Item: Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI
Rating: 8
Author: Chris Saenz

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently employ Commvault Backup and Recovery in our high education institution as our primary backup, recovery, and DR platform for a variety of data classes and clients across the organization. Our central IT team has used Commvault for backing up individual VMs, files at the file-system level, databases such as Oracle, MariaDB, Postgres, and MSSQL, as well as cloud resources like EC2 instances.

Pros and Cons

Organized policy-based configuration
Variety of client types
Deduplication of Backup Data

It is a complicated environment for the new user
Copy rules are not very clear
Browse for Restore functionality does not always give desired results

Return on Investment

Made backups and recovery available to more power users
Increased the opportunity for better RPO and RTOs
Enhanced our DR capabilities to improve our response to a disaster scenario

Alternatives Considered

Veritas Backup Exec, Rubrik, Veeam Backup & Replication and NetApp SnapRestore

Many other backup and recovery platforms have their strengths and weaknesses. They might specialize in backing up VMs but fail to adequately backup Oracle databases, or do well in the cloud, but not so well on-premise. In my opinion, Commvault handles the variety of clients and situations in most enterprise datacenters the best with features for efficient and effective backup policies, such as deduplication for managing storage of backups and use of hardware and software snapshots to minimize impact to production storage and compute resources.

Support Rating

Commvault simply does the best in environments with a variety of clients, data types, policies, and targets. Being able to easily backup a VM on-premise in vCenter and recover to an AWS EC2 instance is an example of the kind of recoverability that is realized with employing Commvault. It does have a definite learning curve, but it is necessary to be able to develop complex backup policies that Commvault was made to handle.

Key Insights

Do you think Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI's feature set?

Yes

Did Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI again?

Yes

Usability

Commvault's features are very usable. Other than having to understand the relationships that policies have to clients and subclients, once configured, the policies work well and are extremely customizable to fit your scenario. Commvault support is also one of the best support programs I have worked with. Their portal makes requesting help easy by automatically grabbing logs from your system and relevant information for your environment. Their support personnel are also some of the best I've worked with, which is hard to come by in technology.

Other Software Used

Nagios Core, JotForm

Likelihood to Recommend

Commvault works well in a large environments with a variety of client types and data classes. With its policy-based configurations, it makes administration of large environments easier when configuring storage and retention, copies, schedules, client configs, etc. Commvault also backs up just about everything you can think of, and works with almost all storage and compute platforms, so there are rarely any cases where Commvault cannot accommodate.

Commvault Fits Almost Every Enterprise Datacenter Environment

Overall Satisfaction with Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery