Cohesity Helios vs. VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced (discontinued)

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.

VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced is well suited for a thin client environment, and/or an environment that runs multiple virtual servers. It is also well suited for an environment with disaster recover requirements that require backups of everything. vSphere is very expensive, so it would probably not be a very good choice for a startup that could use a cheaper alternative in the beginning, or a physical machine environment.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Maintains backups of all virtual systems for disaster recovery compliance.
• Supports plugins for backups of Microsoft systems.
• As with most VMware products vSphere is incredibly easy to use.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Reports are too complex, could be made clearer.
• The interface could be simplified.
• Backups of physical servers take a very long time.

Incentivized

It's reasonably priced and works well, we actually just bought a new larger cluster late last year

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!

Incentivized

The layout of how to implement consistency should be thought through beforehand. Changing it after the application is time-consuming.

Incentivized

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

CloudBacko is the only similar product that I have used, and while it worked by backing up my virtual machines to Google Drive, VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced not only backs up the virtual machines, buton databases, physical servers and more, and backs them up to a centralized location, and has 24/7 live support.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

• Savings from a unified platform to manage secondary and archival data.
• Savings from retiring older tape backup solution, which had very high licensing and running costs.
• Offloading snapshots from costly tier 1 storage to Cohesity.
• NFS/SMB shares replaces the older file storage.
• Help with disaster recovery planning and implementation.

• Virtual machines and servers are backed up and secure
• DR compliance is met
• Multiple platforms backed up to a central location

Incentivized