afi.ai vs. Cohesity

Great for archiving of deleted SharePoint online sites and off-boarded Microsoft 365 users; unlimited number of on-demand backup runs that can be triggered in the application by system administrators.

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.

• Archiving of deleted Microsoft 365 users.
• Backup of SharePoint lists and OneNote books.
• Fast offline export of a mailbox and SharePoint items.

• 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.

• It would be handy to have SharePoint file versions comparisons in the UI
• Email alerts on settings changes would be good to have too.

• 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)

We will continue to renew the service for as long as we continue to use MS 365, unless Microsoft will release native Office 365 backup that provides all necessary features, including multi-geo admin roles, long-term affordable archiving storage tier, auto-conversion of email formats (MBOX, EML etc), point-in-time preview of previous file versions.

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 UI is very intuitive and requires almost zero training to use. Our end users were able to use it with after just reading a simple one-pager.

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.

We needed to contact them three times over the course of two years, and it was very good. Very fast response, and the people are super technical and to the point.

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

afi is next generation system, with our previous vendor we had to wait for a long time to access data, sometimes up to 24h.The reason for that was our scale according to the support team. ( 50TB +) With afi it takes a few seconds. The UI is super simple and easy to use, no training required for end-users to work with the system. afi support is super responsive and very helpful.

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

• It's hard to assess ROI here, however we were able to recover very important documents and full user accounts for executive team during the audit. It helped in a big way.
• Self-Service is a life saver for IT helpdesk team, saved a lot of human hours.

• 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.