Cohesity DataProtect Reviews

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.

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.

Our primary use case is as a backup solution. We also use Cohesity for cloud enabling and seconday storage.

With respect to backup, our environment is based on virtual and physical machines, and Cohesity fits great. The virtual machines are based on VMware 6.5/Nutanix solution with vCenter. Cohesity can handle up to 2,000 virtual machines with a classic schdule of one backup per day. CBT works great so it is an incremental forever solution.

For our physical system, we use agents for AIX, Windows from 2003 to 2016, SUSE, and RHEL.

The application backups handle SAP, SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Cohesity has improved our backup architecture. Now everything is simple. Before using this solution there was a master server, media server, repository, dedupe server, cloud server, and a report server.

Cohesity is an all in one solution in a hyper-converged way. From three nodes and more, you can have one platform for everything. The storage and compute exist in the HA cluster.

No more IT department is required for backup. From four-person teams to general system administration, everything is logical and there are no more difficult concepts. There is no need for training and certification.

The most valuable feature is the cloud support. We can use it as a lift and shift solution for cloud migration. This feature is called CloudSpin. After linking a cloud subscription, like Azure for example (AWS and Google are also supported), you can "spin" a VM onto the cloud from any backup snapshot.

You can use this solution for test and dev, or for testing migration to the cloud. However, it is not so useful for massive cloud migration, so it is better to use the Azure migration tool for that.

It is useful for backing up a cloud workload. For better value in terms of cost, I suggest deploying a cloud edition of DataProtect. 

I would like to see the CDP features integrated into this solution.

Replication is working great, but with backup replication, you should have the option to link and RPO to the backup schedule. This would reduce the RPO in case of a disaster. It would be great to have something like the Zerto software.

The GUI is in need of improvement.

The upgrade path is not so clear because there are too many branches.

We have been using Cohesity for about ten months.

The cluster is stable.

This solution has good scalability by adding more nodes.

Cohesity provides great support, both remote and onsite.

We use TSM from IBM, NetBackup from Veritas, and Veeam.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have implemented this solution on two occasions. The first was with the Cohesity team, and the second was done with our in-house team.

Sizing is important and it is easy to overestimate. It is difficult to understand how dedupe will work with your workload.

We are near a coin-flip with Rubrik. Same benefits but less power on dedupe.

Cohesity can replicate backups to a secondary cluster (also virtual edition).

We use it in the realm of data protection. We have comprehensive coverage, including backups for all our databases, VMs, file systems, and various auxiliary components.

One of the notable benefits is its user-friendly interface, making it easy to navigate. Additionally, it demonstrates faster performance compared to other vendors.

The recovery process is effective, especially when it comes to other types of data, such as VMs, and overall, the performance is commendable.

We have been facing challenges, particularly with HANA databases. Despite initial promises of delivering an agent within a few months, it has been over two and a half years, and there is still no indication of when the Cohesity agent for HANA systems will be available. The absence of an agent for replicated recovery makes it impractical for our current needs. We are highly dissatisfied with the level of support and functionality provided for HANA within the Cohesity product.

I have been working with it for two and a half years.

The overall stability has been consistent. The only noteworthy concern is related to the HANA aspect, which falls short of expectations. However, in terms of performance and support, there have been no issues.

I would estimate that approximately two hundred users are involved.

The support quality is commendable – upon opening a ticket, a responsive and capable team promptly assists. However, managing cases with a global team working across different time zones can pose challenges in terms of knowledge transfer and handovers between teams. Occasionally, the transition between teams for a specific case doesn't go smoothly, resulting in the need to repeat explanations for each new team member involved. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Neutral

The installation process requires a couple of straightforward connectors to be installed on our servers, and the setup is quite simple. It's a one-time task, and overall, we haven't encountered any issues with the setup.

We conducted a POC with testing and various evaluations, completing it in a couple of months. The deployment spanned across a broad range of systems, including both production and non-production, and we successfully implemented it within three months. This encompassed all our SAP systems, including ECC, BW, and others, up to ADA and earlier versions. Maintenance is necessary, but the majority of patches and updates at the cluster level can be seamlessly handled online.

Despite encountering challenges with HANA, I would recommend moving forward with Cohesity. The observed improvements and overall convenience make it a worthwhile choice. Comparatively, the experience has been preferable to Symantec or other alternatives. It is an evolving product, and we've witnessed substantial enhancements from its initial stages. Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for VMware Backup and SQL backups that are replicated and copied to the cloud.

