Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

• 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.

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.

We use it in the realm of data protection. We have comprehensive coverage, including backups for all our databases, VMs, file systems, and various auxiliary components.

One of the notable benefits is its user-friendly interface, making it easy to navigate. Additionally, it demonstrates faster performance compared to other vendors.

The recovery process is effective, especially when it comes to other types of data, such as VMs, and overall, the performance is commendable.

We have been facing challenges, particularly with HANA databases. Despite initial promises of delivering an agent within a few months, it has been over two and a half years, and there is still no indication of when the Cohesity agent for HANA systems will be available. The absence of an agent for replicated recovery makes it impractical for our current needs. We are highly dissatisfied with the level of support and functionality provided for HANA within the Cohesity product.

I have been working with it for two and a half years.

The overall stability has been consistent. The only noteworthy concern is related to the HANA aspect, which falls short of expectations. However, in terms of performance and support, there have been no issues.

I would estimate that approximately two hundred users are involved.

The support quality is commendable – upon opening a ticket, a responsive and capable team promptly assists. However, managing cases with a global team working across different time zones can pose challenges in terms of knowledge transfer and handovers between teams. Occasionally, the transition between teams for a specific case doesn't go smoothly, resulting in the need to repeat explanations for each new team member involved. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Neutral

The installation process requires a couple of straightforward connectors to be installed on our servers, and the setup is quite simple. It's a one-time task, and overall, we haven't encountered any issues with the setup.

We conducted a POC with testing and various evaluations, completing it in a couple of months. The deployment spanned across a broad range of systems, including both production and non-production, and we successfully implemented it within three months. This encompassed all our SAP systems, including ECC, BW, and others, up to ADA and earlier versions. Maintenance is necessary, but the majority of patches and updates at the cluster level can be seamlessly handled online.

Despite encountering challenges with HANA, I would recommend moving forward with Cohesity. The observed improvements and overall convenience make it a worthwhile choice. Comparatively, the experience has been preferable to Symantec or other alternatives. It is an evolving product, and we've witnessed substantial enhancements from its initial stages. Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.