Commvault Cloud Reviews

We are a systems integrator and we sell Commvault to our customers.

One of our customers has Oracle Cloud and we needed to create a backup for that. Only two solutions can do that, Commvault and Veritas. Our customer compared Commvault and Veritas by doing a PoC of each. We displayed the features of each one and the customer chose Commvault. 

We have another customer with a different environment. They have virtualization and they have a physical infrastructure and many operating systems and environments. They compared different backup solutions like Commvault, Veeam, and Veritas, and Commvault was the only solution that could cover all the operating systems and the whole virtual and physical environment.

Another customer is in the petroleum sector. They have different sites and they need replication between the sites and they also need to back up their main sites and their remote sites. Commvault is one of the best solutions for this scenario.

The number of errors or problems with Commvault, when dealing with backups, is very minimal compared to other backup solutions. It saves a lot of time for system administrators. An administrator using another backup solution will take one, two, or three hours per day just to check if the backup jobs have run. With Commvault, it takes about 10 to 30 minutes, maximum.

The solution saves on infrastructure and protects data. Compared to other solutions, using Commvault saves our customers around 15 to 20 percent. In addition, it reduces storage space because of the deduplication and compression during backup.

• One of the big features is the 10-mega backup for endpoints. Not many backup solutions support that. 
• Commvault has support for backing up operating systems and servers.
• The solution covers Oracle Cloud, on-prem, virtual, and physical.
• The support for cloud is good.

There is room for improvement in terms of data security.

We use Commvault's technical support at times. I would rate it at 10 out of 10. Their support is perfect.

For some customers we do the implementation on-premise, and others use the cloud version. It's very easy and straightforward. The design, implementation, and documentation is very straightforward, especially the Commvault hybrid product.

The deployment time depends on the customer and it depends on the environment. It takes a minimum of two to three days, and the maximum is 10 days. It depends on the size of the environment.

We have straightforward procedures for the implementation. We have a manual. We have procedures for the automation of installation for HA environments, whether it's for a virtual or physical, and for different operating systems.

Commvault's licensing is very flexible.

We really needed a product where we could extend the Microsoft Office 365 backups and archival process, as well as back up our Office 365 SharePoints and our users' OneDrives. That way we could have a seven-year retention plan and if we need to go back and grab someone's email that they accidentally deleted two years ago, we could. 

We also needed a solution that we didn't have to have onsite storage for, because we had a storage restriction onsite. This product gave me the ability to have everything stored, as a SaaS model. Everything is right there.

We recently had an issue where someone couldn't find an email that they had just recently written. When I went looking inside the backups, I was able to find and restore that email and they were able to continue working. It was very critical for a customer sale, but that email was recovered and it was perfect. Because it was just a single email, it was relatively quick. If I had had to do it another way, it probably would have taken me an hour-and-a-half to two hours longer with our old way of doing it. Before we went with Office 365, we were Exchange on-premises and it would have required me to have pulled out a SAN snapshot to recover the data that way, or go to the tape. Because this is all hosted in the cloud and works in the cloud, I was able to do it in five minutes.

Metallic has helped minimize the time spent on backup tasks, absolutely. It has reduced the time, daily, that I deal with whether the backup is up, and performing backups, by about 50 percent. I have more time to do other things.

I have been able to save on hardware costs at my site due to the low price of the application. I am looking at a reduction in infrastructure costs of at least 25 percent.

The most valuable part of the solution is that it is fire-and-forget. Everything we've programmed into this Metallic SaaS offering is what they claim it to be. It's been just a treat to use it. From starting the trial, to the 15 minutes it took to run my first backup, to the 30-minutes for my first restore of the users' email, it has just been fantastic. It works as advertised.

Since it's built off the regular Commvault product, and I use that Commvault product, the user interface has been very easy for me to get into. It's easy to use and navigate through. I've had no questions on how to find the relevant information, and their documentation has been on-point for helping me find all the hidden features inside their menus.

The Command Center, as far as providing a complete view of data goes, is 100 percent accurate. I found stuff that I didn't know about. I was able to find out that a couple of things are flowing in an odd way and I was able to get those remedied and treated in a way that ended up improving my boss' daily life.

