Is Cohesity Better Than Rubrik?

If you do a head to head challenge with the two products capabilities, Rubrik will win out every time. Cohesity's UI is a little clunky and childish and Rurik's is simple, elegant and intuitive. Rubrik has amazingly simple scale-out and you will not beat the search functionality and time to recovery. On top of that, their support is beyond top notch. I evaluated both products before ultimately going with Rubrik and haven't looked back since! Compare customers and awards alone to give you an idea of how Rubrik is leading the way in Data Management both on premise and in the cloud. Happy to give more input if anyone needs it :) Trust me, you wont be disappointed choosing Rubrik.

The biggest difference is that Cohesity is able to backup physical servers whereas Rubrik isn't able to back them up. Instant restore is more robust over Cohesity than it is over Rubrik. Not that we have had to restore hundreds of servers at once, but I've seen it done. Rubrik will crawl to a halt if you tried to restore hundreds of VM's at once. Cohesity has the same search ability as Rubrik as well as every other feature and intuitiveness as Rubrik, but costs less. I haven't followed up to see if Rubrik has a cloud edition like Cohesity, but this is a good indicator of the innovation that we will see from Cohesity vs the cobbled together open source software that is Rubrik. Cohesity wrote a lot of their own components and file system.

When looking at both solutions, I originally had a leaning preference to Rubrik, but that quickly faded when looking at demos of both the solutions. Cohesity and Rubrik basically have the same feature sets and do the same in the backup realm. If you compare they both use Policy based backups, they both integrate very well into VMware, they both do near instant recoveries, they both use scale-out file system, they both have search capabilities, and many more capabilities.

What ultimately lead us down to choosing Cohesity, was the sale team. Rubrik ignored us, sent us a full price sheet and never gave us the time of day. Cohesity setup meetings, helped size out our infrastructure (even if we didn't go with their solution), and their sales team was very laid back and not bombarding us with calls and e-mails about if we had decided yet.

After learning more and more about Cohesity and Mohit Aron, it is a company I truly believe will continue changing not just the backup space for a long time, but the secondary storage space. Their technology and staff are the best in the industry and they help do anything needed. I believe Cohesity provides way more than Rubrik ever will, simply because they are focusing on the entire secondary storage landscape and not just backup. You can do analytics, test/dev, automated policy assignment, etc. While I cannot speak to the cloud functionality because we utilize two clusters with site to site replication, everything else just works. I'm not sure the accuracy of those utilizing Rubrik that are speaking for Cohesity's clunky interface, because the UI is painstakingly easy and intuitive. Rubrik may very well be the same, but look up videos of Demos and I would say the UI is not a reason to pick one over the other. The support from Cohesity is industry leading and I have been shocked from the first ticket submitted, when at 2AM you submit a ticket and get a response within minutes, they are quick, efficient, and even proactive in fixing problems you may not have even knew existed. They are constantly coming out with additional features and they truly listen to what the users actually want or need.

I end with the contention that I would invest in Cohesity in a second, if they ever went Public and willingly will refer anyone and everyone I hear having a backup problem to Cohesity.

Oh as a side note, Mohit seems to truly be a great leader, I've listened to a few of his interviews, and I believe the leaders of a company make or break it. Two shocking things that I think need to be more widely known. He refuses to have an office (wants to sit with his "troops") and he sets time every week to still code on the platform.

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Answering the "View box" issue that Paul mentioned, is that Cohesity provides "View boxes" to be able to provide flexibility and security on the data you want to store. Taken from the Cohesity's site "A View Box is a logical division of a partition, that contains one or more filesystems. Each of these View Boxes encrypt data ‘stored’ by them using their own independent keys. This allows for robust data isolation. For example, if IT data and financial data are on different view boxes, a breach on the IT data will not automatically risk your financial data." Of course, if you want Global Dedupe and are not concerned about siloing off data then you can always just make one View Box that provides global dedupe (it is also dedupe's before replication).

Rubrik is quite simply one of the easy products we have ever had to implement. Less an hour after delivery we had the system racked, configured and ingesting backups.

Interface is slick, recovery times near instance, seemless tiering to the cloud and no need to spend time managing the service on a daily basis.

Multi-tier backup architecture - no thanks! Rubrik all the way for us and anyone purchasing wont be disappointed.

Happy to be contacted if anyone would like further details on our usage/setup.

We chose Cohesity over Rubrik. The POC was very close, but our techs preferred the Cohesity UI and the ability to restore VMs to a standalone ESXi host, which Rubrik can only do via API.

Rubrik, We deployed and works wonderful.

