Cohesity Data Cloud Reviews

Its big data and archive data features are the features that I have found most valuable. I can use it in a big virtual environment.

My company is enterprise and our customers are also enterprise. We have an enterprise business. All of the customers are familiar with Veeam and most of them may be working keyless and without a license or maybe they are using a cracked license or something like that, either way, it is not a good choice if you want a strong solution with strong support. That is why an am focusing them on Cohesity as solution number one. I have experience with Meet Backup, Data Protector Micro Focus, Veeam, and Commvault. I see most of our customers' needs can be covered with Cohesity.

In terms what could be improved, everything is okay. Even the support is very good. In fact, days from now we should receive a big project as an installation with a centralized data solution and more than 30 branches using the virtual appliance.

As for what I would like to see in the next release, we still have not implemented the backup to tape with Cohesity with Exec-U-Store, an additional third-party integration with Cohesity. The demand in our region is for the offsite backup not to be on a cloud or in second site. There is a policy to have the offsite backup using a tape library. Most of the customers had the tape library with an FC, fiber connection. Our customer is looking to have their library connected directly to the Cohesive and to even set up their library to another server with an FC connection, and the Cohesity will see the connected server to the library as a media server or a proxy server.

But I'm not sure about this because our customer is a banking system and the solution for the backup disk needs fast restore, deduplication, etc... But in case of disaster, the server will backup to tape even if you have a backup to cloud. But because you have security regulations for the banking system, it is better to have offsite backup using the tape. Because I didn't work too much on this feature, it is complex for me to use this feature like in other solutions.

Cohesity works like a multitenancy. You can have a customer and you can sell the backup as a service. But in case we need to have backup to tape, we need a special license for the cluster and the integration and things like that.

I'm looking for advanced courses for us as a partner, not as a sales or even technical team, to have a good market for this product. Because, as we are a partner with HPE, we bought the Cohesity solution from one of our customers that dealth with HPE three years. This is a big customer now for Cohesity. They heard about the solution before us and before HPE in our region. One of their IT managers said HPE announced that there is a partnership with Cohesity and it is a good solution. Still, the Cohesity license cost is something. You have costs.

I already went back to my manager and told him that our big customer is looking for Cohesity, and they also checked with HPE, and said, that we did a big launch and a big party for this partnership. Today, most of our banking customers now have Cohesity as their solution. But we need to share this experience with other customers. Maybe our small customers are limited with the needed tera. Some customers need only 10 tera. Cohesity offers the virtual appliance. Some of the customers are using legacy, with apps like StoreOnce or Exadata, ExaGrid, or Data Domain to have this backup in case of a disaster in the data center. I can connect it to any site and restore what I need out of the data center. Today, with virtual appliances, the customer can run it over his virtual production environment.

The limitation that I see in Cohesity is that the minimum sized node is 36 terabytes, which is more than a small customer needs. Because of that, they go directly with a Veeam subscription, or VM or Commvault VM. In this case, you will lose because the customer's target does not fit with what Cohesity is offering. Plus, the price of the physical node with the software as data protection is not like a Veeam subscription, their VM or their socket. This is something for Cohesity to think about - having such a solution but for small business needs. This is my perspective and is what I'm facing when I try to ask the customer go with Cohesity, then I have only 10 to 15 VPN. If they go with Veeam, for example, they can pay for a $1,500 subscription per year.

To achieve the maximum performance using Cohesity, you need to pay more. I did a POC on Cohesity using a virtual appliance and using a customized server which fully assisted me and the performance and also the deduplication, and the other features of Cohesity are not like what you got when you run it over a Cohesity appliance. So if I need to offer my customers a virtual appliance, the performance will not be real like what you get in a physical appliance. This is also a limitation of the virtual appliance. I cannot commit the customer to take the virtual appliance because you will get the same value that is matching what I show you in the physical Cohesity deployment. This is something that is not helpful.

I have been using Cohesity Imanis Data since 2019. We have a partnership with Cohesity.

Cohesive Imanis Data is scalable. I have many big customers that buy it from us with three nodes and it is easy to scale up to four because it is used like hyper-converged hardware.

