Replacing NetBackup with ransomware-resilient backup
Moving a low-petabyte backup estate to Cohesity with immutable copies in AWS, and proving recovery through DR exercises.
- Where
- Rushmore Loan Management Services · Merchsource
- When
- 2017-2025
- My role
- Data for the evaluation, deployment, protection policies, recovery testing
Choosing the platform
Rushmore’s legacy NetBackup environment needed replacing, and Veeam and Cohesity were evaluated side by side. My part was supplying the existing backup metrics and storage utilization, so both vendors had to size against real numbers instead of their own optimism. Information Security made the final call, and ransomware resilience is what decided it for Cohesity.
Deploying it
I helped deploy the Cohesity cluster, from racking the nodes to configuring the protection policies:
- 100+ servers, mostly virtual machines
- Multiple SQL Server clusters, protected through SQL dumps to storage that Cohesity then captured (not elegant, but it worked)
- File shares
- Low-petabyte scale in total, with local storage on the cluster and immutable copies in AWS
Proving it works
A backup is only as good as the last time you restored from it. With the Business Continuity team, I ran recovery exercises restoring servers and core infrastructure, so we knew it worked before we actually needed it.
The same discipline at a smaller shop
At Merchsource (about 20 servers), I ran Veeam Backup & Replication for servers and Microsoft 365, with local repositories and offsite copies in Wasabi cloud storage. I also wrote the backup and VM-restore test procedure, and then actually ran it (which is the part that usually gets skipped).
Earlier still, at Fremont Investment & Loan, I ran multiple successful DR exercises on Commvault, where I was Commvault certified.