Rubrik is the better solution!! Between the great support and the ease of use, you just can't beat it.

I've found it hard to beat Rubrik's support. Combined with a solution that just works. Rubrik is my choice.

Rubrik - It has better solution, support, and worldwide spread!

Rubik! Pure simplicity and an awesome product to use!

We looked at both solutions and they both have many great things going for them. I did not like with Cohestiy how they sold us on fake numbers for gains. Thin provisioning is not a space savings, it's funny money!!!

We choose Rubrik for the ease of installation, the vision of where they were going to be, and they ability to make backups just work without ever thinking of them. Instant recovery is great as well.

Switched to Rubrik last year, it couldn't have been easier. They had an expert come in to help get us set up, walked through the UI with us (which isn't really needed because it's super easy to learn), and helped us set up our SLAs with recommendations based on our needs. They have also followed up every couple of months to be sure we're still happy.

We went with Rubrik. They are both strong products. Rubrik is the easier program to use - less buttons, less knobs, and the workflow is solid. Cohesity offers more of a power user experience - more ways to fine tune and the like.

We decided to go with Rubrik over Cohesity. Great decision! Rubrik is simple to implement, easy to use and maintain! Its tough to find anything bad about it.

We have found Rubrik easy to install, easy to configure and easy to use. The install took less than a couple of hours and it has done an amazing job handling our large backups. The compression has been good and our backup times have bene shrunk from days to hours.

Rubrik is leading the charge in revolutionizing the data protection, data archive and cloud protection space.

Rubrik is the best backup system I’ve ever worked with, in over 15 years in the industry!

I would say Rubrik based on my experience with Rubrik and off of reading what Cohesity does and is. Rubrik is simple, fast, and effective. UI is simple and easy to understand. SLA is simple. Recovery time is fast.

Rubrik for us was the easy choice. The one click policy protection for any hyperviser (well AHV, HyperV and VMware), no one has physical these days do they? as well as certified MSSQL backups and NAS protection was a true differentiator. We’re more than happy for this for our ~1000 vms and petabyte of storage

We chose Cohesity over Rubrik

Offered better flexibility can act as an SMB/NFS or object store, can use with existing backup software or with DataProtect. Data Protect licenses per TB so don’t need to license the full cluster if you don’t want to. Allows native Oracle RMAN to go direct to NFS without needing to use a software wrapper so DBAs are happy. Performance and ease of scalability are great. Software is simple. Options for virtual appliance for remote offices and cloud edition for azure/aws.

I dont test Rubrik but we have Cohesity and we are happy with it. Cohesity is good for Backup and get better every day. It is young and fresh. The "google like search" for Files in all Backups is great. The Team is great. Customers are not only Number

Cohesity hands down. Easiest backup I have ever implemented.

Rubrik provides scale out architecture with no "view boxes" to manage or build. They also offer a global dedupe name space rather than silos of storage via Cohesity "View boxes"

Rubrik has distributed metadata, task scheduler, filesystem, and erasure coding (4,2) designed to provide resiliency for multiple drive failures and node failures. Cohesity by default uses RF2 and is susceptible to single drive failure. Our RAW capacity is usable and predictable and also resilient. Ask Cohesity to size for protection against multiple drive failures and you will have a substantially different usable capacity.

Rubrik has policy based automation for protection which can adapt throttling and mitigate environmental impacts without manual intervention or management.

Rubrik provides granular, object level access control. Cohesity provides rigid fixed roles, and requires usage of view boxes for multi-tenancy. This adds complexity, and decreases data reduction.

Rubrik was built API first for automation.

Rubrik provides parallel Ingest of data for high performance, efficient cluster usage.

Rubrik provides granular file and folder level restore and protection for Physical windows and Linux systems rather than volume level dump only support.

Rubrik provides not only live mount of Virtual guests for immediate usage and functionality, but also provides live-mount support for SQL databases as well.

Rubrik provides that ability not just to archive to public cloud but to also power on virtual guests in AWS and Azure environments all without the need to continuously consume virtual guest resources in the cloud

Rubrik is end to end software (or hardware) encrypted filesystem. Cohesity can set a viewbox to be encrypted but data can be copied to another view box and expose the data.

Rubrik is immutable to ransomware with no need to do extra steps like snap your view boxes

We chose Cohesity over Rubrik

Offered better flexibility can act as an SMB/NFS or object store, can use with existing backup software or with DataProtect. Data Protect licenses per TB so don’t need to license the full cluster if you don’t want to. Allows native Oracle RMAN to go directly to NFS without needing to use a software wrapper so DBAs are happy. Performance and ease of scalability are great. The software is simple. Options for a virtual appliance for remote offices and cloud edition for azure/AWS.

