Cohesity vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

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.

SRM is a must-have tool if your business requires you to failover your VMs to a disaster recovery site and provide valid testing and real-time numbers. Our VP office is always amazed at how easily we are able to satisfy our annual testing and show actual results with time stamps and the sequence of each VM that is up and running. SRM may not be needed in a very small business that does not have the capacity nor the need to have their infrastructure off site in a form of a disaster recovery site.

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.

• Easy to build a recovery plan
• Easy to test recovery plans
• Works with storage based replication or non storage based replication

• 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)

• I am not very pleased with the overall licensing cost. It's pretty expensive. Especially if you have a small number of VMs, you are paying a lot.
• We had a little struggle getting our support tickets resolved by VMWare support.

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.

- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster

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.

VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.

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.

Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.

Incentivized

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

Veeam Backup & Replication is slower than VMWare SRM and doesn't suits our RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

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.

• The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster.
• We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM.

Incentivized