Item: Commvault Complete Data Protection
Rating: 10
Author: Will Enestvedt

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Commvault [Complete Backup & Recovery] to back up hundreds of virtual machines across two big clusters; we also back up large Oracle databases via RMAN. We have media agents at two different data centers, and replicate our backups to an off-site colocation facility for DR. In the past we had run host-based backups, but have switched to covering entire VMs. All of our central IT assets are covered. It provides us the ability to recover entire systems as well as our major line-of-business applications.

Pros and Cons

Backs up virtual machines quickly and completely.
Integrates well with Oracle's built-in RMAN tools for recovery & cloning, making success much more likely.
Produces really good logs.
Runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with minimal changes to the clients.

For database restores, it has to restore the entire database in order to recover just one table.
Backups of virtual machines with direct attached storage is difficult.
I wish it covered cloud assets more thoroughly, like AWS ELBs and Security Groups.

Return on Investment

It allows us to meet various compliance requirements for retaining our data.
It improves our BC posture by enabling fast recovery to an alternate data center.
It covers all of our systems (on various operating systems) in a single tool.

Alternatives Considered

Veritas NetBackup

We switched from Veritas NetBackup, because we had two parallel environments. Combining allowed us to cover more targets and make better use of centralized assets & staff. Licensing of Commvault was simpler at the time we deployed, and Commvault has continued to evolve their licensing model (for better or worse). Commvault supports unix clients better, I think, which is important to us.

Support Rating

On the occasions that i have opened a ticket, I got good answers in a reasonable timeframe. That said, the logging is so comprehensive that I learned to trouble-shoot most problems on my own, once I could find the right part of the web interface (or the local log file) to find the messages.

Key Insights

Do you think Commvault Complete Data Protection delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Commvault Complete Data Protection's feature set?

Yes

Did Commvault Complete Data Protection live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Commvault Complete Data Protection go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Commvault Complete Data Protection again?

Yes

Usability

The web interface is fiercely ugly, but it has a lot of functionality buried in there somewhere...if you can find it. I wish the command line interface was better, and better-documented, because that would have enabled better automation when we were still doing host-based backups (which we have since abandoned in favor of VM-based backups) -- and even now, it would allow for scripts to parse job data in a way that I prefer and not in their clunky HTML reports.

Other Software Used

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Nagios Core

Likelihood to Recommend

Commvault [Complete Backup & Recovery] does well in large environments, with assets that are geographically distributed. It scales up well. The reporting is kind of ugly, which makes it harder to share simplified reports with less-technical users. The logs are very verbose, which is helpful both to their support staff as well as to experience users & administrators. Administrative rights can be controlled very granularly, making it easy to delegate limited responsibilities to operators.

Commvault is a great backup & recovery solution

Overall Satisfaction with Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery