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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Infrascale Platform
Score 9.6 out of 10
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The Infrascale Platform is the flagship cloud storage, data protection, and disaster recovery platform from the California based company, Infrascale.
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.
The Infrascale Platform solution we have in place is certainly not cheap - I believe we are paying about $2800/month for it, though it is quite robust. We have 18TB of on-site storage available, with the same available in a secondary - remote - device for replication. They do have a wide range of products available to any size business though, so I'm sure they have cheaper offerings as well. The on-site appliance is fantastic - in that in houses your backups, but can also be utilized as an emergency piece of hardware to spin up a backup and run it in the event of your primary hardware failing. You can also traverse full backups to grab single, contained, files if you so choose. We love that feature as we must perform file recovery monthly for audit purposes.
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.
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.
It is one of the best cloud back up data protection software and software platforms on the entire market for MSPs. There are not many other solutions that offer this level of customization and execution in the data protection and disaster recovery arena better than Infrascale. I highly recommend it for any MSP.
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.
Infrascale Platform is the most modern backup service/device we've utilized. EaseUs and Ghost were just software that would run within a Windows environment (at the time) and backup to a device that we kept on-site. EaseUs would fail quite often with Incremental backups - so I would spend a lot of time re-running full backups to ensure we didn't experience data loss in the event of a crash. Ghost was used when I was first hired at this district - so I didn't have much hands-on experience with it. But I know it was a bundled offering with Anti-Virus back when we utilized it ('07-'09ish).
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.
Peace of mind: our entire virtual environment is backed up both onsite and offsite
As stated, it is pricey. Since we haven't needed to do anything more than basic file restores, ROI is hard to measure. A full restore of a virtual server immediately would be priceless. So, on that note, ROI is good.