The initial setup is not complex.

The price should be lower because the solution is very competitive, but the price is too high in comparison with other solutions.

Our customer is focusing on protection, not only Imanis. The Imanis Data is optional for most of them.

Because Cohesity is running with many vendors like HPE, Cisco, and EMC, when you go with the installation, you will find the latest release on the download link. By default, the customer chooses the available one, not the archive one, because it's the only one available. For the person to install it, you should check with Cohesity or the support vendor if this hardware is compatible or not. We have found some issues with the NVMe disk which affects the installation because they like internal scripting and checking the hardware and if some of the disk is not installed or the NVMe disk is not matching the installation script, the OS will not be installed.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Imanis Data a 10 out of 10.

I am a cloud service provider and a reseller.

We use this solution for local backup, offsite backup, and disaster recovery.

Because we are a managed service, we don't look into it too deeply. We focus more on the different price structures. That would be more for an endpoint user. 

If it is a managed service we are less concerned with what software it is and more with the servicing provided.

It's very regimented and fast. It does local backup, cloud backup, long-term coverage, and disaster recovery.

The initial setup can be complex, depending on the environment.

I have been acquainted with Cohesity Imanis Data for two years.

We have many different versions available for our customers.

It's a stable solution. Where things become an issue is dependent on the size of the environment you are working in, and if it's sized properly. 

It's a scalable solution. It use-stack works very much like Rubrik.

Like any backup solution, there are only a couple of admins to test it.

I have never contacted technical support. I am not in tech support.

We replaced Veeam with Cohesity Imanis Data. They are a good organization to work with.

The initial setup is based more on the environment and not the software. If the customer is set up properly, has the correct network and infrastructure, then it goes very well.

if the infrastructure is setup up poorly, the initial setup will be more complex.

The software is good, but it all depends on where you are going to use it.

There are two admins to update and maintain this solution.

Cohesity is structured differently than Rubrik in terms of pricing, and Veeam is vice versa. That's where you see a lot of difference in, the way the price is structured.

It's priced properly for the market. It's priced appropriately. People can afford to buy it.

For others who are interested in using this solution, I would recommend sizing it correctly for your environment and choose your third-party vendors wisely. They may try to cut corners to keep the price down by under-sizing it.

It is very important to choose your partner wisely.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using DataPlatform, DataProtect, and we are running NAS natively on it now, doing some cloud archiving off of it.  

The primary use for DataPlatform is that we are a managed service provider. We use it as our platform for backing up our infrastructure as a service client for our remote clients. Recently, we replaced multiple platforms with Cohesity. That is, we replaced our quantum storage appliances with DataPlatform. We replaced our Beam storage repositories. With that, we also replaced our Connvault storage platforms, which were all internal data.  

In the end, we consolidated all of our backup storage to the DataPlatform, and then we run DataProtect with that. We are also a Beam cloud connect partner. So our Beam cloud connect actually stores the data on Cohesity. It is a very versatile solution.  

We are also now doing our backup for our Microsoft M365 service and that is run natively off Cohesity as well.  

Being that DataPlatform is a hyper-converged architecture, it scales very well for an MSP (Managed Service Provider) because we can just add nodes as we gain business. Its scalability is hugely important to us, but also just the simplicity of it is really good. It is simple and easy to use, which for an MSP is pretty important because I could be supporting hundreds of clients on that platform. Try doing that in a Connvault environment. Connvault is just super complicated and it would be impossible.  

Simplicity, ease of use, and scale are just phenomenal with DataPlatform.  

We have been kind of leaning on Cohesity a little bit to just start looking at providing tier-one storage capability off the platform. With the NAS workloads, we have some tier workloads that we will put on it, but it has never been touted as a tier-one storage platform. It would not be considered tier-one for NAS-based workloads anyway. Recently they just released all SSD nodes. Because of that, we believe that the upgrade in performance level is going be a huge benefit to us. Because we already use it as a target destination for our Zerto-based workloads we get to take advantage of the dedupe. The idea was when we do a recovery, we can do a native NAS recovery and it performs pretty well, but then we immediately had to be able to migrate the virtual workload to a primary disk. So that means that we always had to have a pool of tier-one storage sitting there unused in the event of a DR (Disaster Recovery) event or some critical situation experienced by a client. Now, with the FSD (File System Device) disc in there, we believe that we are not going to have to do that anymore.  

