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Cohesity Competitors in 2023

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Updated 6th March 2023, Rob Morrison

Cohesity is widely known as a data storage company capable of working with enterprises of various sizes. It was founded in 2013 and the headquarters are in San Jose, California. Despite the fact that it’s a relatively new player on the market – it has already become established as one of the leading data storage solutions.

The company’s main solution is a platform designed for data management that includes backups, analytics, and more. Cohesity has also managed to largely eliminate IT silos by connecting parts of the system across both public and private clouds.

Cohesity as a service offers a lot of complementary products that can be split in four groups – Software, App Ecosystem, Distributed File System and Hyperconverged Platforms.

The essential Software part includes products like DataPlatform, DataProtect, Helios, and more.

Cohesity DataPlatform, as the name suggests, is a platform for most of Cohesity’s products and solutions, the main target of it is data and app consolidation, including files/objects, backups, analytics, and more – all of that on a software-defined platform based on their unique filesystem SpanFS. Since Data Platform is a software solution, it is capable of working efficiently on different platforms, including Dell, Cisco, HPE, or even Cohesity’s own hyperconverged platforms and the public cloud.

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Cohesity Features

DataPlatform’s main strengths are:

Architecture flexibility;
Management simplicity;
Operation efficiency.

The main use cases are data storage in general, backup and recovery operations, security and compliance, analytics, disaster recovery, and more.

DataProtect is a must-have comprehensive addition to DataPlatform, bringing in sophisticated protection and management based on policies for different workloads, such as databases, NAS, virtual and physical machines, cloud environments, etc. As any data protection solution, DataProtect strives to be fast, simple and flexible. It is capable of protecting workloads and bringing in a lot of different recovery levels, like granular file recovery, instant VM restoration, volume recovery, instant mass restore, and so on.

Helios, on the other hand, is all about monitoring your entire system’s backups, analytics, dev/test data and other. There’s also an extended all-in-one dashboard, customizable global reporting feature, GDPR and analogues compliance, system-wide policy management and cluster upgrade capabilities.

‘App Ecosystem’ is another important part of Cohesity’s products, allowing clients to run both Cohesity’s inside applications as well as third-party ones using their DataPlatform as a basis.

There’s an App Marketplace, as well, allowing you to choose from a variety of already existing business-critical applications using categories like data analytics, security, cyber exposure, compliance, and so on. Cohesity also offers a user-friendly software development kit and a bunch of API documentation, in case a client couldn’t find necessary apps in the market and wants to create one by themselves.

Distributed File System (or SpanFS) is Cohesity’s own invention based on the existing Ext4 system type. It is designed specifically to bring enterprise and cloud together, and there’s a lot of features included, like built-in deduplication, chunk management system, metadata separate storage for faster operations, and more.

An important part of Cohesity’s product catalog is their hyperconverged platforms, designed for storage consolidation and intensive workloads (C4000 and C3000 series, respectively). Both of those models are capable of supporting all of the modern hardware, including up to 2 Intel Xeon processors, up to 128Gb of RAM capacity, as well as terabytes of flash and HDD storage capacity. Cohesity’s platforms are relevant to users looking for a modern platform for their business needs.

However, that’s not the complete extent of Cohesity products’ capabilities – there’s also a number of solutions and use cases that can be performed with DataPlatform, Helios and other products above, including:

Backup and recovery
- Database: Oracle, SQL, SAP HANA;
- VM: Hyper-V, Kubernetes, VMware, AHV;
- Cloud: Google Cloud, AWS, Azure;
Cloud backup;
CDP (Continuous data protection);
Disaster recovery;
Long-term retention;
Test and development processes;
Anti-ransomware systems;
Compliance control, and more.

The backup solution market is quite a competitive one, and there are alternatives to Cohesity capable of providing similar or identical functions. Different users have a wide range of different needs, however there are some key features that some Cohesity competitors successfully take to the same market, such as:

Extensive reporting systems;
User-friendly UI/UX;
Capability to perform file-level restores from Windows servers;
Simple setup for Oracle databases;
Easy update process, and so on.

Cohesity Competitors

With its focus on flexibility and efficiency, it is fairly easy to find many different alternatives to Cohesity. Acronis Cyber Backup can match its versatility in terms of different features and the overall speed of operation, while Commvault is capable of providing the same level of support to different storage and/or VM types (snapshots, files, applications, SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.). Veeam may also be an alternative, offering different policies and actions for disaster recovery purposes while also being able to perform both massive and granular backup/recovery operations.

Bacula Enterprise can also be considered one of the key Cohesity competitors regarding backup and restore products. There are a high number of similarities between them, including an especially broad feature range, specific backup and recovery performance capabilities, true scaling capabilities, and more. However, there are also some benefits that often give Bacula an edge in the market, such as extensive Linux support, capability to work with a greater range of database types, Bacula’s own Progressive Virtual Full backup type, extensive bare metal backup and recovery capabilities, support for a wider range of virtual machines including Proxmox, and others. Bacula is also a market leader in supporting the roll-out of containers in operational environments – for example, being the only vendor in the world to be able to back up and recover Kubernetes Clusters, including its persistent data.

All in all, Bacula is a very strong alternative to Cohesity if you’re looking for a more customizable and agile solution, with advantages for Linux-savvy users and additional capabilities built in. For example, rapid recovery of high transaction, large MySQL databases allow organizations using Bacula to recover data much more quickly, for mission-critical business environments. Another example would be Bacula’s dedicated cloud management tools that allow fine grained control over data backed up to the cloud, including unique capabilities such as single file recovery.

Perhaps one of the most significant differences between Bacula and most other backup solutions is the advanced levels of security that Bacula offers. Used by many defense and military organizations around the globe, Bacula offers a level of protection that goes far deeper than many other providers in this space. The advantage is multiplied by its ability to fit all technologies in a typical IT environment, enabling users to protect their entire IT estate from a single pane of glass.

About the author

Rob Morrison is the marketing director at Bacula Systems. He started his IT marketing career with Silicon Graphics in Switzerland, performing strongly in various marketing management roles for almost 10 years. In the next 10 years Rob also held various marketing management positions in JBoss, Red Hat and Pentaho ensuring market share growth for these well-known companies. He is a graduate of Plymouth University and holds an Honours Digital Media and Communications degree, and completed an Overseas Studies Program.