Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

We are the largest organization in Europe and have 10,000 servers in-house being protected by Cohesity. We use several solutions including Archive, DR, SAP, Oracle, VMware, and others.

Our business thrives on Cohesity storage. Cohesity makes data management as simple as Sign Up, Connecting, and Protecting through new SaaS offerings for backup and disaster recovery.

We have been testing DataProtect delivered as a service for some time, and we are very pleased with its performance. The UI is simple to navigate, and data ingestion and retrieval have been a snap.

However, the solution shared and features released are pre-matured. It needs more testing and hardening.

Before Cohesity, we were mostly de-centralized in operations. After implementing it, our operations are now managed in a single pane of glass.

We have achieved a single source of operation and observation for backups. Every team has a stake in operations, and policy management helps to delegate the proper roles.

The storage costs and storage area occupied are now reduced dramatically.

We are using almost all of the features available in Cohesity today.

Our favorite feature is DataProtect but there are many good features that are part of the DataPlatform. 

We use Cohesity to eliminate mass data fragmentation by consolidating our silos onto a single, easy-to-manage software-defined platform that is managed using a single pane of glass.

The dashboard is very rich and provides the details needed for a moderator.

Cohesity needs more hardening, in terms of stability. From our experience, we noticed gaps in the product function and the solution guides and documents. Better documentation is needed because the lack of information has necessitated having our team depend more heavily on Cohesity support. We need to have a more self-sufficient system.

More automation is needed for easier management.

We have been using Cohesity DataProtect for the past five years.

Stability-wise, Cohesity is moderate and needs more hardening.

We found scaling Cohesity to be very challenging.

The product team and Cohesity representatives are always reachable and fill the gaps that are not available in the documentation.

Prior to using Cohesity, we were using Agility Data Backup and Recovery.

We are moving to Cohesity by migrating existing backup/storage solutions. We switched because were not confident in delivering backup solutions and managing SLAs.

The pricing model is impressive and very effective.

Prior to implementing Cohesity, we evaluated solutions by IBM, NetApp, Commvalut, and Rubrik.

We use it for both local VM recovery, exchange, SQL recovery, and disaster recovery.

We have an on-premise exchange environment and it is really large and sensitive to backup impact, where it'll actually slow down the mailbox servers due to the stunning effect of trying to snapshot the VM. We previously had to do dedicated backup servers, which was an  additional consumption of on-premise resources of storage and compute. When we moved to Cohesity, we were able to target the passive copies of those databases so we no longer needed to have dedicated backup servers for the exchange environment, thereby reducing both the footprint of exchange and the resources consumed to support of the backup server.

I found value in the instant recovery with DataMove. I found value in the protection group model for applying policies to VMs. And in the overall UI navigation and the way that the application is laid out in the web browser.

In terms of what could be improved, their UI requires a manual refresh. It doesn't seem like it updates itself sometimes when you're moving from screens or waiting for a change to take effect, so you have to manually refresh. I would say that is an area for improvement, and I would also say that they have room for improvement for being able to roll back to previous versions after you've upgraded. They don't have a good rollback methodology to go back to previous versions if there is a problem with the new version.

I have been using Cohesity DataProtect for two months.

I feel like it's very stable.

We are running with a full no-redundancy, so we can lose an entire node in the clustering and it will operate without any downtime.

Cohesity DataProtect is very scalable. You can add resources just by adding additional nodes to the cluster and it seems to be able to scale out as large as you need it to.

It is used primarily by engineering and by a couple people in the app team on the SQL side. I'd say maybe half a dozen people total use it in our organization and they're in a combination of apps and engineering.

Deployment and maintenance are all done by me and my counterpart for the most part, just senior engineers on the engineering team. There are just two of us that are primarily handling that.

It is being used extensively in both of our data centers for all virtual workloads, as well as the SQL Server and exchange application level workloads. Those are our use cases primarily for those applications and the VM.

They have excellent technical support. I give them high marks for that. They all seem to know the product well and be willing to assist with things and have experiences all around with the support team.

We previously used Rubrik and we switched due to Rubrik tending to focus more on public cloud solutions over the past couple years and also the overall price of the solution - Rubrik was very expensive. We wanted to have more of a competitive product up against it.

Initial setup is straightforward.

It took one day for each site. We have two sites. We deployed each site in one day for a two day deployment total, and then our overall deployment strategy was to begin ingesting at the VM level and then start focusing on the agent-based deployments to equal an exchange.

In terms of ROI, the time of management is lower than what we were previously using so we are getting some cycles back from an engineering perspective. Also, we were able to reclaim our exchange environment in terms of resources, so there was some return there that we were able to recoup immediately, and then just the overall cost across the duration of the licensing and the hardware is expected to be lower than what we previously had.

It is on a yearly license. It actually includes the cost of the hardware, as well. So the cost of the hardware and the licensing is all rolled into a single bundle with the support.

Before going with Cohesity, we spoke with Pure, Commvault, and with Rubrik and Cohesity and Rubrik were identified as the two finalists and we did a proof of concept for both of those.

My advice to anyone considering Cohesity DataProtect is to try it out because the performance seems to exceed the competitors in the market. If it fits well in your organization or your use cases, then give it a shot.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cohesity DataProtect a nine. I did a lot of research into the different products and found this one to be pretty much top across the board and after using it, we are very happy with the performance and the results that we are getting.

Primarily, we back up our VMs on the solution. All kinds of VMs are backed up on it. Not all of them we back up, however, the major ones we do.

The most valuable aspect for me is that I don't have to deal with media in terms of tapes like our existing system does.

Pricing was one of the big features. We chose it largely based on this.

The solution scales well.

We've found the product to be stable.

It's my understanding that the initial setup is simple. 

In terms of the solution overall, it's so far so good. I'll have to check with my team, however, so far, from my perspective, it's working great. We aren't missing any features.

We just got the solution last May. We haven't used it for too long just yet.

The stability has been good. There aren't bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable. 

The scalability has been fine. It's used by us, the IT department. We back up the servers for our entire organization.

I haven't had to call tech support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

As far as I know, the initial setup was pretty straightforward. My team members dealt with all that. I did not directly participate. 

We have a team of five people that can handle maintenance duties such as updates, et cetera. Both users and sysadmins can get into it if they need to. 

Our team members handled the implementations. 

The pricing is pretty good overall. It's less expensive than some competitors, such as Rubrik.

I'd rate the solution at a five out of five. It's quite affordable. That said, I can't speak to the exact pricing. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. 

We were going against another option. It was between Cohesity and another vendor, a pretty big player, called Rubrik. The pricing was better with this solution.

We're a customer and an end-user.

We have an appliance and cloud. We have two deployment models. 

I would advise those considering the solution to watch the demo and compare it to Rubrik and make your own opinion.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for backing up SQL Databases, Sybase Databases, SAP HANA, Kubernetes clusters, active directories, NAS services, some Azure services including virtual machines, Office 365 (Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint Sites, Teams Data), VMware virtual machines, and much more

We're using Cohesity clusters in different locations which are replicating the backup data each to another location. Replication is working fine. 

We're using more and more NAS services for SMB Fileshshares, for example, for Citrix Profiles with FSLogix.

All backups are working flawlessly. The replication of backups has never been easier. Cohesity cluster replication is a great feature! 

There is no need to buy licenses for any new features or backing up new software products. If Cohesity is supporting it, you can just use it. Their list of supported backup sources is impressive!

You just have to license the amount of storage you are using. It does not matter how/for what you are using this storage. You can shift it from backup to NAS usage without any problem. 

The backup is radically simplified. Backup and replication have not been easier. It is simply working! Replication to the cloud? No problem! Backing up new software? No problem! Have to set up a new NAS service? No problem! 

Cohesity really is a Next-Gen Data Management Software.

By using their Helios Cloud service, you have all your clusters, no matter where they are located, in one web portal. You can view all errors and information in one place and you do not have to connect to each cluster itself. There is also a Helios App for your smartphone.

Quality testing of upgrades should be somewhat improved. There really are many upgrades for new features and I really like that. Nevertheless nearly every upgrade brings its own bugs. Cohesity support, however, is really good and they always know how to solve these problems. 

While support does ask the customer if they are allowed to restart service XXX or set parameter X to Y, they never explain if this affects your business or if there can be any further problems by settings the parameters. As a customer, you have to agree to something you cannot really estimate. 

I've used the solution for about a year.

We had been using Dell EMC Avamar, however, we switched to Cohesity due to their pricing and due to the fact that Avamar was a mess. 

I'm using Cohesity DataProtect to do product demo's for my customers.

The enterprise search and instant restore are pretty valuable. Also, the Helios stuff is pretty good and the SAS engine for ransom malware detection.

I think Rubrik and Cohesity are pretty similar in terms of the user interface and user experience, but 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've never had a problem with stability.

It's easy to scale with their clustered architecture and add to the cluster. The builds join the cluster on their own without really having to do much. Most of our clients are mid-sized enterprises.

I rate Cohesity support eight out of 10. I haven't had any issues. I guess it depends on who you talk to and what their experience was, but I think they do a pretty good job with Helios, where their support team can access the environment. I would say it's a little more modern approach than IBM, which has a 20-year-old support model, i.e., you capture and upload the logs. With Cohesity, you get a little more real-time visibility from support.

Then again, most of my support inquiries are in the pre-sales context, so our customers are the ones using it, but I haven't heard of any significant problems. Still, I think some of these companies are experiencing some growing pains. They're growing fast. Sometimes they get a little ahead of themselves, and maybe the support could be better.

Setting up DataProtect is pretty straightforward.

I'd say the price of DataProtect is reasonable.

In some cases, a greenfield approach is a better fit for the customer's needs. The marketplace is robust. They can work as a filer and replace certain file service workloads, like user share type. You're not going to replace a NetApp or an Isilon solution necessarily, but you can do some consolidation. For example, one customer wanted to do their virus scanning right on the cluster, not their hosts. So you can run Tenable or something. One customer liked it because we could run the Christie Bare Metal Restore. They had physical systems and wanted to have BMR.

I would give Cohesity DataProtect nine out of 10. It's a relatively complete solution. If you are thinking about implementing it, I would suggest looking at opportunities to consolidate some file workloads. Many customers are still doing dump and sweeps, and this is a good platform for it. You just dump, and you don't have to do a sweep. Now, the question is: Do you want a lot of NFS mounts in your environment? But it's good. You can buy this data platform that they call "SmartFiles," I think. You can have a 100 terabyte cluster, with half of it devoted to file services and the other half doing backups, then license it accordingly.

Cohesity DataProtect has numerous features, backup only being one of them. The solution's main product involves the data platform and consists of object storage, the file server and hyper convergence storage features. Their focus is right there. So, their backup software has been very helpful in respect of object storage and the file server. These depend on the data platform. 

For the customer, Cohesity DataProtect allows him to have a single solution, ranging from software backup to hardware, all contained within a single contact. 

The solution boasts good retention, as it is global in a single platform and, since they have their own appliance, it is scalable as well. This makes it easier to create a retention from the backup. 

The pricing of the solution could be better, as it is quite high when compared with the competition, Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik. 

The solution offers many features, so my one reservation involves the pricing. 

The solution has a more complex setup than Veritas and Veeam. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We do not have experience with technical support, so I am not in a position to guage it. 

We do not do implementation only as concerns the data protection, but must also implement the storage and then the appliance. I consider the implementation of Cohesity DataProtect to be more complex than those of Veritas and Veeam. 

A consultant was needed for the implementation. 

The solution's pricing is quite high, more so than that of its competitors, Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik. 

Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik offer more cost effective solutions than that of Cohesity DataProtect, whose pricing is quite high. 

Veritas and Veeam have easier setups than Cohesity DataProtect. 

Cohesity is still new to Indonesia. 

I rate Cohesity DataProtect as a seven out of ten. 

One of the most valuable features is the restore functionality that they offer.

They are really ahead of the curve concerning development and telling it to the market. We are a partner, and we know that sometimes a certain technology about which they have been telling a broad audience is not really production-ready, or it is in a feature release. There is always a difference between general availability and general deployment. Sometimes, we sell the feature, but it is not in the GA. It is in one of the future versions. That's one thing.

The other thing is that they lack visibility. When talking about backup, the first thing that everybody says is Veeam. If you are talking about the appliance part of the backup market, Rubrik is the first one they're mentioning, but a lot of the Rubrik customers don't know Cohesity.

I would like to see the management of multiple nodes inside a tenant. If you want to manage a Cohesity environment, you either go on a per-node base, and you can hop from one node to the other, or you need to implement their SaaS capability but it always needs an internet connection. We would really like to have some kind of local management entity so that we can see all the Cohesity nodes in a customer environment and manage those nodes centrally. That's something that we would really like, and they are really working on it.

I have been working with them for the past two and a half years.

It is stable.

It is very scalable, and the nice thing is that you can use it in combination. You can use it as a backup solution, but you can also use it as a file system solution with NAS capabilities.

They're really good. A technical support guy can be a co-owner of a case. They are very good at connecting with the customer. The tools they provide to solve problems are very useful.

We also use Commvault. We see Commvault more as the Swiss army knife for backup solutions with a lot of features and functions. When we want to make backup more easy and robust, then we're positioning Cohesity. We see that one part of the market really likes the Commvault features and functionality, but there is another part in the Dutch market that says, "I don't want all that complexity. I just want it set and go," and that's when we're positioning Cohesity.

It is really easy.

It has reasonable pricing, and we know they can give discounts. If you look at the primary pricing or the list pricing, it conforms to the market pricing, but you have to have a discount on it. Otherwise, it is way too expensive.

You have to get the network right. The network stuff is really important for Cohesity, but we see that its implementations are way simpler than, for instance, Commvault implementations. For all the features, follow the documentation. There is a really good setup guide with some fill-in forms that you can use to get all the details you need, and if possible, consult a partner just to know all the functionality that Cohesity is offering. We sometimes see that people buy a Cohesity appliance, and they're just setting it up rudimentary for backup. When we come in and talk to the customer, we say, "Hey, this is also a feature. You can also use this. Have you looked at this part?" So, it is feature-rich, and you need to consult a partner to get to know the product better.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It is a real robust product.

We have a customer that is looking to consume cloud-based workloads in AWS. This is why we are looking to Cohesity to be able to protect those workloads in the public cloud. Additionally, they have Commvault on-premise, which they may want to switch out with Cohesity in the future.

The most valuable features of Cohesity DataProtect are SpanFS and the handling of hybrid workloads.

Cohesity DataProtect can improve in the area of databases. We have had some challenges with both Cohesity and Rubrik being able to effectively back up in a timely manner the SQL Oracle workloads.

In an upcoming release, they should add more migration capabilities across public clouds.

I have been using Cohesity DataProtect for approximately four years.

I have not heard of any stability issues, such as bugs and glitches. My impression of the Cohesity DataProtect is that it is fairly stable.

The file system is able to be scaled.

The founders came from Google and their Google file system is very good.

The technical support is good.

We previously used Veeam and it is not as function in the cloud as Cohesity DataProtect is and this is why I prefer Cohesity DataProtect.

The solution has a good interface making the installation straightforward.

I would recommend those wanting to implement Cohesity DataProtect to do a proof of concept and have a list of success criteria that they are trying to meet and go on from there.

I rate Cohesity DataProtect a nine out of ten.

