Cohesity vs. vSphere Data Protection Advanced (discontinued)

Cohesity is very well suited to protecting virtualised workloads and is a significant improvement over IBM Spectrum Protect which we’ve replaced by Cohesity. We also protect a Netapp workload and whilst the on-prem side works really well careful planning of protection jobs is needed if you’ll be archiving these to Cloud.

VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced is well suited for a thin client environment, and/or an environment that runs multiple virtual servers. It is also well suited for an environment with disaster recover requirements that require backups of everything. vSphere is very expensive, so it would probably not be a very good choice for a startup that could use a cheaper alternative in the beginning, or a physical machine environment.

Incentivized

• The simplicity of the solution and the support behind implementation, training, and continued support.
• The implementation and training are all done through the sales engineer, which provides for a seamless and great experience when it comes to starting with a new vendor.
• How fast the solution works. When it comes to implementation (which is done in an hour or so) to backups, to actual recoveries, everything is just quick.

• Maintains backups of all virtual systems for disaster recovery compliance.
• Supports plugins for backups of Microsoft systems.
• As with most VMware products vSphere is incredibly easy to use.

Incentivized

• 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)

• Reports are too complex, could be made clearer.
• The interface could be simplified.
• Backups of physical servers take a very long time.

Incentivized

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.

The Cohesity platform with its user interface is easy to implement, rack space-saving, and easy to use on a daily business basis. Backup jobs and policies are easy to define, multiple machines and objects can be grouped for the same tasks. In general, Cohesity makes backup admins' lives much easier.

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.

content was good and hands on lab to get the live feel of the application

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

CloudBacko is the only similar product that I have used, and while it worked by backing up my virtual machines to Google Drive, VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced not only backs up the virtual machines, buton databases, physical servers and more, and backs them up to a centralized location, and has 24/7 live support.

Incentivized

• Cost savings from having to purchase and manage physical tapes, as well as the man-hours to swap them in and out and store them off site.
• Extremely fast recovery times, can bring up a restored VM back in our environment in under a minute. Get back up and running much quicker.
• Simplifies our disaster recovery strategy.
• Initial cost can be pricey depending on your storage needs.

• Virtual machines and servers are backed up and secure
• DR compliance is met
• Multiple platforms backed up to a central location

Incentivized