Cohesity vs. Hornetsecurity VM Backup

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

Do you have VMWare? Yes I can back it up. Do you have Hyper-V? Yes I can back it up. That in itself should speak for itself. Altaro has really given a great deal into their software, not only making it easy to use, BUT also a really good and reliable product where you can support your workloads hassle-free, and super lightweight

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).

• Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running.
• Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost.
• Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective.
• Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play.

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)

• More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too.
• It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive.
• Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues.

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.

It simply works and it is making our lives easier. The renewal process is also really good

Incentivized

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.

A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs

Incentivized

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.

One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.

Incentivized

content was good and hands on lab to get the live feel of the application

Incentivized

Altaro has really designed their product so well that you can honestly implement this within a couple of minutes

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

The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.

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.

• We've a few occasions where Outlook items have been permanently deleted. Cohesity Backup had mulitple backups allowing us to restore the lost items.
• Can be managed by O365 Security Groups meaning offboarding is easier and ensuring licences aren't take unneccesarily
• Backup of Sharepoint and Teams has been very helpful.

Incentivized

• Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running.
• The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up.
• Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost.

Incentivized