Cohesity SpanFS Reviews

SpanFS, I assume you have it addresses the storage of not really hot data, so it's warm to cold data. It addresses the immutable data, the data efficiency storage. Even the speed of redrawing or getting the data back, though the data is stored for a long time, can sometimes be a problem, especially if you look at more traditional solutions like, for example, Data Domain from Dell EMC or something.

What I like about the solution is that it is designed strictly as a consistent file system, which means in every situation, it guarantees that the data that is stored is not corrupt or is not invalidated. It seems to have a lot of performance, but when you're doing backup, you can't allow some gaps in your architecture design. This is one of the most critical things that it works strictly as a consistent file system. If data is written, it is written, and you will get it back, and it is guaranteed that you will get back the data in the same way you stored it in the system, so if the system says I have it, I have got it, then it is stored, and it is not corrupted. This is one thing in the backend which most customers think every vendor is offering. It is really safe, and its immutability is another thing. What comes on top is its multitenancy, the ability to set up Chrome accounts so that it is not possible for one administrator to delete the data, so you need at least two or three people to agree that a particular data should be removed. It should be set free, so it can be overwritten, something like this.

While guaranteeing the strictness of the file system, there is a lot of performance involved. The performance is not as good as I expected. It's not the functionality here but the performance level. It won't be a problem if it's twice as fast.

Even though its stability has room for improvement, I would recommend it to my bigger customers.

The only problem is the current performance of the individual nodes. As a sale-out solution with integrated load-balancing functions, performance is in principle not a problem at all. Capacity and performance are linearly scalable over the number of nodes in the cluster. An increase in the performance of the individual nodes in future releases would be desirable.

I am a consultant, and my company acts as a reseller and distributor of the solution. My company has a partnership with Cohesity. We are able to provide or resell this solution, and we are offering services based on cases. We also provide services to end customers who do not want to run this solution or its own.

SpanFS is the data platform. If you like to mix and match SpanFS to the product names, then let's say this is the data platform. It might even have changed the name. With the vendors, if something is not going well, then sometimes they change the name while trying to add something by adding a little bit to the left and the right. I am not sure if it is still available as a data platform. Regarding how long I have been working with SpanFS, I would say that I started using it around 2018 or 2019.

The stability could be better. It is stable, but if you look at the quality of software releases from vendors like Nutanix, then they are better in this situation. The biggest problem within vendors I see as a partner, which allows people to look inside, is that normally, as an end customer, you should not be able to see the different departments and a different organizational environment in the company. They are not working really close or together. The support and the presales and post-sales could be better. This is not a product, and though Cohesity has good support, communication could be improved. If the support is located in India, it is more or less a problem. If you get access to support from Europe, from Ireland, the problem becomes non-existent or smaller, let's say, like this. It could work and improve in this area. Sometimes it is a cultural thing and how people work in different cultures across the globe. We know that every company offering service around the globe is providing it while being located in India.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. The problem is more when it's getting smaller because it is a hardware-based platform. Normally, you need three nodes minimum. If you're going smaller, with one node, then you will no longer have these features that this one node can save when you are still online. There are some drawbacks when you're scaling down, mostly because of the commercial side. Even though you don't want to include three nodes, you can run it since it is software, and you can run it as a virtual machine on your remote and branch offices.

My company caters to small, medium enterprise businesses. The smallest ones are manufacturers. The biggest ones are running 5.8 TB in each data center.

I would rate the support somewhere around eight to nine out of ten. I lean more toward nine. If you know what you are doing, then the support is really good. If you don't push them, it is an eight, and if you know how to get the best out of the support, then it is a nine.

Positive

Cohesity SpanFS is software run on a data center. It has to be run on the hardware. The hardware requirement has to be on the hardware compatibility list, and their support of the whole bunch of vendors, like Intel, HPE, Dell, you name it. Regarding the initial setup, if you know what you're doing, then it is just done once, and the initial setup is done in one day. It is all about simplifying things. One of the beneficial things is that Cohesity is also a scalable system. If you need more performance and more capacity, if your hardware is aging, you want to remove it, or if you want to extend, then you don't have to add the same identical hardware. You can add the most modern actual hardware, and you're also allowed to interconnect different platforms from different vendors, while actually, it is a maximum of two.

When it comes to pricing, I know the prices because I am also running tenders for customers where I am not offering other solutions. Hence, the prices are pretty competitive.

Speaking about comparisons with other products, I would say that there are unique selling points with the product. If you are looking at the features of the product, then there's no chance that you can try it on your own since it is not a good idea. For example, what you can do, we do have one customer, a financial institute. They record the phone calls of their end customers related to some compliant things. These audio files are later encrypted automatically. The transcript is in the text files. This is done using the platform, Cohesity, the distributed software running on the platform. In the end, it is also a platform to run applications, and backup is just one application. They can run on other applications. It's more than just storage with a backup solution.

Without SpanFS, there is no Cohesity. If you are talking about x86 servers and you remove the CPU, it's just the motherboard without an ability because you can't do anything with it. SpanFS s is the ground for the groundwork that is necessary where the data is stored, where they come deduplicated, and where the data routing is addressed. Actually, you don't work with SpanFS, but you have to know how it works, along with the concepts, to be able to have your customer who is designing backup solutions do it right. My company does have experience with SpanFS, and I can say that it is not a product.

To those looking to buy the solution, I would say that they need to broaden their scope since, mostly, they are looking only for a backup. The benefit of Cohesity is not only that it is a backup that helps you to protect against data loss or when it comes to cybersecurity and ransomware attacks. The real benefit is if you look at it and say that it is a platform for secondary data. There are clear benefits there, and it really mixes and matches for different use cases or hybrid cloud use cases where you still have a percentage of your IT infrastructure still running your data center for some reason. While a lot of things are running outside the cloud, for example, AWS with your software as a service solution like Office 365 or Microsoft Dynamics, the ERP solution, and everything has to be backed up. You can set up your backup needs, backup architecture, and your backup schedules and protect your data wherever your data runs. It is really flexible, and it even allows you to skip the write-down or run in runbooks. With your disaster recovery solutions for your local data center, the backup data into the cloud can be converted to cloud-native virtual machines before starting it up. It is not easy, but it is possible.

I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

It is used as a storage repository for SQL backups, and we also do some S3 repositories.

It has snapshot capabilities. We take advantage of those.

Its read performance can be improved. It is just slow in comparison to other file systems, but a lot of it also has to do with the fact that they have a limited number of spindles under each node.

I have been using this solution for a year and a half.

Its stability has been good.

They are very simple, and they expand.

They are good. They may have been stretched a little bit recently, and they have been a little bit slower to react than normal, but generally, they are good. 

We switched over to it because it is an integrated solution that includes DataProtect and the platform. It has other use cases for enterprise search and can also do things like antivirus.

It is pretty simple to set up right out of the box. Within a few minutes, you are up and running. It is very simple.

I won't talk about specific numbers, but it is a little hard to compare it to other products out there because there is nobody out there that does exactly what they do. If you are just comparing it to another NAS box, it is probably going to look higher, but that's an unfair comparison because it does things that a NAS box can't do.

SpanFS is Cohesity. It is not a separate product. SpanFS is DataPlatform. I would recommend Cohesity to anybody. There is a constant chain of feature releases and capabilities that they're adding on a regular basis.

I would recommend Cohesity SpanFS an eight out of ten.