Cohesity DataProtect is a worthy product and easy to evaluate
Updated March 14, 2023

Cohesity DataProtect is a worthy product and easy to evaluate

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

Overall Satisfaction with Cohesity DataProtect

The
trial period was great; we were able to leverage the virtual edition to
fully test features before bringing the actual hardware onsite for a
POC. The solution has worked well and has outclassed our previous setup
in both ease of use as well as efficiency and speed. One year in and we continue to be impressed by Cohesity. New
features have been released and we have had great success with restores. We are now closing in on the end of our second full year
utilizing our Cohesity cluster and it is performing as well as ever. I
would recommend firing up a virtual instance of the cluster so that you
can easily test out the complete functionality of the Cohesity
ecosystem. They are adding applications that can be run directly on the
cluster against your backups so that your production workloads are not
negatively impacted. The product continues to perform beyond our initial
expectations. User feedback is taken very seriously and I have
personally seen improvements implemented that I specifically requested.
The entire platform is being used to host other applications which can
work with your backups, as well as a new software/cloud-only option
which would be nice if you no longer want to host your own hardware. After more than 2 years I have to say the data deduplication
and compression have really continued to shine. We have not needed to add
additional capacity, something that was an annual occurrence with our
old backup system.

Pros

  • Reliable backups
  • Live restores
  • Backups to cloud providers
  • Fast searching of backups

Cons

  • More visibility into cloud data allocations would be good
  • Reporting was a bit lacking at first but they have steadily improved this area
  • Cost is a bit high, but lower than competitors
  • Backup reliability
  • Restore reliability
  • Speed of backup and restores
  • We were able to close a colo and save money
  • We are able to better leverage clones for testing
  • Speed of recovering an entire VM is light years better than our old solution
Cohesity won out against all others based on speed, capacity, features, and cost. Being able to demo the unit with a VM was extremely helpful -- we were able to get real-world compression and dedupe values without on-prem hardware during our POC. We appreciated the ease of sending backup copies to the cloud for disaster protection as well. The service and support have also been top-notch.

Do you think Cohesity delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cohesity's feature set?

Yes

Did Cohesity live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cohesity go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cohesity again?

Yes

In a highly virtualized environment, this solution really shines. I would think if you are still using bare metal servers it may not be the best fit for you, but there can't be many of those types of setups left. In our case, we back up 100 VMs and then send copies to a blob cloud storage provider for disaster recovery purposes. Cloud can also be used as an archive tier; we have not yet had to do this, as we have plenty of space on our cluster still. The dedupe and compression work really well.

Using Cohesity DataProtect

5 - The users are IT Systems administrators supporting all departments across the business. We are able to use the roles based administration to allow help desk admins to perform various tasks as well, while leaving backup profiles accessible to system administrators only. We are able to customize our backup frequency and retention to best support each different department and their data protection needs.
The DataProtect interface is very straightforward and easy to learn. With minimal instruction help desk admins are able to perform rudimentary file restore tasks, which frees system administrator time for project work. Because Cohesity supports role based administration we can be sure that each administrator can only access what they have been trained for. The file recovery search also quickens restore requests, as the search is as simple as a google search across all backups.
  • File and folder restore
  • Virtual machine development/testing
  • Disaster recovery from cloud stored backups
  • Spinning up a development server clone is nearly instant and has enabled us to test more easily.
  • Our previous backup solution did not allow help desk staff to run restores.
  • We are able to run some jobs much more frequently than our old solution, enabling us to have much better recovery objectives.
  • We look forward to leveraging applications on our Cohesity cluster to monitor our backups
  • Should we need to in the future we can expand our cluster by adding another node.
  • We have also expanded our usage for file storage directly on the DataProtect cluster itself, which also allows for backup to the cloud.
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.

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