Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

We use this product for the enterprise data life cycle and data retention.

With the ability to stage an entire lifecycle through versioning, integrated with AWS, it has made it possible to protect our corporation from end to end.

Integration with AWS has been invaluable to us. To have one platform that can leverage a cloud platform, as well as on-premises, has given us a full solution.

Technical support being outsourced is a downside but not different from every one of Cohesity's competitors. I was an early adopter when technical support was with actual developers and engineers, and not technical support staff. So, you can understand my point of view.   

Features I would like to see include a more visible data lifecycle monitoring tab, and an easier to read backup status dashboard. For example, I would lie to be able to see the status of all VMs for all jobs without drilling into each one.

Chat customer/technical support would also be great.

We have been using Cohesity DataProtect for three years.

I've used many different solutions including Veeam and Rubrik.

We switched because the return on investment was much greater with Cohesity.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to have a high-level understanding from your engineers before committing to a package. Cloud integration is a must. Do not pass up the licenses even if you are not currently using them.

Veeam and Rubrik were both evaluated and turned down.

We did not choose Veeam because the technical complexity was just not there to give us a full solution. Rubrik was passed over, due to the price. 

In my opinion, Cohesity is the way to go, with no doubt.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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-premises

Primary Use: PoC to test and evaluate DPS solutions with production workloads. Overall, the use case is to evaluate solutions in a multi-petabyte environment with more than 100 remote sites. The majority of the environment supports more than 5,000 VMs (VMware ESX) and several physical systems. The key criteria is the support of more than 100 remote sites connected together over slow WAN links with limited bandwidth. Image-level backups, Windows, Linux, SQL, Oracle, etc. are all key. This environment is primarily focused on traditional on-prem applications with an eye towards leveraging public cloud initiatives in the near future.

The Cohesity firmware upgrade process was a surprise benefit. We expected ease of setup, policy settings, single management interface, search capabilities, flexible architecture and scalability would be key features to help reduce operational management overhead.  But, a nice & unexpected benefit was our ability to quickly upgrade the Cohesity ecosystem.  Our legacy systems require coordination between internal personnel as well as the OEM Vendor to complete Firmware\Software upgrades.  Dealing with our internal change control process as well as a remote vendor's change control process requires a lot of coordination\communication and typically took 3 months to complete all 100+ systems. With Cohesity, we can centralize a deployment package and automatically schedule upgrades - We can complete system-wide upgrades within a few days.

There are many features that make Cohesity stand out. A single, global federated search engine from a single, unified interface is a key standout feature.

We can easily search for any file/folder/DB/system and quickly restore from any point in time across any globally deployed cluster. From the same management console, we can quickly monitor the health of the entire DPS ecosystem. We can also manage any system from the same interface: check policies, dive into configurations, perform audit inquiries, etc. The overall simplicity and design of the management interface has quickly become one of most valuable features for me.

The one area where we would like to see additional improvements is with reporting. There are very granular reports from each grid. There are also some built-in reports within Helios (SAS Management Console) that offers basic reporting. However, for complex, large-enterprise environments, a more robust reporting engine that supports detailed audit reporting and enhanced ad hoc reports would be welcome. There are REST APIs which can be leveraged and most of the data we need is tracked and stored within the Cohesity ecosystem.

I have been using Cohesity on production workloads for several months now.

Cohesity's web-scale architecture enables us to scale up as needed. Currently, we need to deploy several point solutions and manage many storage silos within our major data centers. This complicates asset management and requires additional data migration resources to replace legacy systems every few years. Due to the scale-out architecture, we are able to expand easier with the Cohesity solution.

We lack an easy way to access the data without involving a developer. For their part, Cohesity has provided talented resources to help script the reports we need, dedicating those resources and their time for free. This is refreshing and welcome.

We currently use several different products and are seeking to standardize on a single, simpler solution that meets our needs today as well as supports more cloud options/tools.

Pricing, setup costs, etc. are pretty typical. The initial cost for Cohesity was less than other products the we evaluated. Cohesity's pricing does offer benefits as DR target costs are less than other solutions. You are not charged for DataProtect licensing for target DR data consumption.

We evaluated Rubrik, Avamar, NetWorker, and PowerProtect.

Overall, it is an easy to use, flexible backup solution.

On-premises

We primarily use Cohesity as our backup solution, however, we are leveraging Views to replace our MS Cluster file shares. We run these in 2 separate clusters. We are backing up 600+ VMs, multiple file shares, and leveraging other pieces, such as Kroll for Exchange, to recover our data quicker. With Views, we currently have what were once FileShares stored in an MS Cluster leveraging the speed and protection of Cohesity. We are also using Insight and Spotlight from the Marketplace to gain further insights into unusual file activity and audit trails.

We have been able to not only backup more of our data at faster speeds, but also recover that data quicker. What used to take us hours to recover is now done in minutes. Since deploying Cohesity we've been able to help our end-users get their data back quicker than ever. This savings in time has increased their productivity and helped them avoid complete data loss. On top of this, the performance boost we've gained in using Views has made our file shares much quicker to access and use, not only for normal file explorer use but for applications that write to those Views as well.

