Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

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 primarily use the solution for data protection and data platform. We are backing up VMs, physical servers, and other applications. 

We are even using the Exchange cluster backups in our environment. It became easy for us to administrate the data and for handling recovery as well. The best part is the UI. I have never seen this level of enhanced UI. 

The best use case is when we are facing issues while taking the exchange backups. Cohesity made it easy for the exchange backup and restore processes. We are happy with the Support provided by Cohesity for the issues we've come across.

I am very satisfied with the UI of Cohesity. Day to day, they are enhancing it.

We are now easily managing the data from Helios for all the clusters centrally.

Cohesity has made it easy for exchange backup and restore functions. 

We are happy with the support provided by Cohesity.

When we are facing issues while taking the exchange backups, Cohesity makes it easy for the exchange backup and restore processes. 

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

Knowledge sharing has become easy by technical sharing and galaxy also evolving drastically.

For Oracle DBs, we have observed a few bugs. This can be done better.

We'd like to see easy Administration and non-disruptive upgrades and node additions.

For a few engineering issues, we've observed delays and they are asking for an upgrade of the cluster. It would be good if they modified it with gflags.

Knowledge sharing has become easy by technical sharing and has been evolving drastically.

I have been using Cohesity for the past 3 years, from 6.3 to 6.5.1.d Hotfix 10.

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

We'd like to see easy Administration and non-disruptive upgrades and node additions.

For a few engineering issues, we've observed delays and they are asking for an upgrade of the cluster. It would be good if they modified it with gflags.

Our primary use case is for backup and DR. We have two clusters. One is all-flash. The other is a DR cluster with spinning disks. We use the all-flash to host shared storage, as well as a number of other services. We also use a number of other features such as SmartFiles. SmartFiles allows us to host all of our shared storage on the all-flash nodes, while keeping a DR ready copy on the DR cluster. This frees us from the constant management of a traditional Windows SMB environment and allows us to maximize up-time. 

The seamless backup and restore functionality has made file recovery and patch Tuesdays inconsequential. VM and SQL cloning in the test and dev feature sets allow us to immediately bring up backups both to test or for immediate availability (if needed). The VM can stand up within the Cohesity cluster and live vMotioned to our production VMware cluster. 

While other solutions might take hours to recover a VM, we can instantly bring one up and have our users back to work. The file recovery is equally simple, with the ability to clone entire SMB shares with a click.

Cohesity DataProtect is just one suite of features. Obviously, instant recovery and a live VM environment to bring up backups in would be the top feature set, however, there is so much more. 

ShareFiles allow for SMB shares to be stood up in minutes. Currently, we store our surveillance, user shares, department shares, and a number of other internal shares on SmartFiles. We even have a witness share for our SQL clustering. 

With instant DR failover using SiteContinuity, we are able to keep our files available no matter the situation.

DataProtect is a full-featured backup suite. Better support for legacy platforms would be nice, but we should be moving off those anyway. 

The marketplace app stability is still an issue at times. The company is very quick and hotfixes are released regularly. Their support is really fantastic, and I’ve only had one notable outage relating to an update. Ultimately it boiled down to a configuration error on my part, so I suppose I can’t blame them too much for that. 

Now that we have added additional nodes stability has been much better. 

I've been using the solution for two years.

With only one (self-inflicted) outage, I would say it is very stable. 

Adding nodes is trivial and can be scaled out to petabytes easily. 

I’ve had many experiences with Cohesity support. They clearly keep support a primary concern and I’ve never had a bad experience. Recently, I had to submit a P1 case, and I had two top-tier engineers on the phone within 10 minutes. 

Previously we used CommVault. We needed a more agile and robust solution. 

The setup is simple. We simply had to assign the interfaces an IP, set up our port aggregation, and create the cluster. 

We had Cohesity support come on-site to assist, however, we were there every step of the way. The Cohesity PS teams are very knowledgeable. 

Unfortunately, I am not privy to the business side of this decision, however, we've recovered from ransomware successfully without paying any ransom. Considering the organization wouldn’t exist any longer without Cohesity, I would say it was worth it. 

I would advise others to invest in their backup infrastructure. It is literally the most important solution you will purchase for business continuity. As a ransomware survivor, I cannot stress enough how valuable this solution is. 

We did evaluate other solutions and Rubrik was a major contender. Ultimately, Cohesity won out with a Cisco Hyperflex platform and superior support. 

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. 

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.

Primary Use: PoC to test and evaluate DPS solutions with production workloads. Overall, the use case is to evaluate solutions in a multi-petabyte environment with more than 100 remote sites. The majority of the environment supports more than 5,000 VMs (VMware ESX) and several physical systems. The key criteria is the support of more than 100 remote sites connected together over slow WAN links with limited bandwidth. Image-level backups, Windows, Linux, SQL, Oracle, etc. are all key. This environment is primarily focused on traditional on-prem applications with an eye towards leveraging public cloud initiatives in the near future.

