Cohesity vs. Unitrends

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

We have a traditional stack and pretty typical needs as a manufacturer. I have used and evaluated everything out there, but the Unitrends solution fits very well and was competitively priced. I would think if it fits us, it could fit anyone like us with a similar stack.

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).

• It has fully automated and customizable dashboards that can run with less administrative attention.
• It should be able to run on virtual machines or be deployed as a virtual machine within MS Azure or AWS.
• It's AI-based ransomware detection helps to understand data characteristics and alerts for ransomware attacks.

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)

• Errors on backup jobs could be more clearly explained. As the administrator of the device for my company, I often don't know what caused an error, and can't tell from the error information what happened or caused the error.
• Updates of the devices should have an automatic option. It takes to much time to do an update to the devices if updates haven't been maintained.
• Shutdown and restarting the device should be available from the main UI screen to eliminate some time when doing updates or if you're doing some maintenance on the device.

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.

We have grown very attached to the Unitrends appliances and their use for recovery and other file restoration needs as well as data archival, data replication to other appliance and data migration to other servers or long term storage requirements. The appliances work well and the support for them is very good as well.

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.

I have never used such an easy product that is stable and scalable like Unitrends. I have been running backups for MANY years. On premise, tape, disk, cloud, you name it. Unitrends is very flexible, stable and has incredible reporting features. It's nice when management requests a report and it takes you 5 minutes to run it and dump it to PDF. How can you beat that?

Incentivized

The appliances have been there when we need them and have rarely if ever gone down. Hardware issues have been resolved quickly.

Incentivized

The hardware is adequate and speedy. The user interface responds quickly. Backups complete quickly.

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.

They're incredible, attentive, thorough. They make sure my issue is resolved and follow up. I'm usually behind on giving them a reply or an update. They have always gone above and beyond for me, and I'll continue to do the same for them.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It was sufficient to get started. It was not super deep. We called support often to get going.

Incentivized

The Unitrends employees involved in the installation were very friendly and knowledgeable. A certain degree of hiccups can be expected during any installation but never shook my confidence because of the friendly and knowledgeable team that was assigned to my project.

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

Symantec Backup Exec was the primary tool used for backups for years. We also used Veeam for some Office 365/Exchange backups. Unitrends once configured and set up works very well against the competition. Backup Exec interface was more user friendly. The search tool for exploring backups was much better than Unitrends as well. Unitrends is much faster if you need to restore an entire VM or large file folders. Also once you have Unitrends all set up, it is very low maintenance, it just works. If something fails 9/10 it will correct itself on the next backup that is scheduled to run

Incentivized

Once you exceed the capacity of the appliances, you have to forklift a new appliance. This is very expensive.

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.

• 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

• It has saved some deleted file server data for our business department.
• We have lost some reports for the business department due to an overlooked setting that make the backup reports look great, but the server was not being backed up in reality.
• Less anxiety for the IT department, we have backup plan and that is worth a lot to us.

Incentivized