself away from the cluster. I don't know what that means, but yeah, it screwed us up for a few days.

We've had to add nodes — that was pretty simple. We did run into some problems with the IPMI Lights Out Interface, but I wasn't involved in that. As far as I know, once we worked through that issue, it just added itself to the cluster, and all of a sudden we had 20 terabytes of additional storage and a bunch of extra CPU and RAM. 

Sometimes, getting help from support can be difficult. On a scale from one to ten, I would give their support a rating of three.

Although we have full support with them, 24/7, it seems like we always fall into this email support model first, as opposed to just picking up the phone and calling me and telling me exactly what the problem is. When we speak over the phone, the issue is usually resolved within a few minutes.

But it takes four weeks to get to that point, after a couple of weeks of exchanging one email a day. They'll say, "Oh, we'll try this." Then I say, "Okay. I tried that." After a couple of weeks of that, I feel compelled to escalate matters through our account manager — "Why can't you just pick up the phone and call me? We can fix this right now."

We used to use Commvault but we switched to Cohesity DataProtect mainly for cost reasons.

We also switched to Cohesity for the ability to backup to the Cloud. The version of Commvault that we were using at the time was tape-only, and we didn't want to pay Commvault to upgrade.

It wasn't an easy install for us. 

Like I said of our legacy environment, we had an old VMware environment that the latest supported versions of DataProtect would not backup through vCenter. We had to build multiple legacy Cohesity environments to try to get those backups so that legacy VMware environments could work. It probably took five or six tries before we finally said, "Screw it, we'll upgrade the VMware environment". We were finally able to do it because we were able to get some licensing from another department that they were no longer using. Otherwise, we would still be stuck on legacy — with Cohesity backing up legacy VMware. 

As always, there was a learning curve that comes with learning a new product, and trying to get our DBA's involved in SQL backsups, etc. That's something that they've not really been involved with in the past with Commvault — we always managed that. There was some learning curve for them as well.

Overall, it's a good product when it works — don't hesitate to go with it, just make sure you get a good implementation engineer from Cohesity that can answer all your questions. Be sure to ask questions every step of the way. They also have a pretty decent training program; I've gone through a few of their training courses and those are useful. Definitely, I would recommend that anybody that's putting it in for the first time, definitely attend a couple of their all-day, six to eight-hour-long courses, and take some of their administrator-type courses.

Overall, once we worked through some of the problems we had, it's been pretty good. Not counting the tech support who I rate low, but the overall product, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Cohesity a rating of eight out of ten. 

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.

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