Cohesity vs. Dell Data Protection | Encryption Enterprise Edition (DDPE)

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

DDPE is great if you want very specific data encrypted and managed. It's flexible in terms of configuration but also can be quite a pain to get configured right. It requires a lot of exclusions and does not play nice with Windows Updates. Usually the client needs to be updated before updates on Windows can be installed and sometimes a new version is no where in sight. The ATP is great but also requires extensive configurations as otherwise it has way too many false positives.

Incentivized

• 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).

• Silent installation/uninstallation. It was very easy to deploy and remove the software remotely.
• Transparent to users. Users did not see messages from the software or notice performance issues during encryption.
• File or disk level encryption. Includes the option to do file or full-disk encryption to meet your organization's needs.

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)

• The encryption policies require careful configuration to avoid damaging the system
• Encryption does not play nice with Windows OS updates

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.

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.

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.

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

We switched to McAfee Endpoint Encryption, which provides full-disk encryption. We saw fewer issues with McAfee Endpoint Encryption full-disk encryption than Credant full-disk encryption.

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.

• Several hours a week of admin time no longer needed to deal with tapes.
• Many hours a year saved in that the admin no longer has to deal with LTO drives, LTO drive firmware, tape libraries, tape library firmware, a physical server connected to tape library, etc. Retired old legacy NAS devices that in some instances no longer had firmware updates. One system to administer and maintain.
• Piece of mind. We replicate from our onsite cluster to an offsite cluster in the event of a DR event at HQ.

• Added security to physical disks and removable media
• Protects with very powerful ATP

Incentivized