They basically can do what Rubrik does. It's a backup device. There aren't necessarily any special features. 

What it does well, it does very well. It just works. 

The initial setup is easy.

It's stable.

The solution scales well.

It's not overly expensive.

Support needs improvement, but the product is fine when well deployed.

I've used the solution for a few months.

This is a solid product. It's quite stable. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

I found the product to be scalable. You just add nodes if you need to. It's a hyper-converged solution, and scaling is easy.

I have not had a good experience with support.

Neutral

I am also familiar with Rubrik.

I've also worked with Commvault and find that you do have to do a lot of fine-tuning with it during implementation. This solution is easier. Commvault is also a lot more expensive. Cohesity has a simpler workflow and for people in operations, it's a blessing. 

The setup process is very straightforward and simple. It doesn't have huge requirements and it is not that complex. 

The pricing is okay. I'd rate it seven out of ten in terms of affordability. How expensive it is depends on how big the contract is. 

I'd advise potential new users to do their due diligence before, know what they want, and get some training.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are using Cohesity DataProtect for all our platforms, including the VMware platform and the site server. 

I like that Cohesity offers the chance to have data on-premises and on the cloud. All the data is automatically sent to the cloud.

DataProtect's recovery time is too high. It takes a long time to recover things from the cloud. I'd also like them to increase the capacity of the file server. 

DataProtect is very stable. We haven't seen any great problems with the platform.

DataProtect is totally scalable. 

We've contacted Cohesity support at times. It's good.

We were using Symantec. It was so expensive to add new hardware. We have more capacity on Cohesity than with the Symantec appliance.

Setting up DataProtect was very easy. With two people, we could deploy it in a couple of weeks. 

We had help from a consultant to deploy DataProtect.

We evaluated Rubrik. Cohesity is less expensive, and I think it gives us more capacity.

I rate Cohesity DataProtect 10 out of 10. I would advise new users to be careful with traffic from the cloud. If you don't manage your traffic, it might spike one month, and you end up paying a lot. 

We use the Data Protector to back up all our VMware virtual machines, as well as a SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange. We're not that big of a company anymore. We have three people who know the product: two specialists and someone from second-line support who can handle the tickets. 

The most valuable thing about Cohesity is how it operates as a whole. We are very satisfied with the product as a whole—all the backup functions, the data protection functions. We are very satisfied with those, and the product is very simple to use. 

We have had our share of minor bugs over the past two years and a few bigger ones. But I think it's because the product has so many features, and they try to add new stuff reasonably quickly. For example, Cohesity adds certain functionality in what they call a "feature release." This doesn't mean a long-term release. They added new functionality very quickly, and it was things we needed that were not yet available in a long-term release. When I say "long-term release," I mean one that is more static and gets updated once every few months. We wanted the feature, but we had more issues than some of us might've liked.

On the other hand, they managed to fix all the bugs without significant issues like data loss or anything like that. So it was more an inconvenience than it was a real problem. But if I have to have any criticism of them, maybe it's that. There are some minor improvements on SQL Server backups that we are waiting on, five services. We had one problem that will be solved in one of the subsequent releases, but those are small things. We are not waiting on any major stuff. The product currently meets all our backup needs.

We have been using Cohesity for just two years.

Cohesity's stability is very good. We haven't had any major issues with that.

I would say Cohesity support is somewhere in between good and very good. But, of course, it depends on which region you get. We know that if we log a ticket before noon here in Belgium, we are not in the region where we want to be. It's something we told Cohesity about, as well. We asked them if they could arrange it so that our ticket will always get picked up by the people in Cork. For one thing, they're in our title. They're also much more capable compared to the other regions. But that's our experience. Generally, we are very satisfied with the support we are getting.

Setup is pretty simple, especially compared to the product we had before. It was an older legacy product that was much harder to implement. We deployed with the help of an integrator, but we do all the day-to-day maintenance on the product by ourselves.

We paid for the entire solution because we have done a few expansions already. I think it's between 400 to 600k. That is the price for the complete system, including the hardware, the support, the subscriptions for the software, I think for four to five years.

I rate Cohesity nine out of 10. So, I would recommend it because it's quite a simple product and can do a lot. With the last product we used, you had to be a specialist to navigate in it. It's a much more straightforward and modern interface—very intuitive to use. And the speed of the backups, we do much more backup than we ever did before. So, I would certainly recommend it, yes.

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.

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.