Cisco Intersight vs. Cohesity

Cisco Intersight is very well suited for doing firmware upgrades across all of your cisco hardware. So far we have had no problems pushing out new firmware. It's also well suited for hardware management. Cisco TAC has the ability to pull logs for the IMC for themselves, which saves you from having to pull the logs yourself and then uploading them to the case. It may or may not be appropriate for upgrading operating systems. I have not been able to test it.

Incentivized

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.

• Standardising the environment by enforcing use of updating templates.
• Show the difference on a profile between what has changed and what setting was last deployed.
• Perform bulk deploy operation on profiles (like server profiles).
• Policies underpin all settings (e.g. no more defining individual VLANs before being able to use them, or having to clean them up manually when they are no longer in use. You deploy a Domain VLAN policy that states which VLANs are configured on a domain (either standalone) or a domain profile template (if domains profiles are bound to an updating domain profile template).

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.

• It is difficult to spot an added or removed VLAN in an Ethernet Network Group Policy or VLAN Policy. The comparison widget will show you that something has changed, but if you have 100s of VLANs, the difference does not stand out. Workaround: we copy the data out and compare it in a text editor.
• If you are transitioning from UMM to IMM, you lose some functionality like vNIC redundancy pairs.
• It is not easy to map the UMM version 4.x server firmware version to the equivalent IMM version 5.x firmware version.
• It is not possible to configure out-of-band management IP addresses on a per-domain basis. You have to configure these ranges via an IMC Access policy (which contains the IP address range/pool) on the server profile. This leads to "server profile template sprawl" where we have to maintain multiple server profile templates since our domains sit on different ranges, even though the servers are for the most part configured identically.
• UCS domains in IMM only support one Ethernet Network Group Policy (VLAN group) per vNIC template.

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)

Been using Cisco Software as a service (SaaS) platform in a production environment for a large medical and health professionals that has critical healthcare and patients care dependency.

Support team is very helpful getting system updated as needed, and vendor support is fantastic. Also get a dedicated Cisco networking engine to review and advise system health and recommendations.

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.

Usability of Cisco Intersight is highly dependent on the licensing purchased. The default (free) license level provides a lot of value for the minimal amount of effort to implement. The paid license levels provide additional features (detailed inventory, configuration management and deployment, etc.)

Incentivized

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.

If you have bigger problems with the on-prem version, the support team is sometimes a bit slow in their reactions and you have to keep going, to get your help. But finally, all problems, that we have addressed, have been resolved to my full appreciation!

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.

You really need a lab to get hands on but it was useful

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Very smooth process and we did it for 2 data centers

Incentivized

Our organisation has some experience with Dell OME (the centralised management plane for Dell PowerEdge server, equivalent to Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and UCS Manager, but not enough to contrast the two or say why one is better than the other.

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

• The negative thing is that we prefer to use the UCS Manager in our company because this bare metal is integrated into the FI and no extra appliance is required. SaaS is generally not viewed favorably in Germany.
• Telling the user that they have to buy Intersight licenses even if they use UCS Manager annoys our customers.

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.