We were looking to replace our legacy tapes and Veritas Backup Exec. We were tired of spending money on tapes and the time it took to physically handle and transport the tapes as they cycled through the system. We were also looking to do something to get rid of some of our older legacy NetApp devices. In the end, we were looking for a solution with redundancy and support for encryption for data at rest. We were also hoping for something that would enable on-prem storage, but at the same time, give us cloud capabilities down the road when the organization was ready to make that leap.

We were able to eliminate tape backups by utilizing Cohesity to backup our VMs. We then replicated the backup data to a second offsite Cohesity cluster. In the future, we will archive older backups to the cloud as well via Cohesity. We have also been able to utilize Cohesity as a replacement for our older legacy NAS devices  - serving up unstructured data on file shares. This was a major win for us, as it greatly simplified our environment and we saw a substantial increase in speed from our legacy NetApp devices.

The overall ease of implementation and use has been outstanding. Upgrades are easy because of the way that redundancy is built into the Cohesity solution. You simply go to the web-based GUI, download the update, and apply. 

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 engineering team also seems to be working hard to constantly add new features. Since we purchased the product, Cohesity added the ability to perform Office 365 backups and AD backups at no additional cost. The features just showed up in the new release, which was great.

There have been a number of improvements since we purchased the product two years ago that has since made it even more attractive to users. Things liked education and training have been a greater focus. Cohesity now offers "Cohesity Academy" for education, and recently launched Cohesity User Groups for people to join other Cohesity users in discussing best practices, use case scenarios, etc.  

In terms of the product itself, there have been a handful of patches that have had to be applied outside of the GUI via the command line. It's very straightforward and easy and in the same redundant fashion, but not quite as simple as one or two clicks. I'm hoping that will decrease going forward.  

I've used the solution for about two years.

The stability is absolutely rock solid. I'm not aware of any issues with file services and the backups have been 100%.  We have not had any file share outage or issues with SMB which is awesome as SMB fileshares were a critical part of decision to purchase Cohesty.

The solution is very scalable. If you want to buy the boxes, this solution will work at the largest of enterprises.

Support has been very good - particularly in the last 6 months. They seem to have grown the support organization as the install base has increased and the quality of the engineers is very good. The remote support functionality in the product makes it very easy for Cohesity staff to diagnose problems and either guide you through the fix or even perform it themselves.

Previously, we used Veritas Backup Exec and LTO tapes. On the storage side, we had legacy Netgear and NetApp NAS devices that Cohesity replaced with a single device.

Cohesity sent a local sales engineer out and in an afternoon we had it racked, networked, and backing up.

Cohesity sent a sales engineer out and it was done in an afternoon. They made the whole process incredibly simple.

It's hard to estimate a dollar value for the peace of mind in knowing that my files and backups are there and they work. In the face of ransomware and other threats, I can roll back in a few clicks. Upgrades are simple and Cohesity has a security focus. I wish we could have made the change years ago.

The costs vary, but the vendors will sometimes work with you depending on your purchase and what time of year it is in order to make deals happen. The Cohesity licensing was pretty straightforward, which was also attractive in that we didn't have to license a whole bunch of features. Everything was bundled together.

We looked at Rubrik, which was pricier and did not offer file services at the time. We also looked at a budget play in Storage Craft but were not sure if the product was going to have enough market support to continue. Also, the features seemed rough compared to Cohesity, which felt more polished and finished.

We have been very happy with the performance and ease of use of the solution. Support has been very good - even as they have grown and scaled up in size.

We use two versions — one version is deployed on the cloud, the other version is on-premise. 

We use Cohesity with Windows Servers, SQL, Microsoft SQL Servers as well as Hyper-V, AHV and VMware VMs.

I am the primary backup operator. There are two to three people that assist me.

The Cohesity views are valuable to us just because of the speed of the backup and recovery options — Cohesity VM backups are good for us. We have both VMware and Hyper-V.

