Cohesity DataProtect vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

Cohesity and IBM are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. Cohesity is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.3, while IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.5. Cohesity holds a 3.2% mindshare in BRS, compared to IBM’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Cohesity users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Cohesity DataProtect

Read 74 Cohesity DataProtect reviews

7,512 Views
6,160 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

IBM Storage Protect

Read 3 IBM Storage Protect reviews

4,197 Views
3,525 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Cohesity DataProtect

IBM Storage Protect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2025

Cohesity DataProtect and IBM Storage Protect are competing solutions in the data protection category. IBM Storage Protect has the upper hand due to its advanced features and security measures, justifying a higher cost in complex environments.

Features: Cohesity DataProtect offers simplified data management, scalability, and competitive pricing. IBM Storage Protect focuses on robust security, extensive enterprise system integrations, and advanced adaptability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cohesity provides a straightforward deployment model and responsive customer service, suited for hassle-free setups. IBM Storage Protect, with a more complex deployment, offers structured support tailored to sophisticated environments.

Pricing and ROI: Cohesity DataProtect's appealing cost structure facilitates quick ROI, ideal for budget-conscious businesses. IBM Storage Protect's higher initial cost is justified by specialized features, offering long-term operational efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Storage Protect Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Storage Protect

July 2025

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Helped 865,164 peers since 2012

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 DataProtect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

9th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Backup (8th)

IBM Storage Protect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

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 DataProtect is 3.2%, down from 4.2% 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

Giovanni Golinelli.

Hybrid IT Architect at Quanture Spa

Easy to use, offers good scalability and responsive support

The deployment depends on the environment. Deploying on VMs is relatively simple. But for most of our customers, we implement physical clusters with at least three configured hosts using the existing model. So, it depends on the setup. Implementing DataProtect itself wasn't particularly challenging. One key requirement for successful DataProtect deployment is proper network configuration. If the network setup isn't right, you won't achieve optimal performance. We have developed a service for some of our customers where they implement an appliance or physical cluster of Cohesity at the customer site. Then, we use cloud clustering to replicate, and even in production, a second copy of the protected data. And in some cases, we have developed some disaster recovery procedures using Cohesity.

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Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are happy with the support provided by Cohesity for the issues we've come across."

"Cohesity DataProtect is more of a unified solution, which is also trying to expand for ransomware protection."

"Cohesity has very simple reports to help you stay in the know of which servers are being backed up or not."

"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."

"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten."

"The system automatically takes down the nodes one at a time and performs the upgrade and brings the node back up before proceeding to the next. Upgrades can now be done at any time with a high level of confidence."

"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."

"Its most valuable feature is its ransomware protection, so it has immutable backups."

More Cohesity DataProtect pros

"For initial setup, we started with the blueprints, which were great. The blueprints allowed us to be able to decide if we needed to use small, medium,k or large. Because we are a large environment, we used a large blueprint. Once we followed everything in the blueprint, it was a smooth transition from there."

"It is very stable after deployment and will perform in a steady state."

"The business value comes from the capability to overcome data losses."

"Disk-based implementation of a data protection solution for multiple sites is a better fit for my complex data protection needs."

"All other products contain the same features, but when I'm backing up an IBM Power server I feel more comfortable with IBM Spectrum Protect because it's the same vendor."

"It is a really scalable solution. We can scale it up. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."

"The solution offers very good flexibility."

"We have a very good team of administrators who know the product perfectly and are able to manage it on a day-to-day basis."

More IBM Storage Protect pros

Cons

"Microsoft Exchange online mailbox backups would be fantastic."

"Add the ability to delete View Boxes and External Targets in the GUI."

"The tool could benefit from further improvements in AI features, particularly in areas such as a generative AI chat interface. This feature could help answer queries about the data being protected. One feature that would greatly improve our experience with the product is the ability to identify data redundancies through a central console. This feature would help us reduce storage costs by managing redundant data."

"Reducing storage capacity requirements and improving security features are also areas that could be enhanced."

"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 would like it to have more capabilities for different kinds of PaaS or SaaS services in the Azure cloud, such as Azure SQL or Azure Cosmos DB."

"Better support for legacy platforms would be nice, but we should be moving off those anyway."

"Quality testing of upgrades should be somewhat improved."

More Cohesity DataProtect cons

"We cannot take VMware backups for our banking data center environment."

"I would like to see monitoring within the platform: monitoring for storage pools and monitoring for the server's health (e.g., CPU and memory)."

"It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms."

"Sometimes we experience trouble with the backup transfer of the control files."

"Their support is lacking. I've talked to their developers and stuff in the last couple of weeks and they reassure me that some people have retired, and they're working on getting that bumped back up. But the support lacks a lot to be desired at this point."

"The solution needs to work on disaster recovery integration. Basically, VMware applications to the cloud, for example. There needs to be integration with the storage, and integration with VMware."

"Customers have migrated off of it because of its lack of virtual environment functions."

"They are behind on many things, especially security. They are catching up a little bit now, but the competitors are doing better security-wise. There should be malware detection and prevention and higher security."

More IBM Storage Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"The ROI is huge. Not really measurable at this point, but the price of the unit was a fraction of what a couple hours of downtime could result in."

"We purchased support from Cohesity to ensure that should we face an issue, we don't have to deal with different service providers."

"If SQL is in heavy use at your location, I would highly recommend narrowing your PoC testing to Cohesity and Rubrik. They will be competitive on pricing with each other, so really put them through the paces."

"The tool's pricing is average."

"I expect the system to probably pay off within the first two years."

"There is monthly licensing."

"The pricing model is impressive and very effective."

More Cohesity DataProtect pricing and cost advice

"We have capacity licensing. We use the front end. The capacity licensing is pretty okay on the licensing price. I used to use the old PVU-based licensing in the early environment, but now we use capacity-based licensing."

"The solution has a capacity based licensing, front and back-end license."

"You need to put it in a PoC and test it out if you can."

"One can go with either a PVU licensing model or a capacity based licensing model. Either solution does not block the usage, if over used."

"We chose IBM Spectrum Protect, because they actually have something called MSP pricing, which means managed services provider pricing. The pricing was attractive, and it seems to be a platform that IBM is totally investing on in terms of new functions and new capabilities."

"The pricing model of this solution is another difficult area, it's very sophisticated in the way they charge. It's based on PBU, which is a type of processor, how, many processors, and you need to put everything into an equation. However, they have different ways of charging or licensing. One way is a back-end volume or front-end volume, which is quite complicated."

"We have spec'd out our build, and the cost of it can work quite easily today for our future needs."

"We have been at our size for a few years. We are not really looking to battle the licensing costs, as this is our primary system."

More IBM Storage Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cohesity DataProtect?

Several features enable us to perform fast recovery, such as instant fast recovery. All our virtual machines protected with the product can be quickly restored to another healthy environment with m...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity DataProtect?

I find Cohesity DataProtect to be expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cohesity DataProtect?

What areas have room for improvement? Is there anything that could be simplified to make it better?

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Rubrik vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 24% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 15% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 11% of the time

Veritas NetBackup vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Backup vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 3% of the time

More Cohesity DataProtect Competitors

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Storage Protect

Compared 14% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Storage Protect

Compared 14% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Storage Protect

Compared 10% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Storage Protect

Compared 9% of the time

Veritas NetBackup vs IBM Storage Protect

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Storage Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect

August 2025

Download Cohesity DataProtect product report

Buyer's Guide

Backup and Recovery

July 2025

Download IBM Storage Protect product report

Also Known As

Cohesity

IBM Spectrum Discover

Overview

What is Cohesity DataProtect?

Cohesity DataProtect is a top-level, sophisticated, software-defined backup and recovery solution created for cloud environments. Cohesity DataProtect is made to hyperscale and is one the most thorough policy-based protection solutions available on the market today.

Cohesity DataProtect melds multiple-point products into a single software that is able to be deployed as on-premise or consumed as a service.

Top Features:

Hyperscale made easy: Cohesity DataProtect improves data protection by doing away with the need for backup silos and administers backup and recovery with a single user-friendly, easy-to-understand interface. Cohesity DataProtect provides extensive 24/7 enterprise-class protection for a large, varying set of sources, including virtual and physical servers, NAS and SaaS workloads, relational and distributed databases, and traditional and containerized applications.

Super fast recovery: Cohesity DataProtect offers near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) and near-instant recovery time objectives (RTOs) to satisfy your business service-level agreements (SLAs). Using Cohesity Helios’ unified data plane and control plane you can immediately search and recover data on any Cohesity cluster, located anywhere. DataProtect distinctively minimizes downtime by immediately mass restoring any amount of virtual machines (VMs) to any point in time, and lowers data protection costs by as much as 70% or more.

Backup as a Service: Feel free to take advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud and the cost-effective value of Cohesity DataProtect when delivered as a service. When you choose an OPEX option, you can eliminate the need for on-premises hardware. There is a SaaS option that will allow you to very simply configure your backup workloads and immediately begin protecting your vital all-important data and applications.

It’s as easy as: sign-up, connect, and protect!

Ransomware protection: Cohesity DataProtect offers stellar recovery at scale. The solution is so intuitive, it has machine learning-based anomaly detection to stop incidents before they happen. Cohesity DataProtection can provide immutable backups, Datalock write once, read many (WORM), encryption, and role-based access control (RBAC).

Cohesity DataProtect integrates well with many of today’s top solutions, including, but not limited to:

Hypervisors: VMware vSphere (5.5 and later), Microsoft Hyper-V (2019, 2016, 2012 R2), Nutanix AHV and RHeV

Kubernetes-based data and application state

Cloud: AWS EC2, Amazon RDS, Azure VM, and Google Compute

Physical: Windows, Linux(RHEL, CentOS, OEL, Debian, Ubuntu), AIX (7.x), and Solaris

Databases: Oracle (11g R2, 12c), Oracle RAC and SQL (2008 or later)

Distributed Databases (NoSQL and Hadoop): MongoDB, CouchbaseDB, Apache, Cassandra, Cloudera, and Hortonworks.

Bare Machine Recovery: Windows and Linux

Applications: MS Exchange (2010 SP3 or later), MSFT Active Directory, Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Groups), SalesForce (SFDC), and SAP HANA

Primary storage: Pure FlashArray, HPE Nimble, and Cisco Hyperflex

NAS: Pure FlashBlade, NetApp, Isilon, IBM GPFS, Google EFS, Elastifile, and generic solutions*

Reviews from Real Users

One reviewer, who is head of IT infrastructure at Kampmann says, “Cohesity really is a Next-Gen Data Management Software,” and goes on to indicate that Cohesity “works flawlessly with easy replication of backups and numerous supported backup sources.”

Another user, who is a senior network engineer at a legal firm, relates that "Cohesity is a robust and feature-rich solution"

Cohesity

IBM Storage Protect offers data protection and management to secure critical business information efficiently. It's designed to be a scalable and flexible solution for data backup, recovery, and archive needs in complex IT environments.

IBM Storage Protect delivers comprehensive data protection by integrating backup, recovery, and archiving functionalities. It supports a range of workloads and infrastructures, from on-premises to cloud environments, facilitating efficient data management. Its platform provides seamless scalability to meet evolving business needs, underpinned by reliable security measures. Organizations leverage its capabilities to ensure business continuity and minimize data loss risks, making it vital in a data-driven world.

What are the key features of IBM Storage Protect?

Advanced Data Protection: Offers robust encryption and data integrity for secure backup processes.
Scalability: Grows with your data demands, supporting large data volumes without compromising performance.
Cloud Integration: Seamlessly integrates with cloud platforms, enhancing backup strategies with hybrid options.
Automated Operations: Simplifies management tasks with automation, reducing manual intervention and errors.

What benefits should users expect when evaluating IBM Storage Protect?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces storage costs by optimizing backup processes and data retention strategies.
Data Safety: Ensures data accessibility and integrity during recovery efforts, building trust in data protection strategies.
Operational Efficiency: Boosts productivity through streamlined and automated backup management workflows.
Compliance Readiness: Helps maintain compliance with data protection regulations by providing thorough reporting and audit trails.

Industries like finance and healthcare implement IBM Storage Protect to safeguard sensitive information against threats. In financial services, it's crucial for maintaining client data confidentiality, while healthcare institutions use it to protect patient records, ensuring both accessibility and compliance with regulations.

IBM

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

CEMEX

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Storage Protect

July 2025

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