A business priority in today’s digital age should be having a data recovery and business continuity plan in place. Businesses who don’t are taking unnecessary risks!
You can’t predict what could happen — a data breach, human error, system failure or even a natural disaster — which could cause your business to lose data, halting operations and wasting time and money. That’s why it’s best to be prepared.
The way to prepare for this is to use backup and disaster recovery software to ensure your business can recover any lost data quickly and efficiently. Many data backup and recovery solutions are on the market — you just need to choose the right one for your business!
This article will be covering the benefits and drawbacks of two leading companies in the data recovery market: Cohesity and Arcserve. Read on to find out more!
Cohesity: A Young Firm With Big Ambition
Cohesity, founded by Mohit Aron in 2013, is an enterprise-level cloud storage company with a focus on data management and disaster recovery. Headquartered in San Jose, California, the firm now employs more than 800 people and offers a market-leading DR solution.
Cohesity’s primary mission, as its name implies, is to create a cohesive solution to enterprise data problems. The firm, described as a Cool Vendor In Storage Technology by Gartner, offers software that aims to solve the age-old issue of mass data fragmentation. In the past, companies used a variety of different systems for managing data, including tape, media and servers, target storage, dedupe and backup. There was no ability to integrate company files, analytics, testing and development or cloud gateways. In short, it was a mess.
Cohesity’s product eliminates this complexity, reduces the instance of “dark” data, cuts compliance risk and improves efficiency by combining all these aspects into a single package.
Cohesity Data Platform provides an intuitive UI from which IT professionals can see all their data workloads, achieve global sharing of all data resources, perform analytics, connect to the cloud and file share within the application itself. No more data silos, no more costly duplication and no more lack of interoperability: the platform takes care of it all.
The way that the company achieves this seemingly miraculous outcome is complex. But the technology that underlies the software appears works. You can simplify management, reduce your TCO and mitigate business risk by ensuring compliance.
Arcserve: Built for the Virtualised Era
Arcserve was founded in 1983 under the name Cheyenne Software. In 1990, the company released the very first version of its DP console and has since gone on to update the software, adding features and making it more user-friendly and applicable to the cloud and virtualised eras.
Arcserve was initially developed as a tool to backup other software programmes and ensure that data in the network could not be lost due to power failures or accidental erasure.
Arcserve became an independent company in 2014 when a private equity firm bought it off the parent company, CA Technologies. Soon after the acquisition, Arcserve released Arcserve Unified Data Protection, a product which the company says offers a host of advantages over the competition. Not only does it reduce downtime from days to minutes, but it also works across local, cloud, virtual, hyperconverged and SaaS-based workloads using only one unified central management interface.
Their flagship product, Arc service Business Continuity Cloud is advertised as a single solution to help your business functionally operate if there has been a data loss. They claim that a business’ entire IT ecosystem can be protected with this solution, no matter the IT platform used.
Cohesity vs Arcserve
Both Arcserve and Cohesity want to enable firms to efficiently carry out a variety of DR-related functions without having to dedicate significant chunks of their IT resources.
The main difference between the two options is pricing. Arcserve offers great value-for-money compared to Cohesity when you consider the number of features that the former company provides. With Arcserve, firms can prevent data loss and extended downtime, manage data workloads over a single unified management interface and operate the product over a variety of computing environments, including local and the cloud.
Arcserve also offers the companies that have suffered a loss of data the ability to get things back up and running quickly with VM and bare metal recovery. The software uses something called “application-consistent backup” which tailors recovery needs to that of the specific program.
Companies need to be able to validate RTOs and RPOs if they are to have an effective data recovery strategy. Again, Arcserve provides this functionality from within the dashboard, giving enterprises full control over their backup resources.
Finally, Arcserve gives firms the ability to scale up and down their use of resources according to operational needs. No need for “forklift upgrades” or additional products: just a simple service that works as it should.
Cohesity offers solid functionality and a comprehensive product that aims to transform the current “patchwork” of siloed infrastructure into a cohesive whole. Cohesity seeks to create a data management system that has Google-like simplicity, making it accessible to experienced and inexperienced IT professionals alike.
You can understand why the company takes this tack: it knows that the majority of its customers — small and medium-sized businesses — don’t have the IT resources to implement complex, bespoke solutions to data management problems and need something that caters to all their needs “off-the-shelf.”
Cohesity Data Platform allows companies to collapse all their data repositories into a single accessible archive, making it possible for anyone with access to share and copy data when required.
Both platforms make it easy to search for data, but here is where Cohesity might have a slight edge: the company not only offers a helpful “Google-like” search tool but also allows data analysts and engineers to make custom queries, thanks to an intelligent, underlying AI system.
Just like Arcserve, Cohesity has native cloud integration and will run on a variety of cloud platforms. Including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The software will also allow you to run apps on the platform and provides a marketplace for compatible, third-party apps.
The right solution for you
If you’re a firm that wants to get the most functionality for the least amount of money, then Arcserve is probably your best choice. Not only does the platform enable you to bring together disparate silos and discover and use hidden data, but it also provides a range of dedupe and efficiently solutions, which help to keep costs down. You can scale up or down as much as you like, and deactivate features you don’t require, paying less as a result.
Cohesity targets professionals who want an off-the-shelf solution to data management. Cohesity’s main advantage is its ability to back up secondary workloads in real-time and achieve up to 70 per cent lower TCO than traditional silos.
Choosing the right DR software can be a challenge. That’s why many companies get help from specialists with the knowledge and skills to select their correct application for their operation. The choice of software should reflect the needs of the firm.
Of course, software does not provide an end-to-end solution to all your firm’s data management requirements. Hardware is important too, as is the way both hardware and software combine. Specialists can help you integrate software with your hardware setup and help you develop a fully-fledged business continuity plan.