For us, Cohesity edged out Rubrik as the better solution.

Rubrik was close, but because we have a lot (100+) remote sites with different capacity requirements, Cohesity edged out Rubrik during our testing.

Cohesity offers greater scale terms of size for virtual deployments - You can deploy a single virtual node (up to 16TB's), virtual clusters (100's+ of TB's) and\or physical deployments (100's+ of TB's.)

Cohesity's virtual ROBO solution also runs the same OS that includes the same set of features\options as their Physical Hardware counterparts.

With Rubrik, their Edge systems did not have a full set of features as their physical solutions.  In one example, we needed to replicate data from one Edge device to another Edge device but were not able to. We were forced to replicate to a different regional Data Center that hosted a physical hardware solution. 

Other than a few limitations with Edge, we did find Rubrik quite capable and user friendly.

We Implemented Rubrik a couple years ago to back up our Azure cloud environment. We evaluated Cohesity but their features did not offer what we need. Our Account team was great to work with and we have always been able to accomplish everything we need.

Given that I've used just about every solution under the sun, I would have to say Rubrik!! Without a doubt. Not just because it's the easiest to use, but in the RARE event I've needed support, the Rubrik team was right on it, no hassles, got right to them, the engineer fix the issue (my fault) without hesitation and had me up and running in a matter of minutes. By far the BEST support experience I've ever encountered in my 20+ years in IT.
Support IS TOPS! Product is EASY. 

Cliff note version: After running a POC of Cohesity, Rubrik and other vendors, we purchased Rubrik. It was the easiest to use, most technically capable, and had the best company feel of all that we dealt with.

The Rubrik sales team was very laid back and let their product speak for itself. The system was up and running in <30 minutes and we had the first backups running in <1h. Every test we threw at Rubrik succeed, their backup service handled our "improperly configured" Linux machines without any issue, and everyone I have added into the system via the Organizations feature has been able to navigate the system with minimal training from me.

We have had Rubrik for 3 years, and the feature growth has been fantastic. It has outstripped our needs and ability to use many of the available features. Being able to copy our backups to cloud storage was a dream until Rubrik. It was so simple to setup that I had it setup and running in <1 hour, which included setting up a new account on the cloud storage provider. This is one example of the ease of use that is present across the Rubrik feature set.

Cohesity was an initial leader but their backup of physical Linux client ended with their engineers telling us that our machines were built wrong and needed to be rebuilt; this is not a valid answer/resolution. Their sales team was crazy aggressive, used "used-car sales tactics", and completely turned us off to the company beyond the technical short comings. To me it seemed like they were trying to do everything they could to put new features into the product as fast as possible. Which sounds great, but the driving factor seemed to be "what will get us acquired"; this is not something that you want in a company.

I used Rubrik at a previous employer and have only received a demo of Cohesity. I really really like Rubrik, but the one area that it fell short for me was in regards to bare metal recovery. In this area Cohesity and Veeam are head and shoulders above Rubrik. I suppose that is to be expected for a product like Rubrik which is very focused on virtualization. In every other aspect Rubrik comes out on top or on par with Cohesity for me.

With the two product strengths, if you do a head-to - head challenge, Rubrik will win each time. Cohesity's UI is quite clunky and infantile, and Rurik's is easy, elegant and intuitive. Rubrik 's scale-out is incredibly easy and you won't beat the search feature and the time to recover. What's more, their support goes beyond top notch.

The main difference is that Cohesity can back up physical servers while Rubrik can not back them up. Instant restore is more stable than over Rubrik, over Cohesity. Not that we had to quickly rebuild hundreds of servers, but I've seen it done. When you've tried to restore hundreds of VM's at once, Rubrik will crawl to a halt.

Rubrik is one of the simplest items we have ever had to introduce, very literally. Less than an hour after delivery, we had backups stacked, installed, and ingested on the machine.

I would recommend Rubrik all the time! UI is a piece of cake to understand, processes are simple and easy to use and support is exemplary!

We went from Veritas to Rubrik and haven't looked back since! Throughout the This whole lockdown period, we completely forgot about backed as we were working on other things.

Checked it out today and... Perfect. All black ups there and the system is healthier than ever. If you want peace of mind with a backup solution. Rubrik is the one!

