Cohesity Data Cloud vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library

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

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.

• 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).

• Allows you to use Veeam and other software that uses Virtual Tape Libraries while getting rid of actual tape drives and tapes
• Backblaze B2 implementation is great - keeps storage costs low while automating backups to the cloud storage
• Low cost and great support by the Starwind technical team
• Feature-rich and in constant development

• 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)

• Set-up is confusing.

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.

Their support is great and the interface is not as user friendly

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.

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.

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.

Great and reliable product with little need for support

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

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

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.

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

• ROI was immediate as we got rid of expensive sneakernet backups with hard drives in a Pelican case
• One-time cost of the product is very cost-effective
• Support contracts are reasonable and we received excellent support throughout
• We have much better peace-of-mind with our data being protected better