Item: Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI
Rating: 10
Author: Keith Luken

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We migrated to Commvault in our data center back in 2005 and which point we had less than 150 systems protected. Over the years as the company grew we also expanded the use to our remote offices (over 220) and eventually we were backing up over 2400 systems between our data center and remote locations. Commvault provides all the basic data protection for our systems. We protect Windows systems and VMs as well as AIX.

Pros and Cons

As the product has matured its efficient use of WAN resources has improved with deduplication allowing us to protect complex remote systems with limited bandwidth.
The Commvault interface provides a fairly consistent look and feel regardless of what type of agent or workload you are trying to protect.
The use of Storage polices allows for very granular control over how various workloads on the same system may be protected and retained.
The ability to create dynamic groups based on an endless number of attributes makes automation of backup sets easy.
Console auditing is great to prove who made changes to the environment as every change is logged within the system and can be retained for as long as you select.
The reporting engine is very robust and has flexibility to generate adhoc or scheduled reports.

The Java client (and only client) has been a pain point as it is very particular as to what version of Java you have running
Over the years the deduplication engine has been less than robust, much of which has been resolved in the latest version. There are still some deduplication gotchas that you need to plan and be prepared for. V11 is really the first version I would consider truly ready for prime time with lareg deduplication workloads.
Their windows agents still have a reliance on .Net which means not all upgrades are without a reboot. If you are not careful you can leave a system unprotected until it is rebooted.
The custom report engine requires you to understand the underlying database structure and needs to be improved to be more intuitive with selectable criteria and fields.

Return on Investment

The ease of use and reliability of Commvault have enabled us to support the entire environment with less personnel than other products. We can support hundreds of clients and 500TB of protected systems with a single person.
Their per TB pricing can get rather expensive often forcing you into an agent based pricing model and that can be less that ideal to mange.

Alternatives Considered

IBM TSM has Commvault beat in true HSM, but TSM is so complex to mange and run and is probably a tad lighter on resources, but not enough to warrant using it. NetBackup was the speed king for years, but after Symantec virtually abandoned the product their are years behind in innovation. The NetBackup UI is ancient and the reporting is weak. Veeam has a very specific target audience and that is the purely virtualized SMB what does not have much to protect. Veeam's deduplication is barely works and their compression is just OK. Veeam underlying disk usage is very wasteful and can quickly add up, Commvault is far more space efficient for the backup target than any of the competitors that offer deduplication.

Other Software Used

vSphere, Hyper-V, HP 3PAR StoreServ Flash Storage

Likelihood to Recommend

Commvault's strength lies in its robustness and flexibility. It can protect workloads on many different platforms. The UI while intimidating is fairly quick to learn once you understand basic concepts and their terminology. There are very few products that can scale up into the largest enterprises and go low to medium sized businesses and Commvault is clearly one of them. Their SMB business has been slow due to heavy competition especially in VMware centric shops where Veeam has been a strong competitor, but Commvault quickly wins in any environment with more than a few dozen VMs or that has anything other than pure VMware of Hyper-V. Commvault really needs a smaller SQL express like build that supports say a very small SMB where Veeam is easier to set up and use, but far less space efficient on the backups. Commvault's support organization has had its ups and downs, but the last few years has been very solid. Unless you need a true HSM based solution then Comvmault is hard to beat. TSM is the better HSM based product for now, but I would not put it past Commvault to try and one up TSM over the years. We backed up over 500TB across 200+ locations and our main data center and can't think of a product that would have been any easier or more reliable to use. Version 11 is the version that is really a true Enterprise ready deduplication and protection system.

Raising the bar in Enterprise data protectoin and recovery

Overall Satisfaction with CommVault