It also provides me with a single platform to move, manage, and recover data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations. It's a single window to see everything I needed to see regarding this level of backup. I really dislike like it when the company purchases multiple products that do similar things and I have to go to different windows to get full insight. This solution gives me the full insight without having to use other products, metrics, or reporting tools.

Since it plugs into my Office 365 tenant, it was literally three clicks. So it supports cloud well. And it's all documented well. They even provided training and onboarding help for that 15-minute process. It was just fantastic.

I would like to see some of the code execute a little bit better when I add new licenses and assign licenses to users. I'd like to see that information update a little quicker. It would also be helpful to be able to run a report on licensing so that I have better visibility into how much licensing I'm using.

I really have no other complaints beyond that. And they were able to get me that information relatively quickly when I submitted a ticket.

I've been using Metallic since day-one of its release in October, 2019.

I would give the stability "five nines." I've not seen it down. I can't say it hasn't been down once, but it's been up the entire time I've used it. There have been no issues. It's snappy and responsive. I'm impressed with the stability of it.

Scaling is amazingly easy. The way they recommend the setup, it is easy to drop a user into one of my security groups and, within 15 minutes, they are in the backup schedule rotation and are being backed up.

I have 75 users enrolled. We may have plans to expand in the future to start taking advantage of their endpoint product through Metallic. We would expand from 75 seats to 200 seats in the Office 365 backup, and would add on another set of 200 seats for their endpoint backup.

Commvault's technical support for the solution is knowledgeable. I haven't been able to stump them. They've been able to answer every single question and help me with any issues I've had. They've just been, bar none, fantastic.

We were using Backup Exec for a lot of stuff and ShadowProtect SPX, a StorageCraft solution. Now that we have this online, it's fantastic. Every product that we use from Commvault, in general, has been fantastic.

We switched to Metallic from our other solutions because they didn't provide the Office 365 backup component we wanted.

We needed a backup solution and I purchased their standard Commvault for our on-premises stuff. When I attended Commvault Go, their customer conference, they debuted Metallic and I said, "That's exactly the product I was looking for, for my 365 backup, and I'm buying it from Commvault." I already knew how their software works and Metallic is same. They're just doing it in a SaaS model for 365, endpoint, and even server backup if you want. I really needed that 365.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's 100 percent accurate on their website. From start to finish: 15 minutes and you're running your first backup.

My implementation strategy for this was for the 365, the OneDrive and the SharePoint components. When we brought it online, my goal was to target the 75 most used, customer-facing mailboxes. Within 15 minutes I was able to make sure the product was working and, by the end of that day, I had everyone applied. Compared to other products, that would have taken days.

If you have technical experience it will be straightforward. We walked through their installation script just to confirm I had everything done, because, given how new the product is, they wanted to test their help script. And it was spot-on. They had it perfect. I am fully confident that, even if a person doesn't have great technical knowledge, they would be able to help that person through it.

When I purchased Commvault Metallic, they did have an onboarding process that helped me if I had any questions. It was literally a 15-minute process. I did everything before we even had that phone call, so I got to spend the call asking a few questions. It was really easy. 

I would say we have seen a return on investment, but it's a hard metric to come up with due to DR. We haven't had a DR scenario where it has paid for itself. But I view it like buying car insurance. It's better to have it and not need it, than something happening and needing it and not having it.

We are paying on a yearly basis and it comes out to about $3.80 a user per month.

There are no other costs for the specific features that I have. If I was to use server backups with them, there would be an additional cost per terabyte of storage, based on my storage targets, or an infrastructure cost if I was using it to target on-ground storage stuff. But because I'm using the platform that includes storage for the Office 365 backup exclusively, there is no additional cost.

The other products I was looking at wanted to charge me anywhere between $10 to $15 per person and I would have to do storage on top of that. That means I would be paying by the terabyte if I was putting the storage in the cloud or having to purchase hardware on-premises to do so. With the Office 365 offering from Metallic, at the price point we got it at, it was perfect. They knew exactly what the market needed and they hit their marks.

