Great Data protection for virtual and physical environments with feature rich and flexible scaling options.
Overall Satisfaction with CommVault
We have been using CommVault 2+ years now, and let me tell you that now we have control of our backups on almost all of our IT infrastructure across the whole organization. Basically we began to make the backup of the most critical systems (virtual and physical). After a year of use, we made an expansion and now we almost have all the systems. Some big Oracle databases are also being backup. It is a feature-rich product where we can establish different retentions policies, schedule backups based on the time and date of the lowest impact.
Pros
- With the flexible definitions of policies for the backups retention period. We can age out the data that is backed up on primary storage and move it to secondary storage (archiving) for a longer retention period. This gives us the advantage to have the recent backup on our fastest storage.
- The web console is a really nice and clear way of presenting detail information of the backups statistics and results. I like the fact that it has a lot of pre-built reports, but also we can personalize the reports. This is very useful when it comes to auditing for a SOX compliance company.
- The integration of the Oracle database backups is really neet and works like a charm. We had some bad experiences with other backups products, but with Commvault, we are able to connect directly with the engine (by installing an agent) and do the backups in a more efficient way.
Cons
- There is an integration with FusionSphere (Huawei) virtual environment that is really hard to configure and make it work. But I think it will get better so we will spend a few days to make it work. There is room for improvement.
- The CommVault solution is a very versatile and feature-rich solution, but it's also complex to learn and use. I think the is a con because the learning curve is months. You will have to invest a lot of time to learn and configure it.
- I think that if you are scaling the backup solution or you deploy it on an enterprise (2000+ servers), you will have to consider having at least two human resources dedicated to the operation of CommVault. It is a great product but a little bit complex so you need to control a lot of stuff.
- One positive thing is that CommVault gave us control of the protection of the company data in a way that we are sure that we can recover if something happens. In our experience, we have had 2 problems with the backups in the 2+ years we have been using it. Plus, support its really great.
- Another positive impact is that with the global deduplication and compression, we have saved on storage costs (20% reduction) and also save time when we need to find and recover the data.
- With the implementation of CommVault, we have successfully complied with the requirement of SOX control by protecting all our production environments that affect financial situations. In other words, now we are sure that we can recover and have not lost money because of downtime.
Before CommVault, we had EMC Backup Solution and we evaluated IBM Backup Solution. We evaluated the features and also the investment over 5 years. So based on the features and licensing scheme, we prefered CommVault because we could have a flexible way to scale and have different retention policies and data aging. Also, we select the license per TB on the front end. Based on the global deduplication and compression predictions, we could have a 6x reduction of the storage consumption. Also, the support was a big factor because they have some great local partners that can quickly response to our needs.
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