Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

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.

I'm using Cohesity DataProtect to do product demo's for my customers.

The enterprise search and instant restore are pretty valuable. Also, the Helios stuff is pretty good and the SAS engine for ransom malware detection.

I think Rubrik and Cohesity are pretty similar in terms of the user interface and user experience, but I think Cohesity could add more platform support. For example, they could improve integration with DB2 or make the integration S3 object storage a little tighter. Some of that stuff could use some work, but overall, it's a relatively comprehensive platform.

We've never had a problem with stability.

It's easy to scale with their clustered architecture and add to the cluster. The builds join the cluster on their own without really having to do much. Most of our clients are mid-sized enterprises.

I rate Cohesity support eight out of 10. I haven't had any issues. I guess it depends on who you talk to and what their experience was, but I think they do a pretty good job with Helios, where their support team can access the environment. I would say it's a little more modern approach than IBM, which has a 20-year-old support model, i.e., you capture and upload the logs. With Cohesity, you get a little more real-time visibility from support.

Then again, most of my support inquiries are in the pre-sales context, so our customers are the ones using it, but I haven't heard of any significant problems. Still, I think some of these companies are experiencing some growing pains. They're growing fast. Sometimes they get a little ahead of themselves, and maybe the support could be better.

Setting up DataProtect is pretty straightforward.

I'd say the price of DataProtect is reasonable.

In some cases, a greenfield approach is a better fit for the customer's needs. The marketplace is robust. They can work as a filer and replace certain file service workloads, like user share type. You're not going to replace a NetApp or an Isilon solution necessarily, but you can do some consolidation. For example, one customer wanted to do their virus scanning right on the cluster, not their hosts. So you can run Tenable or something. One customer liked it because we could run the Christie Bare Metal Restore. They had physical systems and wanted to have BMR.

I would give Cohesity DataProtect nine out of 10. It's a relatively complete solution. If you are thinking about implementing it, I would suggest looking at opportunities to consolidate some file workloads. Many customers are still doing dump and sweeps, and this is a good platform for it. You just dump, and you don't have to do a sweep. Now, the question is: Do you want a lot of NFS mounts in your environment? But it's good. You can buy this data platform that they call "SmartFiles," I think. You can have a 100 terabyte cluster, with half of it devoted to file services and the other half doing backups, then license it accordingly.

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.

We primarily use the solution for VMware Backup and SQL backups that are replicated and copied to the cloud.

They basically can do what Rubrik does. It's a backup device. There aren't necessarily any special features. 

What it does well, it does very well. It just works. 

The initial setup is easy.

It's stable.

The solution scales well.

It's not overly expensive.

Support needs improvement, but the product is fine when well deployed.

I've used the solution for a few months.

This is a solid product. It's quite stable. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

I found the product to be scalable. You just add nodes if you need to. It's a hyper-converged solution, and scaling is easy.

I have not had a good experience with support.

Neutral

I am also familiar with Rubrik.

I've also worked with Commvault and find that you do have to do a lot of fine-tuning with it during implementation. This solution is easier. Commvault is also a lot more expensive. Cohesity has a simpler workflow and for people in operations, it's a blessing. 

The setup process is very straightforward and simple. It doesn't have huge requirements and it is not that complex. 

The pricing is okay. I'd rate it seven out of ten in terms of affordability. How expensive it is depends on how big the contract is. 

I'd advise potential new users to do their due diligence before, know what they want, and get some training.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use the Data Protector to back up all our VMware virtual machines, as well as a SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange. We're not that big of a company anymore. We have three people who know the product: two specialists and someone from second-line support who can handle the tickets. 

The most valuable thing about Cohesity is how it operates as a whole. We are very satisfied with the product as a whole—all the backup functions, the data protection functions. We are very satisfied with those, and the product is very simple to use. 

We have had our share of minor bugs over the past two years and a few bigger ones. But I think it's because the product has so many features, and they try to add new stuff reasonably quickly. For example, Cohesity adds certain functionality in what they call a "feature release." This doesn't mean a long-term release. They added new functionality very quickly, and it was things we needed that were not yet available in a long-term release. When I say "long-term release," I mean one that is more static and gets updated once every few months. We wanted the feature, but we had more issues than some of us might've liked.

On the other hand, they managed to fix all the bugs without significant issues like data loss or anything like that. So it was more an inconvenience than it was a real problem. But if I have to have any criticism of them, maybe it's that. There are some minor improvements on SQL Server backups that we are waiting on, five services. We had one problem that will be solved in one of the subsequent releases, but those are small things. We are not waiting on any major stuff. The product currently meets all our backup needs.

We have been using Cohesity for just two years.

Cohesity's stability is very good. We haven't had any major issues with that.

I would say Cohesity support is somewhere in between good and very good. But, of course, it depends on which region you get. We know that if we log a ticket before noon here in Belgium, we are not in the region where we want to be. It's something we told Cohesity about, as well. We asked them if they could arrange it so that our ticket will always get picked up by the people in Cork. For one thing, they're in our title. They're also much more capable compared to the other regions. But that's our experience. Generally, we are very satisfied with the support we are getting.

Setup is pretty simple, especially compared to the product we had before. It was an older legacy product that was much harder to implement. We deployed with the help of an integrator, but we do all the day-to-day maintenance on the product by ourselves.

We paid for the entire solution because we have done a few expansions already. I think it's between 400 to 600k. That is the price for the complete system, including the hardware, the support, the subscriptions for the software, I think for four to five years.

I rate Cohesity nine out of 10. So, I would recommend it because it's quite a simple product and can do a lot. With the last product we used, you had to be a specialist to navigate in it. It's a much more straightforward and modern interface—very intuitive to use. And the speed of the backups, we do much more backup than we ever did before. So, I would certainly recommend it, yes.

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.