Cohesity is a leader in AI-powered data security and management. Cohesity protects the world’s most critical data workloads across on-prem, cloud-native, and SaaS with backup and recovery, threat intelligence, cyber vaulting, files and objects, and recovery orchestration.
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VMware SRM
Score 9.0 out of 10
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VMware's Site Recovery Manager (VMware SRM) is a disaster recovery option, used to automate orchestration of failover and failback to minimize downtime and improve availability with VMware Site Recovery Manager.
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.
It's quite well suited for a medium to large size VMWare virtualization infrastructure where your production infrastructure can be failed over to a disaster recovery site. There are other cheaper options for a smaller budget business. Also, for a non mission critical virtual infrastructure, you can simply use VM backups such as Veeam backups for restoring failed VMs
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)
It’s unfortunate, but more and more, the quality of VMware’s products and the technical support teams behind them has degraded significantly. We have opened several support requests within the last few months and ended up resolving a large majority ourselves due to the poor performance of their remote teams.
VMware is suffering from the same illness that’s affecting multiple U.S. technology firms, in that their focus has shifted completely away from their customers and moved to pleasing investors. In doing so, clients suffer because they do not get properly tested products and the support teams behind them are very weak and overwhelmed.
We worked close to a month trying to get SRM V6.5 to work. We have worked with many previous versions of SRM in the past while using HP EVAs, NetApps and Hitachi arrays, and we can honestly say that we are greatly disappointed with this release and the company.
We escalated right up to engineering, but their response times were brutally slow; the technicians were juniors at best.
As a technology leader, the last thing you want during a DR is to be dealing with a company that just can't deliver. SRM is not cheap, and you would expect much better products and support from VMware.
If you are comparing products, try other companies like Veeam... We ended up using them instead, the setup and execution was easy and seamless, and they answered all our questions quickly and efficiently. They actually do care about their clients.
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.
Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.
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.
Entertained Veeam, however with SRM's tight integration and "brand" it was an easy decision. The cost for a 25 server license also weighed in the decision for using a VMware product. Plus I am a VMware fan and feel this option to go with SRM will transcend jobs.
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.
The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster.
We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM.
