Cohesity checks all the boxes when it comes to backups to an on-prem appliance as well as offloading to the cloud as an offsite backup. If you are after some meaningful analytics around backups for reporting when some additional work will be needed as the built-in reporting does not seem too intuitive or useful for those who want more than just an understanding of whether the backup succeeded or failed - we need to understand which, files, directories, partitions or VMs and the cause.
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
Ease of use - the platform is simple to manage and does not require a lot of daily care and feeding by my administrators
Reliable - the platform is able to protect my workloads reliably without a lot of backup failures
Great support - the Cohesity team has been a partner to us throughout our use of the solution, taking our feedback and implementing it as improvements to the platform.
Innovative - the Cohesity team is consistently working to improve the product and add new capabilities.
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.
They are always friendly, knowledgeable and helpful. The support is easy to reach and the reaction times are on point. Several times I had called with my system being down and the person who answered the call would require a support rep call me back. Some of these call backs would be 1-2 hours later. When needed, the support will scale up to deliver the right support for the right cases. When asking for detailed information about a problem they always help you to understand the problem and the underlying causes better.
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.
IBM is good but it´s old and really big and not easy to manage. And the License fees and so are worth it. Veeam I have a look on and 4 years ago I selected Cohesity because it was easier to manage, dedup was better and it is one hyperconverged infrastructure. Rubrik is or was similar to Cohesity. But they are not so good in Data management on the boxes
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.
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.