That lack of tier-one capability is the only pain point or area for improvement, but they are working on that. They have all SSD nodes in it now. We will be testing actual full recoveries on the NAS on their smart files. If I can run 30 or 40 workloads simultaneously with relatively high IO requirements, then we are going to be extremely happy.  

They have their CDP (Customer Data Platform) capability now, and we need CDP in a multitenant solution, which is on the roadmap for them. It is not available to us yet today. So that is something that we are anxiously waiting for. We run the multitenant edition and that is one feature that we can use and in our current multitenant configuration.  

We have been working with Cohesity DataPlatform for approximately a year.  

It is a pretty stable solution. It was largely scalable before just because it is a hybrid storage solution. The only thing that limits your performance is the amount of cache that you have in each node. But now if each node is 100% FSD, then the performance is no longer hindered by spinning disk performance.  

The technical support is just awesome. They are top notch. There were a couple of bugs that we came across on some earlier releases. They identified them as bugs and took care of them. They actually escalated them into engineering right away. We have been able to get bug fixes turned around in some cases as little as a day or two. So the support has been really good for just dealing with bugs. But even just for questions about how to do things, they have been awesome.  

I think the initial setup was very simple. You can have a three-node or a twenty-node configuration and it really does not matter. You are up and running right away and in a few hours, you are just cruising along.  

The cost is based on capacity. You have got a hardware component because you have got to buy nodes and you have got to buy discs for those nodes. That is typical server pricing cost whether you are buying Cisco systems or HP or whatever, you are buying two new rackmount boxes full of discs.  

If I am looking at comparing to the competition — let's say we compare Beam to Cohesity. Beam makes their solution look extremely inexpensive because they just say they are selling the software. You run the solution as a virtual machine. The idea is that they suggest you do not need anything else in the way of dedicated hardware. But in actuality, Beam still needs a lot of compute power to perform — especially if you need compression and encryption and stuff like that. So Beam makes it sound like it has some advantages because of the way it is deployed, but any backup product needs a lot of horsepower. Their claims end up not being the reality.  

When you factor the claims for not needing hardware in, then you have to try to compare apples-to-apples. Beam just really does not have an immutable storage capability because they do not manage their storage. From an attack footprint, Beam runs on top of Windows. So its attack surface is pretty large. When I run Beam, I have a dependency on the SQL server. Those are all things that we looked at and realized we might not want to have those risks. We had to look at the risk and decide if it was high enough to say that Beam was not an option. That was kind of a deciding factor because we did not want our backup platform to be the same platform that is our largest attack surface in terms of our app servers and all the Windows servers out there.  

Right now what we are seeing in the industry is the hackers are going after the backup systems first. If they get that, then they go take out the production data, and you are done. That fact makes mutable storage absolutely critical to us. The obvious solution to the problem was not having the platform be Windows-based as it was hugely important to security.  

My advice to people looking for this type of solution is that you really have to look at your secondary data. It can come in many forms. If you are just looking at Cohesity as a backup product, then that you may look at it and think that it is too costly as just a backup product. But when you look at all of Cohesity's capabilities and if you find two or three things that you can take advantage of on the Cohesity platform, then it becomes more desirable and the decision is a no brainer.  

Now I have got one platform that is doing my backup to disc, it is doing my data protection, it is doing my cloud archive, and it is doing my NAS protection. It is serving NAS, it is acting as my dev-ops environment. On top of all that, I can use that normally stagnant, stale data to run antivirus against. I can run Splunk against that data and then it becomes useful data to me. By comparison, data on a Beam backup repository is no good to anybody but Beam.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the Cohesity DataPlatform as a ten-out-of-ten. It does everything we want, it is a unified solution, and it is only getting better.  

