Cohesity vs Rubrik: The Drive to Modernize, Manage and Protect Data

Cohesity

Cohesity appeals to mid-large enterprises to solve complexity problems related to data fragmentation – the management burdens of data stored across multiple platforms in separate physical locations. DataPlatform, Cohesity’s flagship product, is a software defined solution for consolidating multiple workloads onto a single cloud-based platform. It also provides comprehensive protection for data across locations with a wide range of platform support from legacy systems to the latest enterprise platforms.

Key Considerations for Cohesity

1. Cohesity is well-designed for consolidating data silos as well as secondary workloads including analytics, file services, testing and development. It can also add compute-only nodes that don’t need to store or retrieve data. These capabilities increase operational efficiency and reduce costs, multiple architectures, software licenses, employee trainings and staff specializations.

4. Totally non-disruptive upgrades and restores allow continuous operations.
5. Heterogeneous clusters are supported, meaning that nodes can be from different generations and vendors. This provides design flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in, and key integrations with older solutions. Customers can also perform platform refreshes without needing an outage.
6. Cohesity provides the highest level of protection with its SpanFS™ filesystem. This immutable read-only file system deters cyberattacks. Its instant mass restores for any point in time are vital for recovering in the event of a ransomware attack.
7. Many tasks are automated, thus less need for hands-on support.
8. Industry standard variable-length deduplication of data with inline deduplication provides the best ratios. It also deduplicates data on solid-state drives (SSDs), providing faster backup and recovery times. This can reduce physical storage and licensing by 25%.
9. Cohesity’s Helios UI is common across all deployment types, acting as a single pane of glass for as a service, on-premises or cloud, reducing management overhead.
10. Cohesity offers true multi-tenancy, meaning multiple users share the same physical machines without commingling data and access. This feature is especially useful to larger organizations, to segregate the data and roles of individual business units and customers.
11. Global searches of the entire catalog of data are also possible with DataPlatform, whether the data is stored on-premises or in the cloud. Users quickly find what they’re looking for, thus streamlining operations
12. Cohesity cannot be installed within Mac or Windows OS; usage is bare-metal, VMware, SaaS, and Cloud (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud)
13. Linear scaling allows 256 nodes

Rubrik

Rubrik provides the greatest benefits in cloud-based data management for enterprises running a hybrid cloud environment. It helps these organizations protect their data while also providing useful insights into that data. Rubrik’s flagship product is Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM). This platform is vendor-agnostic. Customers don’t need to change their existing software stacks, whether they’re based on hardware or software.

Rubrik is also compatible with typical virtualization systems Hyper-V, Nutanix and VMware in addition to cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions like AWS and Google Cloud.

Key Considerations for Rubrik

1. Rubrik integrates well with existing software stacks, allowing usage across many applications in cloud, virtual and physical machines.
2. Some consider Rubrik’s ease of use and user interface to be a bit better than Cohesity’s.
3. The Rubrik architecture is cloud-native and allows infinity scalability versus Cohesity’s 256 node linear scaling.
4. Non-disruptive operations are claimed by Rubrik, please look into how this applies in practice for your workloads.
5. Rubrik supports heterogeneous clusters with mixed nodes from different generations, but not mixed nodes from different vendors.
6. The product architecture isn’t designed for consolidating data silos.
7. Fixed block deduplication is much less efficient than variable-length deduplication. It’s also unable to deduplicate data on SSDs, if that is a requirement.
8. Rubrik uses a chain-based approach to taking data snapshots, requiring it to traverse chains of metadata. These must be stitched together which slows recovery. Scripts are needed for processing more than one workload at a time.
9. No single UI for all deployment types.
10. Rubrik doesn’t have true multi-tenancy; searches are restricted to a particular virtual machine.

Summary

So which product to choose? While both solutions include next-generation capabilities, a deep understanding of your current environment and objectives, both technical and business, will determine which product will work best for your data sets and team skills.

In our experience, Cohesity is the preferred data management solution for medium and larger organizations when data consolidation is a primary goal, especially for those with multiple vendors, sites and/or compliance requirements. For this reason, to date five of the world’s top 10 financial institutions use Cohesity.

Comport’s team of experts will help you assess your data and use cases, to create the right data management strategy for your particular needs. Reach out today to get started on your journey to the benefits of modern data management! Need more information, take a look at our Cohesity vs Rubrik Technical Guide.

Note:  We recommend a technical deep dive on all points of interest with an authorized partner, Rubrik and Cohesity, to understand and validate specific application to your environment, as well as any product developments that have occurred.