Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

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.

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.

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 the cluster for local backup and restore as well as for sending backups offsite. We make use of the file server capabilities as well. We can spin up test and dev workloads as needed without impacting our production storage. This solution replaced Veeam and ExaGrid.

Backups and restores are much faster and we were able to increase our backup frequency where it made sense to do so in order to have lower RPO. We were also able to move our backup solution off of the fiber channel, which will help with our eventual decommissioning of that portion of our infrastructure.

Instant volume mount and the SpanFS filesystem itself, which has great dedupe and compression across all of our backups. Our admins have been able to run restore jobs with little training, as well. The dashboard makes it easy to see if you have any issues with your backup jobs.

Reporting is one area that isn't as robust as it could be. The next release supposedly improves upon that but I have not seen it yet.

We had real issues with restores on our older Red Hat 5.x systems, but we have upgraded those and no longer need support for that OS. 

We previously used Veeam and ExaGrid. We liked Veeam, but we did not see any innovation out of ExaGrid and they were becoming progressively more expensive. I was wary of vendor lock-in if we continued to invest in that platform. The speed of their solution was just not good enough for us.

I advise others to spin up a Cohesity virtual edition on their infrastructure. We ran backups in parallel for a month to test all features before even bringing in test hardware. Spinning up the virtual edition was quick and painless.

We evaluated Veeam with other back end storage as well as Rubrik. Rubrik looked nice but was more expensive and we felt it was lacking features. It would have been a step up from our tired ExaGrid solution.

I would say that Cohesity seems like they are a very forward looking company. They are adding features with each release and seem to be investing heavily in extending their product. I feel like we will get good value out of our investment.

We are using this solution for the DataProtect feature in our VMware environment. It is also protecting SQL and Exchange 2013 servers.

We have two clusters that replicate to each other; this process is also very fast.

This solution has given us a three-fold performance increase.

The most valuable feature is the instant mass restore of VMs. I am able to restore VMs in a few minutes.

The other great thing is the Google search, as it helps a lot and accelerates the restore process.

Apps are very cool too!!

The Cloud Archives are very easy to configure. We are using AWS Glacier.

Fully hydrated Snapshots give you the ability to do incremental forever.

The GUI is simple and very responsive.

This solution is easy to manage. Just a quick look to the dashboard every morning and that's it. You will spend ten minutes, max, of your day on Cohesity.

Being able to take a backup of OneDrive and Sharepoint in Office 365 would be great. It is in the Roadmap, but we would like to see it in the next release of this solution.

This solution is only compatible with a limited number of storage arrays, including Pure and Cisco Hyperflex.

The cloud management solution needs a little more development.  Now it is really like the same dashboard than the one you are using locally.  They put some AI in the prediction  of when you will be out of space but I would appreciate more AI to discover malware (but is in the road map for version 6.4 I think)  .

This is a stable solution. It is running by itself.

The scalability of this solution is impressive.

Technical support for this solution is excellent.

Our previous solution which was Quest Rapid Recovery. We switched because of the performance, which is three times better with Cohesity.

The initial setup of this solution was very easy.

Implementation took only a few hours and backups begin the same day it has been physically racked.

We were assisted by the vendor team. The knew what they were doing!

In a few hours, the solution was in production.

Prior to choosing this solution, we evaluated Rubrik and Commvault.

The software is running by itself! It was a very great acquisition for us.

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 use this to back up our VM environment. We are also using this to store file shares for our customers.

It's allowed us to consolidate various backup solutions into one. This has helped us from paying separate vendors for our past backup solution.

We have found that being able to host file shares and back up our environment in one device is amazing.

• I would say they could work on the update process of the nodes. 
• They could also make it easier to try out beta versions of their software without the need of opening tickets.

Backing up virtual machines on our public and private IaaS platforms. It is also used as an NFS shared secondary storage to virtual machines.

We got rid of not being able to scale our storage, having to constantly add new storage and use windows as a repository doesn't scale above 2TB.

• Scale-out
• Test and dev
• Directly spinning data
• Searching data in VMs for restore and downloading specific files.

Support is good, but some functions are added pretty late, like vCloud Director support. This could speed up adoption for service providers.

We've had no downtime in the time it's been used. Some minor issues that we do get are resolved really quickly with support.

The scale-out capabilities are great.

They are a great help on performance issues and minor bugs.

Veeam, we came upon Cohesity while searching for scale-out storage.

Straightforward, it's almost plug and play.

In-house, we're a service provider.

We resell the product.

The nice thing is there is no further licensing when you purchase the system. All is integrated.

Rubrik.

Take it a go, I think you'll love it.