The ease of use and the GUI have really been most valuable to us. Configuring the system to do what we need is simple and straight forward and a lot of guesswork has been removed. One of my favorite features with Cohesity is Kroll for Exchange item-level recovery. The software is simple to use and fast. We've been able to recover individual emails in minutes instead of hours, some of which were time-sensitive matters. Helios has also proved useful to give us a look at all of our clusters and their performance.

The product is still young and is continually improving. There have been a couple of buggy releases in the software that have caused us minor issues, so possibly some better QA before releasing would prove to be useful. We have also been inquiring about new app and functionality via the Marketplace that was teased months back but has yet to come to fruition. The apps are coming, but slower than expected. While we know they are working at getting more of these features out and doing so as fast as they can, a better product roadmap would be helpful.

We have been using Cohesity for over a year now.

Overall, Cohesity has been very stable. We've had a few hiccups with some software releases, but have been able to get Support involved and resolve those in a timely manner.

Cohesity is easily scalable, simply adding more storage or nodes when needed.

Customer Service and Support are top notch. Each issue we've thrown at them has been answered and addressed quickly. We've even had times where we're not expecting to hear anything until the next day and we'll have a Tier 3 engineer on the phone within minutes. Overall their Support has been one of the most impressive things about them.

We previously used CommVault. We switched due to costs and speeds primarily.

Setup, with Cohesity's Support, was very straightforward. We had it up and running jobs in a matter of hours.

We used Cohesity's team to implement our solution.

I don't have an exact figure, but when you save dozens if not hundreds of hours for multiple engineers, the savings add up quickly. We've been able to focus our attention on bigger issues and some other lingering problems instead of worrying about our backups.

Setup was very easy and pricing/licensing were very straightforward. We didn't feel like we were getting nickeled and dimed for every little thing.

We looked at CommVault, Cohesity, Veritas, and Veeam.

If you're on the fence about moving to Cohesity, I suggest making the jump. We have been amazed at what we've been able to accomplish with it in such a short time.

On-premises

Our primary use case is as a backup solution. We also use Cohesity for cloud enabling and seconday storage.

With respect to backup, our environment is based on virtual and physical machines, and Cohesity fits great. The virtual machines are based on VMware 6.5/Nutanix solution with vCenter. Cohesity can handle up to 2,000 virtual machines with a classic schdule of one backup per day. CBT works great so it is an incremental forever solution.

For our physical system, we use agents for AIX, Windows from 2003 to 2016, SUSE, and RHEL.

The application backups handle SAP, SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Cohesity has improved our backup architecture. Now everything is simple. Before using this solution there was a master server, media server, repository, dedupe server, cloud server, and a report server.

Cohesity is an all in one solution in a hyper-converged way. From three nodes and more, you can have one platform for everything. The storage and compute exist in the HA cluster.

No more IT department is required for backup. From four-person teams to general system administration, everything is logical and there are no more difficult concepts. There is no need for training and certification.

The most valuable feature is the cloud support. We can use it as a lift and shift solution for cloud migration. This feature is called CloudSpin. After linking a cloud subscription, like Azure for example (AWS and Google are also supported), you can "spin" a VM onto the cloud from any backup snapshot.

You can use this solution for test and dev, or for testing migration to the cloud. However, it is not so useful for massive cloud migration, so it is better to use the Azure migration tool for that.

It is useful for backing up a cloud workload. For better value in terms of cost, I suggest deploying a cloud edition of DataProtect. 

I would like to see the CDP features integrated into this solution.

Replication is working great, but with backup replication, you should have the option to link and RPO to the backup schedule. This would reduce the RPO in case of a disaster. It would be great to have something like the Zerto software.

The GUI is in need of improvement.

The upgrade path is not so clear because there are too many branches.

We have been using Cohesity for about ten months.

The cluster is stable.

This solution has good scalability by adding more nodes.

Cohesity provides great support, both remote and onsite.

We use TSM from IBM, NetBackup from Veritas, and Veeam.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have implemented this solution on two occasions. The first was with the Cohesity team, and the second was done with our in-house team.

Sizing is important and it is easy to overestimate. It is difficult to understand how dedupe will work with your workload.

We are near a coin-flip with Rubrik. Same benefits but less power on dedupe.

Cohesity can replicate backups to a secondary cluster (also virtual edition).

Hybrid Cloud

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.

Private Cloud

We use Cohesity for backup and recovery primarily, though we are starting to look into it for file service as well. We perform on-premises backups of Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, VDI Golden Images, and a host of Windows Servers and Linux Appliances.

We test the restores weekly with file-based restores. The product makes this surprisingly easy to search for folders and files. The elastic search puts Cohesity above the competition. We will be leveraging the long term retention to the cloud later this year, but with the level of support that we receive from Cohesity, we don't anticipate any issues.