Cohesity CDM solution is our primary backup solution and we use it to back up our entire VMware infra, MSSQL, Oracle, SAP HANA & BASIS applications, and we also use this for our cloud archive solution. Earlier, we outsourced our solution and backups are using TSM as their solution but we have some serious issues without huge SAP DB's which was eliminated once we started using Cohesity. We choose this product after testing many POCs with different legacy and new era backup vendors but finally we chose this due to features offered by Cohesity.

Cohesity was brought into our organization as a replacement for traditional magnetic tape backups (formerly using IBM Tivoli Storage manager as our backup solution). We also were looking for a replacement for legacy NAS devices for the storage of unstructured data like home and user drives across the organization and we have our most of the applications and DBs are hosted on vSAN VMware infra which are high in size. Our backup and recovery rate using Cohesity is reduced almost one by fourth as compared to our old solution. 

• Backups - Cohesity makes it very easy to back up our VMware environment. They also have specialized backups for Active Directory, SQL, O365 Email, and legacy storage devices.
• File services - Cohesity allows us to easily provision new SMB file shares.
• Easy and non-disruptive Cohesity software upgrades.
• Our data center size occupancy for Cohesity appliance is reduced by 70% when we install Cohesity.
• Plug and play installation for new software addition or removal for node addition/removal.           

• Documentation - Their documentation portal is not up to date for newer releases and I strongly recommend Cohesity to increase their efforts on the documentation portal.
• Multi-tenancy is supporting limited functionalities and we are excepting to work for all features when we use multi-tenancy.  
  
• It would be nice to be able to restore Active Directory objects.
• I would like to see an easier filtering mechanism on the elastic search. Currently, a global search in Cohesity GUI has limited functionality only to search sources.

We are using it for 2+ years now.

We use IBM TSM by outsourcing, now we choose as our internal solution because of it's features, support and price saving over years as compared to other vendors in Market. 

Compare and choose wisely by considering initial 7 operational costs. And require less FTEas compared to other legacy vendors.

We have done testing of Actifio, Rubrik, Commvault and Coohesity and Cohesity is a winner in our case.

Cohesity DataProtect is a great product and has reduced my backup window and jobs significantly. I like that you can do a VM level backup as well as a database backup. By doing so, I was able to replace two backup application products. 

Cohesity gives us the ability to run a local backup, replicate, and archive to AWS all in one job. Though, we are not able to archive all of our workloads to S3 for longer retention. 

The Cohesity User Group is extremely beneficial and productive. We get to speak with the developers and engineering team directly about their products, whether it be a feature request, enhancements, issues, or processes. They are very receptive to what the customer has to say.

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 are looking forward to not having to hassle with tapes anymore as the data will automatically be replicated across multiple locations.

The search abilities are very impressive. We hope to soon start leveraging immutable archiving off to the cloud to replace the tapes. All of this is from a single pane of glass.

I like that I can launch the cloud-based UI (Helios) from anywhere to view my dashboard. 

The support team is responsive and knowledgeable. 

I like having several options to backup and restore databases. 

The clone feature is very nice. You can restore workloads onto Cohesity's storage, which is also nice to have when you don't have enough space to restore on the server. 

Being able to automate failover for DR with runbook is a very nice feature.

I like that you can use a single pane of glass console to manage multiple Cohesity nodes.

We were starting to feel the struggle with secondary data fragmentation, having multiple copies of a file across locations that were different versions. Users just accepted it as business as usual, but now we will be able to serve much of that via a large NFS share.

I don't like that the MS SQL Agents require a reboot during the initial install and that you have to install agents at all. You have to manually upgrade the agents depending on which release you have and unregister them if they don't show up correctly. They need to improve the process to unregister applications.

We have been using this solution for several months.

The technical and engineering teams that I have worked with have been heavily involved throughout the whole process and responsive. The online ticketing is simple to use and addressed in a timely manner. Feature requests and enchantments provided by the customer are not overlooked. Their developer team is heavily involved in the customer's business requirements. The turnaround for feature or enhancement requests is fairly quick.

There is limited support for legacy systems, which is something that could be improved.

Overall, working with Cohesity has been a great experience.