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Cohesity Data Cloud vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cohesity Data Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
38th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (35th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (6th)
IBM Storage Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Cohesity Data Cloud is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Storage Protect is 2.3%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

AmarpreetSingh - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers improved data protection and security with indirect ROI
The pricing of the Cloud is on the higher side, and it should be cost-effective enough to compete with native solutions. Currently, Cohesity Cloud seems very costly compared to native backups. Although this is an emerging tool and there is room for growth, it needs to mature further. There is an AI feature, however, it is still in the development phase and requires substantial improvements.
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I find the most important feature to be data protection."
"It's very regimented and fast. It does local backup, cloud backup, long-term coverage, and disaster recovery."
"I rate the Cohesity Data Cloud solution a ten out of ten. It's an easy-to-use product that provides substantial value and security."
"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."
"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."
"The hyper-converged architecture and scalability are hugely important for growing service companies."
"I definitely recommend this tool to others due to its simplicity, security, features, and flexibility."
"Our data center size occupancy for Cohesity appliance is reduced by 70% when we installed Cohesity."
"Its flexibility is valuable. It is a very flexible solution. There are always more ways than one to do something. It is a software solution, which means you can buy your own hardware and expand it whenever you want. You are not boxed in or locked into something you've bought and outgrown. You can always expand it."
"It integrates well with Spectrum Scale."
"We can scale. Today, we have an average backup volume of 100TB a day."
"Technical support is okay. We have not had many issues with them."
"With Spectrum Protect, you can use any type of disk to back-end the repositories. It gave us flexibility to use whatever storage we wanted at our secondary site."
"Support of the IBM X platform and the backup data replication to DR are the most valuable features."
"It seems very scalable and robust. It can do what we require it to do."
"It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection."
 

Cons

"The pricing of the Cloud is on the higher side, and it should be cost-effective enough to compete with native solutions."
"The primary drawback is the need to transfer large amounts of data to the cloud via an internet connection, requiring significant bandwidth."
"The limitation that I see in Cohesity is that the minimum sized node is 36 terabytes, which is more than a small customer needs."
"The initial setup can be complex, depending on the environment."
"Their documentation portal is not up to date for newer releases and I strongly recommend Cohesity to increase their efforts on the documentation portal."
"It has never been touted as a tier-one storage platform, and that would be a benefit. They are currently working on solving that issue."
"There is limited support for legacy systems, which is something that could be improved."
"The pricing of the Cloud is on the higher side, and it should be cost-effective enough to compete with native solutions."
"It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great. At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement."
"It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor."
"The user interface (UI) for the admin is still not good. It is way too complicated to manage the product, as we still need to use command line. IBM launched the Operations Center (OC), but there are still functions lacking, especially since we cannot manage all our scheduled tasks by using the GUI."
"This solution is not mature in terms of disaster recovery and could be improved."
"I would like to advance reporting and analytics for the platform to see how much data is coming into the platform. how much data is expiring everyday, and what tape savings we are getting through reclamation."
"They should introduce more features for virtualization platforms and backing up IBMs. Backup speeds should also be improved."
"Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area."
"The administration interface should implement more functionalities that exist only in the command line and needs improvement in how some reports are created."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's priced properly for the market."
"Regarding pricing, it's very costly and I rate it a four."
"Competing products sometimes use deceptive marketing to make their products seem a lot cheaper. Comparing apples-to-apples, DataPlatform wins out."
"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."
"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.​"
"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is not cost-effective, and ten is cost-effective."
"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."
"I don't have an idea about the pricing. They send that over to someone else, but I know that one of the issues they had was the licensing costs. I don't think they were happy with how they were charged."
"Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective solution."
"The pricing of the solution is high in comparison to other products on the market. For example, IBM and Symantec have less costly options."
"Regarding retro-compatibility of the product between versions, your data is always available and the ROI is unquestionable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity DataPlatform?
While Cohesity Data Cloud is more costly in the long term compared to physical tapes, it offers value by meeting compliance needs and providing protection against ransomware attacks. The pricing is...
What needs improvement with Cohesity Imanis Data?
The primary drawback is the need to transfer large amounts of data to the cloud via an internet connection, requiring significant bandwidth. Reading data from the cloud can incur additional costs, ...
What is your primary use case for Cohesity Imanis Data?
The primary use case for Cohesity Data Cloud is to offer an additional layer of protection for backup data, which I can restore if needed. It is a managed service that allows me to set up and confi...
What do you like most about IBM Storage Protect?
The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will continue to use in the future.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Storage Protect?
IBM Storage Protect is generally an expensive tool. However, with good contracts with IBM or its partners, the cost might not be so high. New customers can expect very high prices.
What needs improvement with IBM Storage Protect?
One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...
 

Also Known As

Imanis Data, DataPlatform, Cohesity Helios
IBM Spectrum Discover
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Navis, 1st Security Bank, Brown University, WestLotto
CEMEX
Find out what your peers are saying about Cohesity Data Cloud vs. IBM Storage Protect and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.