This product has allowed us to finally remove tapes from our environment. Prior to this, our service desk would waste two to three hours a week swapping tapes and then an additional five to six hours each month shuffling the tapes all over the place. All that time has been recovered.

For the admins/engineers, we would spend ten hours a week trying to keep our old backup system running properly, and that includes needing to be up at 1-3 AM when their "follow the sun" tech support would return your call from 10 AM (with a two hour SLA).

It also has allowed me to stop focusing on fixing the backups daily and I can trust that they will run reliably.

The most valuable features are the rapid VM restores and the ability to quickly find files and download them directly to my desktop so that I can put them where I need them to be.

The elastic search function is unbelievable. It has saved us so much time, not just in finding files to restore but also in finding lost files or files that were misplaced by an employee. This has led to quick ticket turn arounds for our service desk and they are growing more confident in the backup solution. If they had to leverage our previous product, they considered the file lost.

The granular restore functionality in AD is also extremely helpful.

The best part about Cohesity is that there is an active user community that can request improvements and the developers will incorporate them as they move through releases.

The error handling could be improved. The errors shown on the GUI tend to be just what the log spits out and that can be quite confusing. The nice feature is that the logs are in the GUI, so you don't have to go hunting for them, you simply need click the drop down to show the information. There are a few cryptic error messages, thankfully the support staff is fantastic and knows what the errors mean.

There are a few user interface concerns with some of the functionality, such as what screens you get dropped back on when moving in between different areas. If you use the back button on your browser, you may not go back to the last page due to the coding. However, overall navigation isn't tough or complicated. 

I have been using Cohesity for four months.

There have been bumps in the road, but overall the solution is working wonders in our environment. A 38-hour full backup has been reduced to a 10-hour full (it was only needed once) and then 45-minute incremental backups after that.

I believe it will scale up where we need it to and it can scale down where we expect it to. I think that it is great in terms of scalability.

The tech support is fantastic. Even when I e-mail on the weekends I get responses within 20 minutes, tops. If I call, it is immediate. 

We switched from a previous solution because it was unreliable and their tech support was unable to adequately fix the issues we were having. 

The setup was simple. There was an engineer who was on hand to do all of the work, but I chose to do quite a bit of the work myself instead. From power on to the first backup was about 30 minutes.

The engineer that they provided to us was amazing. He was dedicated to getting the job done right and quickly. We couldn't have asked for better.

With respect to pricing, make sure that you look at both Rubrik and Cohesity as they are very similar and are quite competitive.

We evaluated Rubrik, Unitrends, Veeam, Dell, and Cohesity for this project.

Cohesity's elastic search gives it a leg up on Rubrik. 

On-premises

Our experience with the Cohesity DataProtect Platform has been overwhelmingly positive as we been able to manage our 500+ VMs and physical servers with only a few backup policies. Backups: VMs are currently being added to jobs automatically through tagging. But, we also manually add VMs to jobs at times as we need to split up the load of VMs to multiple backup jobs. We try to keep a ratio of 15 VMs to 1 job. After getting a Cohesity Agent on a SQL server and syncing it with Cohesity, it is simple to set a backup/retention schedule for Log, Incremental, and Full backups based on policy. We utilize the Cohesity APIs to produce daily reports on jobs that have succeeded, failed, paused, etc. We send an email to our Systems team with this information and log it in a .csv. This allows us to give a timeline to backup auditors as well as let us know when something isn't going right. Restores: We have used Cohesity to restore granular files as well as restore SQL databases. VM's restore to vSphere directly. VM's typically restore quite quickly and work right away as long as they're restored to the original vSphere they came from. Individual files can be searched on multiple VM backups and downloaded locally or placed back on source machine. SQL Databases can be restored to any SQL server instance, not only the original. As long as the SQL versions match. *We have had some luck restoring databases from older SQL versions to newer SQL versions. Support: Cohesity has been very responsive to support requests and resolved issues in a timely manner. They openly assist in filling in knowledge gaps about the application.

Our previous backup solution was unable to be upgraded after several engagements.

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.

Our previous backup solution was unable to be upgraded after several engagements.

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.

Reliable backup solution with many options and friendly/logical backup/restore infrastructure.

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.

Reliable backup solution with many options and friendly/logical backup/restore infrastructure.

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.

Volume Shadow Copies can get very large on SQL servers so be aware of this if OS says a drive has a lot of space but everything else is saying that the drive is out of space. This mostly occurs when the backup job fails, which is very uncommon. We've run into issues where network segmented computers couldn't reach back to Cohesity over 445 and that has caused restores to fail. Split large Database/NAS/Phycial backups into their own backup job so smaller devices can stay on their backup schedules and backup more often. SQL and Physical (Block Level) backups need to have a Cohesity Agent installed (requiring a restart) and they have to be manually added into Cohesity but the process is still pretty simple. Cohesity cluster upgrades have not been as easy as a single button click but a manual process that requires upgrading each node in the cluster individually. The upgrades do go pretty smoothly though.

Less than one year.