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 Zerto is well suited for disaster recovery and virtual machine replication between multiple data centers. DR testing for audit or regulations is much easier with Zerto, great reporting, dashboard etc. It is not well suited for physical server replication for disaster recovery or as a primary backup solution.
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 Anyone with a large disk (VMDK) knows the issues of VMware snapshots. Most backup software is a "point in time backup" that uses snapshots. While the backup can be run multiple times per day the stress of the snapshot on the host and storage is eliminated by the continuous protection of Zerto log replication. A client had a the disks on a VM go missing for some reason. We had them "flip the switch" for a real fail over and press the fail over button. The VM on our DR site started to come alive as the VM at the customer site was brought down. When the DR VM was fully up, automatic reverse replication started. The DR machine was available in a few minutes (to take into account different host hardware) for access. One the vm at both sites were in sync, we had the customer again repeat the fail over process and the DR site VM was turned off and the Production site VM was brought back on line. This was a 200 GB VM and the whole process was finished in about 3 hours. Zerto also allows for "Test" fail overs that can be configured on many different functions, such as host, datastore, network and IP usage. Configuring the IPs is crucial to avoid inadvertent site cross contamination of the same VM. Zerto can also retrieve files from any VM disk on the DR site without starting a VM. Very handy for retrieving files or directories. Since Zerto is running continuous log replication, changes on the production VM are nearly instantaneously copied to the DR site. As with any data process, having sufficient bandwidth for "churn" peaks minimizes the delay in updating the DR site. 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 Moving a VM from one protection group to another could be simplified. I would like to see an executive-style report of recovery and testing for upper management. The ability to deploy Zerto as a virtual appliance, without the need for a windows server. 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 We really like the easy setup of this replication solution, as well as the ease of management. Not to mention, our internal IT Economist determined that the Zerto solution would provide the best ROI out of the competing solutions we analyzed. So far, his calculations have been spot on, and we have saved substantially
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 Usability was the primary reason we purchased the software in the first place. We had compared it to several other software products in the same area, and it was by far the easiest to set up and use. Long-term maintenance proved to be similar, with updates driven by updates to VMware and vSphere, rather than the product itself.
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 Overall support is very good. We sometimes get pushback when asking Level 1 support to escalate to Level 2. This causes undue frustrations when you need a more knowledgeable support person to get involved. We've had to escalate to account reps a few times for this scenario. Zerto is very responsive and normally handles our requests very quickly.
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure the end goal is in mind before implementing. That way results meet expectations.
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 We started out using Backup Exec which was in service until we virtualized our environment where it didn't perform as well at the time. Then we switched to Veeam which worked well, but then as we started needing to do migrations and off-site DR, we found ourselves relying on Zerto more often.
Greg Goss SQL Database and Business Intelligence Manager
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model For my organization, the pricing model was an upfront investment for the Zerto licenses. My organization prefers to pay upfront and not deal with month-to-month or year-to-year pricing models that most companies are moving to. But for some, the investment may be more than they can afford, and would prefer the year-to-year pricing model.
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 I mean, it was 6 years ago, but we were up and going with all applications synchronizing in short order. The longest tasks was getting the 30 TB of application data synchronized between the datacenters.
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 Zerto is like having the best possible insurance ... it just works, and often provides the backups taken overnight that are key in recovering data/work between overnight backups. Zerto easily enabled the move of primary datacenters by allowing easy failover to a secondary site, and failback to the primary site. Read full review ScreenShots