The ability to essentially instantly recover a VM and have it run on the Cohesity Platform while all those bits are technically being recovered in the background is useful to us as well.

We've certainly had our share of problems with it. Since March, I think we've opened about 150 tickets with Cohesity for support for various issues; we're averaging 4 tickets a week with them. We're working through the issues that we have, but it seems like, on many levels, we're rewriting their code to make it work in our environment.

We, as a city, a local government — we have a lot of old legacy hardware, old operating systems, and old applications.

Commvault was pretty good about supporting those legacy operating systems that we still have in our environment, which includes things like Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. I understand that Cohesity has to keep up with the times and everything, but our inability to back up some of those older platforms is a pain point for us.

I'd like to be able to pause a backup while it's running and have it resume when I tell it to resume. Unfortunately, I can't do that today. I have to basically kill or cancel a job — that's one of my biggest pain points. I'd like the ability to backup clustered file servers, which I can't do today. I have to back them up as NAS devices basically, as opposed to Windows Servers. Those are my two biggest pain points. 

I have been using Cohesity DataProtect for roughly nine months.

One of our Cohesity nodes apparently partitioned itself off from all the other nodes.
We have a five-node cluster, and that was preventing one of our SQL backups from running; it sat there for roughly two days in this partition state. Then, just as suddenly as it partitioned itself, two days later it unpartitioned itself, and the backup eventually completed. It took two days to back up what normally takes about 20 minutes.

Nobody's really been able to explain anything about that to me, other than that somehow a node partitioned itself away from the cluster. I don't know what that means, but yeah, it screwed us up for a few days.

We've had to add nodes — that was pretty simple. We did run into some problems with the IPMI Lights Out Interface, but I wasn't involved in that. As far as I know, once we worked through that issue, it just added itself to the cluster, and all of a sudden we had 20 terabytes of additional storage and a bunch of extra CPU and RAM. 

Sometimes, getting help from support can be difficult. On a scale from one to ten, I would give their support a rating of three.

Although we have full support with them, 24/7, it seems like we always fall into this email support model first, as opposed to just picking up the phone and calling me and telling me exactly what the problem is. When we speak over the phone, the issue is usually resolved within a few minutes.

But it takes four weeks to get to that point, after a couple of weeks of exchanging one email a day. They'll say, "Oh, we'll try this." Then I say, "Okay. I tried that." After a couple of weeks of that, I feel compelled to escalate matters through our account manager — "Why can't you just pick up the phone and call me? We can fix this right now."

We used to use Commvault but we switched to Cohesity DataProtect mainly for cost reasons.

We also switched to Cohesity for the ability to backup to the Cloud. The version of Commvault that we were using at the time was tape-only, and we didn't want to pay Commvault to upgrade.

It wasn't an easy install for us. 

Like I said of our legacy environment, we had an old VMware environment that the latest supported versions of DataProtect would not backup through vCenter. We had to build multiple legacy Cohesity environments to try to get those backups so that legacy VMware environments could work. It probably took five or six tries before we finally said, "Screw it, we'll upgrade the VMware environment". We were finally able to do it because we were able to get some licensing from another department that they were no longer using. Otherwise, we would still be stuck on legacy — with Cohesity backing up legacy VMware. 

As always, there was a learning curve that comes with learning a new product, and trying to get our DBA's involved in SQL backsups, etc. That's something that they've not really been involved with in the past with Commvault — we always managed that. There was some learning curve for them as well.

Overall, it's a good product when it works — don't hesitate to go with it, just make sure you get a good implementation engineer from Cohesity that can answer all your questions. Be sure to ask questions every step of the way. They also have a pretty decent training program; I've gone through a few of their training courses and those are useful. Definitely, I would recommend that anybody that's putting it in for the first time, definitely attend a couple of their all-day, six to eight-hour-long courses, and take some of their administrator-type courses.

Overall, once we worked through some of the problems we had, it's been pretty good. Not counting the tech support who I rate low, but the overall product, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Cohesity a rating of eight out of ten.