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Cohesity is a polished backup solution which keeps improving and expanding capabilities.
December 05, 2019

Cohesity is a polished backup solution which keeps improving and expanding capabilities.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cohesity

We are using Cohesity as our primary backup solution as well as leveraging the native cloud capabilities for DR purposes. We have a small cluster with room for a fourth node to grow in the future. Thus far it has really sped up our backup and restore times, as well as enabled us to increase our backup frequency. We did not need to increase our retention, although we more than likely could given the great dedupe and compression we are seeing with the solution. It mainly addressed the issue of costly collocation fees for offsite backup. Replacing our old solution with Cohesity and cloud blob storage has been a monetary benefit.
  • Instant spin up of test and dev machines is pretty amazing. Our last solution claimed to do this but the backing storage was much too slow t be of use.
  • Uploads to the cloud are simple to set up and you can leverage low cost blob storage.
  • The cluster nature of the solution makes upgrades seamless with zero downtime.
  • The entire cluster fits in 2U of space -- we are saving 8U in our main datacenter and all 6U we previously had offsite.
  • Reporting is still a little rough around the edges. The current release is 6.1; the next release of 6.3 is supposed to address this.
  • Software update schedules seem to slip. I suppose this is better than releasing buggy code, though.
  • I'd like better visibility as to which workloads were contributing what to storage space, especially cloud storage space which can be assessed a specific cost.
  • The runbook functionality that is coming will need to be very capable in order for us to adopt it. No cost tie in to Helios are critical for this to work as sales has outlined it.
  • We were able to close our expensive colo and replace it with Cohesity and blob cloud storage. This was a big positive ROI.
  • The increase in backup frequency has benefited our end users in that we can now recover files we could not before.
  • Live restore of a 3TB VM can be done in minutes now instead of a day with our old solution.
We replaced Veeam and Exagrid with Cohesity. We liked Veeam well enough, but the Exagrid backing storage was a big negative for us. The costs were very high, and we saw no innovation as far as using flash instead of committing half of the storage to fully hydrated data. We also looked at Rubrik, which is a good product, but we felt that Cohesity could do more and at a lower price point. Our other option was to use Veeam with some version of FreeNAS or Windows S2D, but these were not as polished or capable as the Cohesity ecosystem. In any case, I would urge anyone still on the Exagrid upgrade treadmill to pull the bandaid off now.
On the East coast I am used to getting support from the other side of the globe when I arrive in the morning, which is always a bit tough. With Cohesity, I speak to someone in Ireland who knows the product well and whose accent is not a hindrance to communication. At midday support shifts to North Carolina, where the agents are equally knowledgeable. I've always been able to rely on them for solutions to issues, even if it is a small patch until the next release comes out.

Do you think Cohesity Helios delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cohesity Helios's feature set?

Yes

Did Cohesity Helios live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cohesity Helios go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cohesity Helios again?

Yes

Cohesity is best suited for a highly virtualized environment, although they do have agents for bare metal. But who runs non-virtualized workloads these days anyhow? Not any organization which would invest in best class backup, anyhow.

We find that the search features make file-level restores so much easier -- now a partial filename is all we need to get going, and we can see a file's change history by date so we no longer have to hunt for the last changed version. You will want 10GB network capability for this solution to really shine -- each node has dual SFP+ connections for data.

Cohesity Helios Feature Ratings

Data Center Backup
9.6
Universal recovery
9
Instant recovery
10
Recovery verification
10
Business application protection
9
Multiple backup destinations
10
Incremental backup identification
10
Backup to the cloud
9
Deduplication and file compression
10
Snapshots
10
Flexible deployment
8
Management dashboard
9
Platform support
10
Retention options
10
Encryption
10