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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StarWind VTL
Score 8.6 out of 10
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StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) resolves the issue of Enterprise ROBO being stuck with expensive tapes for data backup, while allowing users to stick to regulatory archival requirements. One can’t be sure that data stored on the tapes in archives will always be retrievable. StarWind VTL takes advantage of the already existing tape backup infrastructure and virtualizes the data for easy access and storage. Using on-prem VTLs with cloud and object storage tiering, the solution allows…
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.
Starwind VTL is a great solution for customers that want the benefits of a physical tape library without the hefty price tag and the manual intervention required when changing tapes as it is automated. In addition, Starwind VTL virtual tapes are "air-gapped" as they are in LTO format.
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.
The initial setup took some time, however, with the help of the Starwind technical team, we were able to set it up from start to finish including seamlessly adding it to our existing backup solution. After that, there was no need for any additional setup or troubleshooting.
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.
We've looked at physical tape backups, however, the infrastructure is too costly compared to Starwind VTL and it also requires manual changing of tapes that users will not want to do or forget to do. With VTL, it works exactly like a physical tape library with the same benefits and full automation.
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.
