Rubrik, Cohesity, Veeam, curious if anyone has any experience with them? PoC experience to share, other thoughts?

StorageBackup & Disaster Recovery
30.1k views4 Upvotes15 Comments
CTO in Software, 11 - 50 employees
Veeam is more focused on business continuity than anything else, so depending on your use-case, may not be a good fit for application and data management.On Rubrik vs. Cohesity, the background of the founders and how the companies started is indicative of the products they've built. While they may seem to have feature parity on surface, Cohesity was built all in-house / ground-up. The features and experience are seamless. Rubrik focused on a particular use-case to start and then acquired Datos.io, but in my experience its hard to integrate another company/product and have a seamless solution. Cohesity’s founder (Mohit) was a lead on the Google File System and founded Nutanix. With that experience, Cohesity's product is architected in a way that scales 'infinitely' and for me, they win on that fundamental difference.Rubrik also has a single point of failure with their nodes, whereas Cohesity doesn’t have that problem. Additionally if you have to do a restore in Rubrik, its painful and quite manual and again Cohesity manages a lot of this complexity for you.Both products have a 'global search' if you do need to do a more granular restore. However in Rubrik, to locate a particular file, you need to know which VM to look in. Cohesity does a truly seamless global search.Cohesity also has better support for immutability of backups. You can mark a backup as ‘can’t touch’. If you are one of the organizations hit by the recent waves of ransomware attacks, with Cohesity you can restore seamlessly. Rubrik’s backups are not so ‘fully immutable’ and it's also more complex within their interface.Lastly Cohesity is less on cost overall since there is more automation in place and therefore less pro services and time is required to maintain the solution.
2 3 Replies
VP of Global IT and Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, 501 - 1,000 employees

Thanks, we are getting ready to run a Poc for Cohesity and Rubrik. Can you expand a bit on what the Rubrik point of failure is,

CTO in Software, 11 - 50 employees

Here are some additional details around the SPOF

If a node fails or is taken down for maintenance, any backup running on that node fails and has to be restarted. This could mean missed SLAs which may be unacceptable for most customers especially since everyone has 24x7x365 operations.

The exception is Oracle RMAN backups which are sent to the node that has a floating IP address. Since the floating IP address can fail over to another node, Oracle RMAN backups don't fail on node failure.

The reason behind this is that a Rubrik cluster has only one floating IP which lives only on one node. This floating IP is used for what they call managed volumes. These managed volumes are used only for instant VM recoveries and Oracle RMAN backups.

1
CTO in Software, 11 - 50 employees

https://www.cohesity.com/blog/cohesity-pegasus-6-1-simplifies-management-secondary-data

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VP Hosting and Infrastructure Services in Software, 201 - 500 employees
We started using Veeam Backup and Replication when we moved from VMware to Hyper-V few years ago at a client side. Since Hyper-V was new at that time (Hyper-V 2008 R2) and there were not many good backup solutions available. We tested a few well known products and they all had some issues. Some of them very complex to configure and manage, and some did not work with Hyper-V.We then came across Veeam Backup and Replication. We did a trial of their solution and to our surprise it worked a lot better then other solutions. One thing that we liked most was that their interface is simple and easier to understand and manage. There were a few issues with Veeam also but their support was great and we worked directly with their support and developers to resolve those issues. They even extended our trial period to several months until they resolve those issues. In the end their product worked great for us. Their Deduplication feature saved on disk space and Hardware Snapshots (for storage) increased backup performance. Since then Veeam has released several versions and improved their product a lot and it is still working great for us.
1 2 Replies
VP of Global IT and Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, 501 - 1,000 employees

Thanks Adnan, i appreciate the feedback.

We wanted to remove all the unnecessary layers of complexity (backup software, backup servers, backup proxies, catalog DB, backup storage / archive, etc.) and replace it with a hyper converged appliance. Beyond simply the software as a solution, we were interested in the appliance aspects of the overall global solution.

We also wanted condense, simplify the backup software and globally dedupe storage into a single, scale-out fabric, being able to easily grow as you go without limits, just like other hyper converged platforms such as Nutanix or Simplicity.

Having the ability to archive out to the platform of our choice was important, whether that's on-site / off-site object store, or even the public cloud such as Amazon - AWS, Microsoft - Azure or Google - GCP.

There are number of new updates to the Veeam backup and replication product, unfortunately they won't be GA until late this year or early 2019 and i'm not interested in seeing beta features for a PoC. We also had some concerns with the lack of global deduplication, its per job schedule was my understanding.

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VP Hosting and Infrastructure Services in Software, 201 - 500 employees

Hi Michael, understood your point. We don't have experience with an all-in-one solution. Yes Veeam Dedupe is per job basis, we used Dell DR4100 deduplication appliances for storing the backups. Both Veeam and Dell DR-4100s are very simple to setup, minimal management and work great.

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Director Of Technology in Manufacturing, 51 - 200 employees
We have used Veeam for the last 2 years. It works great for both VMware and Hyper-V servers. We are creating snap shots from 15 minutes to 8 hour increments. This tool works very well for restoring single files to entire VM's. We also used Storagecraft shadow protect in the past, but had frequent issues with performance.
1
VP of Global IT and Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, 501 - 1,000 employees
We are down to Rubrik and Cohesity.
VP of Global IT and Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, 501 - 1,000 employees
#Rubrik it is
1
CTO in Software, 11 - 50 employees
Would be curious in hearing the key criteria that factored in the decision
VP of Global IT and Cybersecurity in Manufacturing, 501 - 1,000 employees
Rubrik was the solution to replace our legacy solution with a converged software platform that grows with the business. The simplified architecture of Rubrik will achieve 80% data center foot print reduction. The Rubrik solution allows us to get up and running on the new platform within days not weeks. This allows us to eliminate annual maintenance agreements which are scheduled for renewal in Q1/Q3 2019. We will also achieve approximately savings over three years from software convergence.Our data-centers are nearly 100% virtualized, Rubrik allows for a near-zero recovery time objective by mounting production servers directly onto Rubrik without any data rehydration. Rubrik will reduce our recovery point objective from hours to minutes. Both are extremely beneficial when recovering from a disaster, failure or ransomware event. I also worked on a pretty detailed ROI, TCO going out over 3-6 years to show the reoccurring Capex of our legacy solution.
VP Infrastructure and Support Services in Finance (non-banking), 10,001+ employees
We are using Veeam and extremely happy about it. It simplified the recovery time of the applications on our ships and it is so simple that our low level techs can use it without extra headaches on training. We don’t use shoreside as we have real time replication in 3 different sites.
1
CIO/Project Management Office in Software, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
Veeam here as well and happy about it also. Simple interface, straightforward planning and recovery options takes the effort off of the admin and allows for solid backup and disaster planning.
2
CIO and Startup Advisor in Software, 10,001+ employees
I LOVE Rubrik and their roadmap is solid. After lots of vendor evaluations, they were definitely most aligned with our needs since we had a combination of on prem and cloud, and there was so much cost savings with AWS due to the policies that would move EBS to S3, among other features. They were also the only ones that had SaaS solution backups on their roadmap.. do you mind sharing more about your environment and what you are looking to achieve?
2

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