Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

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 are using Cohesity DataProtect to protect our internal data, specifically on the servers. We are also incorporating some capabilities for SQL and Java.

Its flexibility is the most valuable. Being a cloud version, it has more flexibility, and it allows me to incorporate different workloads and consolidate all the data in one place. It has good high availability, and it is also easy to maintain.

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.

We have been using this solution for less than a year. We got it last year, but we implemented it in our company this year.

It is a very stable product.  We don't have any problem with the solution at the moment.

Its scalability is very good. You just need to add another node. Currently, we have ten users who use this solution, and they belong to the IT group. However, we are using it to protect the data for the whole company in some of the cases.

Their support works very well. From the technical aspect, they are very good. I would rate them a nine out of ten because it is always possible to improve.

It wasn't easy, but it also wasn't complicated. We completed the deployment in two or three months.

It is important to establish beforehand what you are going to use because you need to pay for the license based on your subscription. It is a very good product. We have a good experience in using this product.

I would rate Cohesity DataProtect a nine out of ten.

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. 

We use this product for the enterprise data life cycle and data retention.

With the ability to stage an entire lifecycle through versioning, integrated with AWS, it has made it possible to protect our corporation from end to end.

Integration with AWS has been invaluable to us. To have one platform that can leverage a cloud platform, as well as on-premises, has given us a full solution.

Technical support being outsourced is a downside but not different from every one of Cohesity's competitors. I was an early adopter when technical support was with actual developers and engineers, and not technical support staff. So, you can understand my point of view.   

Features I would like to see include a more visible data lifecycle monitoring tab, and an easier to read backup status dashboard. For example, I would lie to be able to see the status of all VMs for all jobs without drilling into each one.

Chat customer/technical support would also be great.

We have been using Cohesity DataProtect for three years.

I've used many different solutions including Veeam and Rubrik.

We switched because the return on investment was much greater with Cohesity.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to have a high-level understanding from your engineers before committing to a package. Cloud integration is a must. Do not pass up the licenses even if you are not currently using them.

Veeam and Rubrik were both evaluated and turned down.

We did not choose Veeam because the technical complexity was just not there to give us a full solution. Rubrik was passed over, due to the price. 

In my opinion, Cohesity is the way to go, with no doubt.