Getting Your Data Backup Right: Cohesity vs. Rubrik

Your data is invaluable to your business. That’s why you need to feel confident that you have your critical data securely backed up. 

With the increasing complexity of data management and recovery, legacy systems cannot efficiently (or cost-effectively) keep up with your transforming business. You may need data backup and recovery systems that offer multi-tenant needs, unlimited scalability, AWS and VMware integrations and more.

When searching for new data center backup software, we often see customers exploring Cohesity and Rubrik reviews. Both are Top Rated solutions and can be seen side by side quickly on our Cohesity vs Rubrik comparison page. 

If you want a more in-depth look at the differences between the two, we take a deeper look at these powerful data backup and recovery solutions.

Using Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions

Data center backup software allows companies to provide business continuity and ensure that data will not be lost in case of emergency. 

Natural disasters, hackers and ransomware all present serious risks to businesses that need to keep their data safe. Data center backup systems provide an extra layer of insurance against the threat of data loss or holdup. 

Whereas legacy systems often rely on multiple point solutions that create data fragmentation, modern data backup solutions offer singular platforms that reduce data silos. Modern, cloud-native backup systems bring together backup, replication and recovery under one UI in a hardware agnostic form. 

In case of emergency, data can be recovered instantly. On top of that, backup data is now easily searchable, accessible and usable for analytics. 

Legacy systems required slow, forklift updates. With cloud-native backup systems, updates are online and much faster.

In addition to protection and improved efficiency, modern data backup solutions offer compliance automation. 

When it comes to scalability, there is no limit to your data backup needs with modern enterprise-level data center backup solutions. 

There are a number of data backup and recovery vendors. Here we focus in and share a rundown of Rubrik vs Cohesity.

Cohesity 

Cohesity is a data management software vendor that offers a variety of data backup software and appliances. 

DataProtect is a data protection and recovery solution that can handle all workloads on a single web-based platform. DataProtect uses Cohesity’s DataPlatform, a solution that consolidates and enables you to be productive with your data.

Features

DataProtect features ‘hyperconverged’ backup and recovery for all workloads, rapid recovery points and instant recovery, proxy and media servers and cloud gateways. DataProtect can be deployed anywhere and at scale. Policy-based automation and user-assigned policies allow businesses to meet SLA requirements.

This solution can also protect your critical business applications, databases, NAS, SaaS and public cloud environments.

In addition to data protection and management services, Cohesity offers high-density hyperconverged nodes. The C3000, C4000 and C6000 appliances can store large files and objects. As you scale, you can add more nodes and avoid forklift upgrades. 

What customers say about Cohesity

Customers have used DataProtect for backups of VMware environments, mailboxes, SMB, SQL data, NAS shares and more. Customer reviews consistently cite Cohesity as a simple and effective solution for data protection and secondary storage. The speed, scalability and nonintrusive updates are also plus, noted by many users. 

“Using Cohesity for data protection is amazing. They are the Uber of the data protection world. Setting up sources and targets is so simple. The backup procedures are crisp, and the results speak for themselves. 99%+ success rate since install.”

Verified User | Engineer in IT | Chemicals Company 

“We are using it to backup VMware environment, SQL and Exchange servers. We have two clusters that replicate to each other; this process is also very fast. GUI is simple and very responsive. Implementation took only a few hours and backups begin the same day it has been physically racked.”

Verified User | Team Lead in Information Technology |  Wholesale Company

Cohesity Highlights

• Varied options for recovering (cloning, instant volume mounts, etc)
• Packaged as all-in-one backup solution, out-of-the-box implementation
• Easy operation & UI
• Scalability as needed
• Multi Tenant Options: This option allows multiple customers to share a single platform and control their own backups. Service providers will have protected workloads for their customers with one hyperconverged platform.  
• Smooth & consistent backups

Pricing

Cohesity offers a TCO calculator for five years. The cost estimation is based on how many VMs you need to backup, how many physical TB you need to back up and cloud-archival options. This calculator shows the estimated cost of Cohesity vs legacy systems. 

Rubrik

Rubrik’s flagship product, Rubrik Cloud Data Management offers a single platform for users to manage their data at the edge, in the Cloud or on-premise. Rubrik supports virtual, physical, NoSQL and cloud application storage. 

Features

Rubrik also offers Rubrik Polaris and Rubrik Mosaic. Rubrik Polaris is a unified system of record designed to bring all your data available no matter where it is stored. Rubrik Mosaic is a data management platform designed specifically for NoSQL.

Rubrik does not offer appliances.

Rubrik Cloud Data Management is built as a stack of Infinity, Cerebro (data control plane) and Atlas. These three layers each scale and are independently resistant to failures. This solution is built with API-first architecture. 

Rubrik Cloud Data Management features backup, instant recovery, policy-based controls, search, analytics, reporting, security, compliance and copy data management in one single solution. This solution can be used across data center and multiple clouds.

Rubrik enables you to meet SLAs across the data lifecycle with automation across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

What customers say about Rubrik

Customers say that Rubrik is a user-friendly solution that makes data backup simple and reliable. They say that this vendor has great support and is well suited for almost any industry.

“Rubrik is a very good enterprise data protection platform. It provides both the software and storage needed to perform backups and recovery across our company. It takes away the need for separate master-slave servers needed in legacy backup solutions like TSM, Netbackups, etc.”

Mark McCully | Manager, Infrastructure | Vizient, Inc. 

“The Rubrik appliances use Erasure Encoding for redundancy, and it also maintains itself, self heals, and optimises. Rubrik encrypts data at rest, in-flight and in archive. The Rubik interface does not require any fancy software installed or Java, it uses a standard browser that supports HTML. Rubrik fully supports APIs, there is a repository available for Rubrik customers to share their code.”

Darryl Wilson | Senior System Analyst | Kent Squash

Rubrik Highlights

• Easy administration, installation and configuration 
• Support for multiple platforms/OS
• Particularly great for VMware & AWS
• Accurate searching
• Multi-tenant options
• Good support

Pricing

Enterprise and SMB pricing for data backup solutions with Rubrik is available only by request. Get in touch with Rubrik directly for questions about pricing.

Get the Most Out of Your Data Center Backup 

You know your business best and what you need out of a data center backup solution. When you start to reach out to potential vendors, begin with your most important questions. The responses to questions surrounding implementation, support, security and hard numbers for quotes will guide you in your decision.

Before speaking with sales reps, consider your options. Learn about the main players in data backup and recovery by reading customer reviews and firsthand accounts first. Fellow IT leaders have a lot of wisdom to offer from their experiences with vendors.  

Read real and trustworthy reviews about data center backup solutions and other business applications on TrustRadius.