The Cohesity firmware upgrade process was a surprise benefit. We expected ease of setup, policy settings, single management interface, search capabilities, flexible architecture and scalability would be key features to help reduce operational management overhead.  But, a nice & unexpected benefit was our ability to quickly upgrade the Cohesity ecosystem.  Our legacy systems require coordination between internal personnel as well as the OEM Vendor to complete Firmware\Software upgrades.  Dealing with our internal change control process as well as a remote vendor's change control process requires a lot of coordination\communication and typically took 3 months to complete all 100+ systems. With Cohesity, we can centralize a deployment package and automatically schedule upgrades - We can complete system-wide upgrades within a few days.

There are many features that make Cohesity stand out. A single, global federated search engine from a single, unified interface is a key standout feature.

We can easily search for any file/folder/DB/system and quickly restore from any point in time across any globally deployed cluster. From the same management console, we can quickly monitor the health of the entire DPS ecosystem. We can also manage any system from the same interface: check policies, dive into configurations, perform audit inquiries, etc. The overall simplicity and design of the management interface has quickly become one of most valuable features for me.

The one area where we would like to see additional improvements is with reporting. There are very granular reports from each grid. There are also some built-in reports within Helios (SAS Management Console) that offers basic reporting. However, for complex, large-enterprise environments, a more robust reporting engine that supports detailed audit reporting and enhanced ad hoc reports would be welcome. There are REST APIs which can be leveraged and most of the data we need is tracked and stored within the Cohesity ecosystem.

I have been using Cohesity on production workloads for several months now.

Cohesity's web-scale architecture enables us to scale up as needed. Currently, we need to deploy several point solutions and manage many storage silos within our major data centers. This complicates asset management and requires additional data migration resources to replace legacy systems every few years. Due to the scale-out architecture, we are able to expand easier with the Cohesity solution.

We lack an easy way to access the data without involving a developer. For their part, Cohesity has provided talented resources to help script the reports we need, dedicating those resources and their time for free. This is refreshing and welcome.

We currently use several different products and are seeking to standardize on a single, simpler solution that meets our needs today as well as supports more cloud options/tools.

Pricing, setup costs, etc. are pretty typical. The initial cost for Cohesity was less than other products the we evaluated. Cohesity's pricing does offer benefits as DR target costs are less than other solutions. You are not charged for DataProtect licensing for target DR data consumption.

We evaluated Rubrik, Avamar, NetWorker, and PowerProtect.

Overall, it is an easy to use, flexible backup solution.

We primarily use Cohesity as our backup solution, however, we are leveraging Views to replace our MS Cluster file shares. We run these in 2 separate clusters. We are backing up 600+ VMs, multiple file shares, and leveraging other pieces, such as Kroll for Exchange, to recover our data quicker. With Views, we currently have what were once FileShares stored in an MS Cluster leveraging the speed and protection of Cohesity. We are also using Insight and Spotlight from the Marketplace to gain further insights into unusual file activity and audit trails.

We have been able to not only backup more of our data at faster speeds, but also recover that data quicker. What used to take us hours to recover is now done in minutes. Since deploying Cohesity we've been able to help our end-users get their data back quicker than ever. This savings in time has increased their productivity and helped them avoid complete data loss. On top of this, the performance boost we've gained in using Views has made our file shares much quicker to access and use, not only for normal file explorer use but for applications that write to those Views as well.

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. We've been able to recover individual emails in minutes instead of hours, some of which were time-sensitive matters. Helios has also proved useful to give us a look at all of our clusters and their performance.

The product is still young and is continually improving. There have been a couple of buggy releases in the software that have caused us minor issues, so possibly some better QA before releasing would prove to be useful. We have also been inquiring about new app and functionality via the Marketplace that was teased months back but has yet to come to fruition. The apps are coming, but slower than expected. While we know they are working at getting more of these features out and doing so as fast as they can, a better product roadmap would be helpful.

We have been using Cohesity for over a year now.

Overall, Cohesity has been very stable. We've had a few hiccups with some software releases, but have been able to get Support involved and resolve those in a timely manner.

Cohesity is easily scalable, simply adding more storage or nodes when needed.

Customer Service and Support are top notch. Each issue we've thrown at them has been answered and addressed quickly. We've even had times where we're not expecting to hear anything until the next day and we'll have a Tier 3 engineer on the phone within minutes. Overall their Support has been one of the most impressive things about them.

We previously used CommVault. We switched due to costs and speeds primarily.

Setup, with Cohesity's Support, was very straightforward. We had it up and running jobs in a matter of hours.

We used Cohesity's team to implement our solution.

I don't have an exact figure, but when you save dozens if not hundreds of hours for multiple engineers, the savings add up quickly. We've been able to focus our attention on bigger issues and some other lingering problems instead of worrying about our backups.

Setup was very easy and pricing/licensing were very straightforward. We didn't feel like we were getting nickeled and dimed for every little thing.

We looked at CommVault, Cohesity, Veritas, and Veeam.

If you're on the fence about moving to Cohesity, I suggest making the jump. We have been amazed at what we've been able to accomplish with it in such a short time.