Axcient x360Recover vs. Cohesity vs. Datto SIRIS

I feel that Axcient x360Recover is well suited for any environment, both large and small. Weather you build your own device, BYOD or purchase one of theirs, it all works great. I even use it at home via the direct to cloud option. Well work the investment. I am unable to find a downside at this time.

Cohesity has been awesome. The performance (speed) that it has been able to provide has actually given me back time every month. I have to test my backups monthly, and the Cloning process that Cohesity has available from it's backup has given me days back each month. It just a few minutes I can have VMs restored for testing and documentation. This took a couple days with the previous vendor.

Incentivized

Datto is a fantastic option for smaller businesses who don't have as large of a budget. It might work well for larger businesses as well, but the features are not exactly on par with more prevalent backup solutions. So, that should be kept in mind while determining a good fit for a company. But if selling a backup solution is met with push back, this can be a great option to give a good working backup solution. It offers the main features solutions should have, so it's definitely not a compromise. Just keep in mind the features it does not offer.

Incentivized

• Setup and configuration is extremely easy.
• The business continuity component for spinning up the desired recovery point as a virtual machine on the appliance in order to keep the business operational is rock solid.
• Recovering the desired backup point back to the physical hardware or virtual environment and syncing the most recent changes to finalize the recovery is awesome.
• The system documentation is concise and easy to use.
• The support team is absolutely fantastic.

• Easy to use and setup new backup and restore jobs.
• Extremely fast recovery time, can spin a VMware backup VM up in well under a minute.
• Granular recovery search options, easy to find specific files or systems to recover (or SQL DB).

• Simple agent setup for new machines to be protected. A new machine can be setup on the server in under a minute whether it be a Linux or Windows based machine.
• Local virtualization on the Datto is quick to start up. After a physical problem with a server I had the machine locally virtualized on the Datto before users had a chance to report service issues to me.
• Nothing to do on my end to get backups shifted to offsite data center. Schedules are setup for each machine or group of machines and I sleep well knowing all our backups are safely stored offsite.

Incentivized

• The only thing missing is the ability to cancel a backup as they appear to just continue to try to run even after rebooting the BDR and endpoint until a failure finally occurs.
• The only other ask would be to expand support to Linux operating systems.

Incentivized

• Reporting could always be better- executive-style reports have to be generated from data at multiple points.
• Some tasks that could be brought to the UI that today we have to call support on (for example when an NFS mount is still active but we cannot see it from the UI)

• Initial backup sync: The downside to the cloud backup is that, if you have a lot of data, you need an external hard drive to seed to the cloud. And you usually have to request this after you've already got everything else working.
• Unsyncing: We have pretty decent bandwidth, but with 8TB of data, we'd get syncing issues with the cloud servers every 3 months or so. The only way to address it was to request another external drive and resync it, but that also meant losing the older data.
• Availability and support: Datto only operates through MSPs and VARs, and will not help you directly without putting in a ticket with your provider. This causes delays, and extra epenses, and if you grow beyond the need for an MSP, you have to keep them around for at least that piece.

Incentivized

We've been using Axcient over the years and have worked with their development team to suggest new features, something that you would not normally be able to do with other companies. They listen to what we have to say and understand that we are a business, just like them. It's great to know that someone will always be there for you when you need them.

Incentivized

We have been very pleased with this backup solution. It is fast and reliable, and supports our VMware infrastructure. The company's support has been great, including proactively replacing our nodes when the flash memory was reporting high wear. Support is offered on-shore as well. We plan on continuing to use this product for the foreseeable future.

I trust the product and service and am satisfied with the direction of the company

Incentivized

It is overall very easy to install and get working. Install the application, select the drives you want to backup or leave blank and backup all drives. It starts to run immediately. You configure all the backup retention and how often to run in the portal so once you deploy the agent it is very easy to get started. After the backup completes. The portal will perform a test boot and auto verification of the image.

Incentivized

Cohesity Helios is very easy to use and the web up is simple to navigate and the main dashboard presents a very good and clear overview summary of protection status, capacity and other vital metrics. If you have multiple clusters you can get a single pane view of overall status which is awesome.

Usability is great. The web interface is simple and easy to use. While various options are available for client backups, it is very easy to re-use settings of the existing client, so adding new clients is a very fast process. Configuration of the agent on the client-side cannot be easier as well. Datto dashboard provides an overview of the client status, and email notifications can be configured for various events.

Incentivized

Support is pretty good. The issue is that they don't have any SLA so they get to you whenever. Though, if you hound them, they usually bump you up in the chain and get back to you. Their techs are fairly knowledgeable. Occasionally the first level support isn't the best, but once it bumps up to the next level, they are good.

Incentivized

Support is quick to respond but lacks that ongoing responsiveness if the issue is not simple. There will be large gaps in replies if they need to resort to escalation and when there are timezone differences between yourself and the person who picked up the ticket.

My specific example or reason for this rating goes back to a need for support after a client on this platform has a fire. In a nutshell, Datto had no idea how to BMR the image back to the server correctly, and as a result, the RAID on the server was lost, due to the Datto BDR environment not being able to see the RAID card, and the support technician knowing how to inject drivers.

Incentivized

content was good and hands on lab to get the live feel of the application

Incentivized

I had the miss fortune to go back to this device. Alot has changed since the first time I had used it. Now instead a full deployable network appliance, you have to download a preconfigured virtual machine that will only run on an ESXi server. What about Hyper-V? I have many clients that are Hyper-V only. I setup a test lab to get this thing up and running and it has been a nightmare to say the least. Will be looking at other options.

Incentivized

Security and encryption of Axcient is a top priority . Axcient have all the tools to provide solutions to different kind of businesses Best part is it has an MSP friendly console to manage multiples devices and clients at the same Dashboard. Deployment process is very easy in Windows an VMWare Devices.

We looked at Veeam and although it's a great product when we priced out the licensing of both primary and disaster datacenters it became much too expensive. Rubrik is a great product and very similar to Cohesity. In the end, Cohesity had a secondary storage play as well as a better UI and better compatibility with lower tier cloud storage. We also like the way Cohesity did protection jobs vs Rubrik's virtual machine centric backup. CommVault is a product we still use today due to its massive features and the ability for bare metal backups. Cohesity does a much better job in the area of UI simplicity, virtual backup ease, and ease of management.

Incentivized

Datto seemed to be better than other vendors I trialed, and I inherited an Alto device, so it was easy to stay with them. I also assumed the backups had been working with the previous contractor, but it turns out they had been failing for months and no one knew it.

Overall Cohesity professional services like the rest of Cohesity are brilliant. We had some poor advice around how to carve up our Netapp protection jobs which has set us back but it has been acknowledged that a mistake was made by Cohesity and they promise for future engagements with new customers the lessons learnt with us will be integrated into their planning workshop for NAS onboarding.

• The few customers I have I feel confident and comfortable that a disaster will make recovery easy and fast for my clients.
• I can set it up and forget about it with reports and alerts
• I recommend it to any client that requires a good solid backup solution;

• We've a few occasions where Outlook items have been permanently deleted. Cohesity Backup had mulitple backups allowing us to restore the lost items.
• Can be managed by O365 Security Groups meaning offboarding is easier and ensuring licences aren't take unneccesarily
• Backup of Sharepoint and Teams has been very helpful.

Incentivized

• In most cases, Datto will provide the appliance free of charge with a 3-5 year contract which results in a modest monthly fee instead of a large initial outlay and monthly fees.
• The contract's warranty is top-notch. Failed drives or issues with the appliances are replaced/corrected with free replacements and shipping.

Incentivized