I have never used either of these solutions but have heard both positive and negatives on each. The choice is subjective as one will do something the other doesn't and vice versa which will sway a decision. I would need to get hands on with both to offer a valid choice but to me if it is easy to install, setup and get going those are good positives. Also is the interface easy to navigate to find the processes I work with the most? If I cannot find it myself and have to contact someone that usually is not the choice I would go with as finding things myself is the best way.

However never count out Veeam as another choice. Great product and platform. Always works no matter what.

Rubrik installation is very smooth and fast. the UI is so simple to use that you don't need to be a Professor of Backup in order to be able to restore. Adding on top of that the capabilities of RestAPI, ScaleOut, Automation, SLA based backups. You get an amazing product.

Between the two, Rubrik is better with all its capabilities.

Both Rubrik and Cohesive in the background work in the same way. However, we chose Cohesity over Rubrik, offered better flexibility, options for a virtual device for remote offices and cloud edition for azure / AWS. Waiting to see how we take more advantage of the system

Both products are excellent but Rubrik won out due to far greater simplicity of operation and a tighter focus on the backup/recovery need.

Having worked in the backup industry for some time now i have found Rubrik to be the best all round product on the market today, I have sold Asigra, Zerto Veeam and Rubrik.

The speed of backup and instant recovery is incredible, ensuring recovery point and recovery times are met. Additionally, the Google-like search offers a functionality that no one else has. Lastly, it’s API-first architecture enables customers to build end-to-end automated workflows.

Furthermore, its Cloud Data Management platform leverages the strengths of public or private cloud for archive, reducing the cost of data protection without losing functionality.

Cohesity is trying to emulate Rubriks success.

We just implemented Cohesity yesterday. Super simple deployment, and by the end of 8 hours we had most of our infrastructure backed up on Cohesity and replicated to the other cluster. Looking forward to see how we take further advantage of the system.

To be honest, I've never worked with Rubrik so I cannot fairly compare and contrast with Cohesity. That being said, Cohesity is a fantastic solution for hyperconverged secondary storage and I highly recommend it!

We reviewed both Cohesity and Rubrik when looking at a new backup system. Ultimately, we ended up going with Cohesity. The Cohesity support team was excellent, from our account manager, to the SE, to their regular customer support. The cost for Cohesity was much better as well.

I have preference for Commvault as it is a complete Data Protection solution.

A few year ago when we were researching data protection solutions I favored Rubrik over Cohesity, however, we ultimately chose Cohesity because it could also handle file services in addition to data protection.

Cohesity is third tier JBOF fare and is NOT a serious competitor to Rubrik.

Rubrik is aimed at Data Domain replacement at a reasonable cost and their software and appliance platform is the Data Protection solution of the moment.

Simple as that.

Rubrik,

It’s easier from an HW perspective and their Cloud-on functionality is amazing.
It outperforms all the current big backup players on all levels.
It is a cloud-first solution, hence archiving tiers are inherited to this solution. If you don’t have a cloud vision and strategy, go with Cohesity. The integration with Pure and Nutanix is another big plus for Rubrik.

We are about to start a POC on Cohesity and Rubrik. We are in the process of standing up servers.
I have not researched Rubrik. I do like the cluster environment that Cohesity has.
I would suggest running a POC and choose the best one for a company’s environment.

Both Rubrik and Cohesive in the backdrop works the same way. However as said above by Nathan, the UI is elegant. Just not that thier feature capability when I compared for our org was ahead than cohesity.

I.e recovery from the cloud, Cohesity would download the Entire batch of a snapshot for even a single file restore while Rubrik does not. Which saves on a Cloud perspective
DR Rubrik in the cloud already has this, Cohesity is on beta phase as last I know.

thier live mount of VM and SQL is proven, cohesity lacks in that aspect.

And many more. however I have to say Cohesity marketing/ SE do not engage more with customer compared to Rubrik.

Hands down, it is Cohesity. The comparison, datasheets, numbers, etc. prove it all that Cohesity is on top.

Let me know if you and your team think otherwise and why?

@Bob Short sounds like you've got some great input on these and other backup solutions. Would you be able to provide a review of any of these solutions? I'm sure it would help others in the community learn which is the best one for their needs. LMK and we can have someone accompany you through the process.

I've been using Acronis True Image for several years with minimal issues---upon advice from SIL consultant who inquired among his many corporate clients. I twas overwhelmingly recommended. Not sure where it fits in in terms of needs, complexity or costs--but that's my input as a small mom & pop home business. 

We have not used Cohesity. We switched from combination of CommVault and VEEAM to Rubrik and the difference was day and night. And that was out of the box experience back in version 3 since then every upgrade is making this product better. All of our wishlists was already covered in different iterations of version 4. And with version 5 they started offering us features that we did not know we needed like Live mount for SQL.

