Cohesity vs. Percona XtraBackup

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.

Xtrabackup has many excellent features that are supposed to be in any backup solution. It's well suited for all MySQL deployments but it's not appropriate for any other database. If you are using any MySQL flavor (MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server for MySQL), it's your only and perfect solution for backup and disaster recovery.

• 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.

• The ability to stream backups (using netcat or socat) to a target destination has many uses, for example, 1)We do not need to store a backup locally on the database server 2) We can stream backups into object storage using GCSFUSE.
• The hot-backup functionality is probably the most important function. We are able to take backups of our primary instances with minimal impact on the database instance.
• XtraBackup has many parameters that can be tuned, allowing us to increase performance or reduce by using the parallel thread parameter for example.
• Partial backups.
• The ease of use when doing restores. Simplified, fast and accurate.

• 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)

• Remote execution: Xtrabackup doesn't support remote backup. The backup process has to run locally and have to store data locally.
• LifeCycle management: Xtrabackup doesn't support backup lifecycle management. Users have to manage it themself.
• Stability for large databases.

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.

Takes a bit of getting used to when you first set it up.

Incentivized

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.

Great support, detailed online documentation, and examples in many scenarios. Bugs can be logged and are tracked. Great community support has been built-up due to Percona XtraBackup being a great product. Frequent releases ensure bug fixes are committed as soon as possible. Over and above this, the development team stays up to date with the latest releases of MySQL and ensures it is 100% reliable.

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

Percona XtraBackup saves us time and money. Besides the performance and reliability, the support and documentation are top-notch. It's not just about the cost savings, but about the functionality and the minimal impact that XtraBackup has on the database server during a backup window. Percona XtraBackup has been integrated into Percona XtraDB Cluster which makes adding nodes easy and fast.

• 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.

• It is free and the best backup tool that I know of. Using this for free means we save on having to purchase other backup software.
• As a DBA it is the standard backup tool that is used everywhere I have been.

Incentivized