Cohesity Helios is a data management platform from Cohesity, headquartered in San Jose, which provides users with end-to-end protection for virtual and physical workloads, databases, applications, and storage with a single web-scale solution.
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IDERA SQL Safe Backup
Score 5.4 out of 10
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SQL Safe Backup from Houston based software company Idera is a data recovery and protection option.
Cohesity is very well suited to protecting virtualised workloads and is a significant improvement over IBM Spectrum Protect which we’ve replaced by Cohesity. We also protect a Netapp workload and whilst the on-prem side works really well careful planning of protection jobs is needed if you’ll be archiving these to Cloud.
SQL Safe is appropriate and well-suited for any backup scenario. Having used SQL Safe, I probably wouldn't want to manage a set of servers in the future without it. If you only have a couple of SQL servers, it might not be worth the spend as there are well-maintained free options that are very functional (though they do require more technical knowledge). But I can't think of a scenario where SQL Safe wouldn't be appropriate.
Instant spin up of test and dev machines is pretty amazing. Our last solution claimed to do this but the backing storage was much too slow t be of use.
Uploads to the cloud are simple to set up and you can leverage low cost blob storage.
The cluster nature of the solution makes upgrades seamless with zero downtime.
The entire cluster fits in 2U of space -- we are saving 8U in our main datacenter and all 6U we previously had offsite.
Replication performance - We needed support to provide some customizations in order to get our replication to work properly to another offsite cluster. We have been told that this issue is fixed in the newest general release.
Support - I would characterize the support as very good, but in a few instances I could tell my support agent needed to go higher up his chain to get clarification on features. I believe Cohesity is rapidly growing their support infrastructure as they put more hardware in the field.
When you're adding a new SQL server, sometimes the install from the management server to the SQL server will fail. I'm guessing this happens because of some version difference in Windows components or similar. Not a huge deal because you can just copy the agent to the SQL server and install it there, but considering how easy everything else is, I would expect this to be a little more fluid.
I ran into a situation where part of our business decided to move their servers to a third-party data center. When they took away a SQL server that I was managing with SQL Safe, anything having to do with that policy took forever. Click. Wait 10 minutes. Window reacts. I'm guessing this is because the Management Console is trying super hard to contact the server in question, but I wish it handled losing a server better than it does.
The Cohesity platform with its user interface is easy to implement, rack space-saving, and easy to use on a daily business basis. Backup jobs and policies are easy to define, multiple machines and objects can be grouped for the same tasks. In general, Cohesity makes backup admins' lives much easier.
Cohesity support is wonderful to work with. If your case is assigned to someone who is outside of your time zone, you are able to ask for it to be reassigned to someone in your time zone and no offense is taken; in fact, some of the support agents will call out that they see the time zone difference and if you want the case assigned to someone in your time zone, please request it be re-queued so that proper attention is given to it. This is rare in my experience and it makes it wonderful to work with them. I usually only request it be re-queued when I have a system down or severely degraded and need to work on it immediately. Great people to work with!
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.
Cohesity Helios was included with our Cohesity DataPlatform purchase. The pricing to refresh our backup and software with Cohesity was less than our annual backup software renewal from our previous solution.
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.
SQL Safe allows me to spend less time managing my DR plan and still maintain confidence that my backups and restores are solid. Saving my time means saving money.
SQL Safe does an amazing job at backup compression over and above SQL's native compression. SQL backups are probably our single largest consumer of network drive space. Any product that helps reduce my network footprint, saves money.