Based on couple of comments on this page. I can already see people have outdated information.

Examples.

1. It fully supports bare metal backup of physical now.

2. Direct archive/backup of NAS Drives

Rubrik is not only our main backup solution. Its the core component of our DR Policy on AWS.

Cohesity. Love all the features, speed and it's ability to scale.

We bought Cohesity based off the features it provides, we have never had an issue with the platform and support has always been very quick to respond with new features.

Definitely Cohesity! Its amazing.

Cohesity is the best

We choose Cohesity over Rubrik because of the XFS indexing and DB reduction.

We purchased Cohesity a few months back and could not be happier with it. So simple and reliable!!

Rubrik is the winner for me.
Performance is super..
The Gui is slick, but the API documentation and playground is the best I ever saw.
The technical support also great.

Rubrik is hands down better than the Avamar we were using. Ease of use means even mgmt. can poke around without issues.

We have implemented Rubrik and have been very pleased with all its capabilities and ease of use.

Rubrik is quiet simple and powerfull. It's the best backup i have ever seen

I prefer cohesity. I made the decision to go with them and I haven’t had a reason to regret it.
It’s been as good as they said.

Frankly I never worked with Rubrik, but using Cohesity for the last 2 years. Data restoration is a bliss and backing up VM/ Views / physical machines is even easier. GUI is simple and user friendly. Also, integration with vCenter is smooth and robust.

Cohesity, best solution for all that you need and everything that didn`t know that you needed.
Also best customer service and customer focus in the business

We did head to head demo's and Cohesity won out. I was initially leaning toward Rubrik but the ingest was better with Cohesity as was day to day operations. At the time it was the more mature product. The indexing/searching and restore options are fantastic. The sales and support teams have been great. Overall it's been a great decision and one that has made our work life better.

I have no experience with Rubrik, but Cohesity is here for the future. Legacy backups bye bye!

We did a POC with both Cohesity and Rubrik. We ended up going with Cohesity and have not regretted it at all. The amount of time saved with the ease of restores, whether it is a VM, a folder or searching for a document from iManage. Go with Cohesity!

Neither. Veeam is better than both. Bullet proof and solid. Just works.
www.itcentralstation.com/products/veeam-backup-replications

My reccomendation is Rubrik but again it is important to understand what you want to backup,how much data, how fast and what is the limitations of the product is

Interestingly, I originally asked the very same question last year, seeking the opinion or recommendation of our Consultant SIL who happens to be a multi-qualified MS Engineer.

He inquired among his many clients and the overall favorite was Acronis. We purchased it and overall have been somewhat satisfied, although at times it seems to be overly complex to set up, which is very important. Subsequent updates have proved to be improved.

We also use iDrive which seems to be much simpler and overall more reliable, without the complexity of Acronis and others. In the past we used others but times have come a long way and they were no longer considered by us. Keep in mind we are merely a small home business, not
overly complex.

Honestly, I would rate them equally.

We spent most of 2017 reviewing new backup solutions and it came down to Cohesity and Rubrik. Both are all-in-one hardware/software
Appliance solutions that essentially have the same features. We found the technology as innovative and a pleasant change from the old proxy server backup solutions. And a lot less complex.

It was essentially a matter of which vendor offered the best deal, which led us to Rubrik.

We would have been happy either way.

Our shop hasn’t used either one. I have heard Rubrik mentioned more than Cohesity and I would explore that option first. Better, how about they look at VMware or MS HyperV and use Veeam for software and hardware backup?

I have not worked with either product - sorry. BUT I use an interface similar to Cohesity - I use Cloudberry that backs up to Amazon AWS servers as does Cohesity - if I read t he white paper correctly. I'm not sure pricing is an issue, but it's very inexpensive to use Amazons storage for GBs of data - all you need is the right interface for you. From baremetal or de-dupe capabilities or SQL - whatever, I can do it all for pennies with Cloudberry and AWS. Sorry if this doesn't help, but I hope it does. Good luck!

I do not know any of both solutions. I highly recommend Acronis for home and enterprise backup.

Compatibility, stability, price.

I recommend Quest’s Rapid Recovery/VROOM or the DR appliance paired with another solution, depending on what one would like to achieve. From what I understand, Rubrick is a reliable, popular, somewhat new solution.

To be honest I've not worked with either of these products. I'm biased as I've been working with IBM's TSM/Spectrum Protect for a very long time, and I won't change any time soon. So I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful.

I would dump both of them and buy Qumulo!