Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review I recommend Enterprise Vault, especially over native Exchange archiving when: 1. You have, or may need litigation holds and searches 2. There is a need to archive and set defined retention periods for Journaling 3. You have lots of duplicate large emails that you want to get deduplication of 4. You need/ want to be able to search attachment in addition to emails 5. You want or need Litigation searches or archive retention to be handled by a team separate from your Email team
Read full review Pros 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). Read full review EV FSA had 2 stubbing options. We ended up using the IE shortcut as the stub replacement on the file system. In the DFS environment using DFSR the IE shortcuts allowed us to quickly and easily archive the data while allowing users to still access their data via the web or stub format. We were also able to exclude certain folders from archiving like the dfsrprivate folder. The newer versions of EV 11 and up have a better user interface to access this content from the web. EV SharePoint implementation was pretty simple for us. Document Library archiving was pretty seamless. Archiving the different versions in sharepoint also helped further reduce total cost of storage. EV Exchange was a good addition to our archiving portfolio. In our case we did not use the stubbing mechanism. Instead, we used the vault cache methodology. We had the option to pull down the full archive versus just the header information. The concern at the time was how quickly we could update the vault cache on the client. We ended up scaling out our EV environment to ensure the push of data could get to all our clients since we were in the middle of a notes to exchange migration. Overall I was impressed with Vault Cache and its capabilities. I also liked the ability to manage the Vault Cache and perform resets where necessary from the web browser interface. We had EV FSA, SharePoint and Exchange as one single environment so we benefited from overall single instances of a file. Our backend systems were Netapp which we enabled deduplication for further improve storage savings. EV had a good SQL Reporting mechanism for Archiving and plenty of good canned reports. Speed of archiving data was pretty fast. Read full review Cons 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) Read full review The search function in the vault does not work very well. Cost. If not planned diligently, it might add to the overall cost. Not easy get a expert to address the issue fast. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Symantec Enterprise is one of the best in the industry. We have already deployed their product to thousands of devices in the company and it would be a huge project to go through and change to an alternative product. We have also had much luck in dealing with their customer support. They have been very pleasant to deal with and their technical support has been quite knowledgeable in fixing our issues. This leaves us with very little reason to switch to a new product. We would have to see a significant amount of cost savings to switch to an alternative that offers all the same features and modules.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review I haven't research any other software against Enterprise Vault. Office 365 automatically has archiving capabilities that we use in the cloud. In comparison to Office 365, I'd say Office 365 comes out on top. For one thing, we essentially don't have to manage it. It also seems to preform better. However, Enterprise Vault does very well if you have an on-premise email solution.
Read full review Professional Services 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Helps on the data management life-cycle, moving unused data to cheaper storage and/or deleting it after some time, if required. Also helps reducing the amount of data to be backed up on the active array. Read full review ScreenShots