We really didn't evaluate other vendors because none of them gave me the options that I was looking for and that Metallic was offering: a low price per user, and storage included for the 365 backup. With other products I would have had to purchase cloud storage and pay for additional storage, or the cost per seat was just not something I was willing to pay.

The biggest lesson I've learned is to remind people that they still need to back up Office 365 emails. Just because it's not on their premises, they should still back it up.

Commvault gives you a fantastic 45-day trial. It's worth trying it. They have a really good, long trial period. They will answer any questions you have during that process. I know a lot of people say, "Just try the product." With this one, try the product and you'll see the ease of use.

For deployment and maintenance of the solution, for our size of company, it's just one person, a system administrator who does overall operations support.

We use it to backup and protect our virtual environments. We do Active Directory, SQL, file server, and some application levels backups. We do Office 365 and SharePoint backups too.

We back up everything locally first, then store it in the cloud.

It provides us a single solution to recover data. We haven't had a lot of restore requests. There have been a couple of them where we had to restore a full server and the work involved was very minimal. We were able to run a quick restore job. We did not really run into any challenges doing this. Every once in a while, we receive requests for files or emails that people have lost and those files are in SharePoint or OneDrive. We have the ability to restore it within 30 days directly from the portal. But if it's beyond the 30 days, we use Commvault to restore data and that has worked absolutely fine.

It has helped us drive innovation and accelerate growth. From a growth perspective, this storage solution has clearly helped us. The option for us to save the data in the cloud is very valuable for the organization.

The solution has helped our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and other projects. We have an administrator who manages the system. I'm more of an architect. Compared to the previous product where the administrator had to go around and look for a lot of information before he could find out whether the backup had competed successfully and the reporting structure was not that great, the reporting structure now with Commvault is where he can get daily emails from the jobs which have been completed. If there are any issues with jobs, he can directly drill-down to the details and find out why the job failed or why it did not run on time since there may be other dependencies that won't allow the job to run.

All the features used right now have been very valuable. The biggest advantage for us right now is the ability to back up our Office 365 mailboxes along with all our SharePoint and OneDrive data. Because all our users mostly store all their data in these locations, it is important for us that we back up all these services.

It provides us a good holistic view of everything that we have backed up so far. It also provides us all the recovery points. If we look at an an object that has been backed up, we can tell how many retention copies it has, how far we can go, and recover any data, if needed.

I have written a lot of different reviews about the product and every time I have mentioned the user interface is not user-friendly, e.g., the admin portal is not user-friendly. It definitely takes a lot of understanding to get familiar with the portal. However, once you are completely familiar with it, then it is pretty easy to manage. It's not something that you can jump in right away and start, knowing what exactly is going on. There are a lot of places that you need to look around to understand how the backups are configured.

The administration of the solution could be simplified. This would really make the administrator's life easier.

We've been using Commvault since early 2017. We are in our third year right now.

It has been pretty stable. We have not run into a situation where our systems were compromised. However, we have run into system corruption issues and were back in business within about two hours.

Right now, we only have one primary administrator for this product. We have a couple of backups in case this person or another is on vacation. We have other people who have been provided good knowledge transfer on how this product works. This way, if either of them is unavailable, there is somebody who can do the job.

It is definitely scalable. We are able to scale as we need, whether we need to add any compute, storage, or additional licenses for user accounts. All of that is very flexible when it comes to scalability. If we want to add more users to our Office 365 backup, we can quickly get new licenses from the vendor with a quick turnaround time. As soon as we get that, we are able to add those users' data to our backups. We generally have a buffer. However, sometimes if there are a lot of new hires, then we need to go in and secure new licenses.

We are using more space than what we were previous using, mainly because we did not have a lot of flexibility with the previous product that we were using. So, there was not much room for us to store the data for a long duration. At the same time, we did not have enough on premise storage capacity to leave the data around for a long time. Therefore, data growth has been significant over the past years because we have been able to store data. So, we are leaving the data on-premise for 30 days, then we moving it to the cloud. Most of the data is now in the cloud, but even on-premise we are now able to back up a lot of systems that we were not able to back up earlier. We have seen significant storage growth on long-term systems, because we are now backing those up and the data is there.

It is only my team managing the system. We back up all the data that the end user has. If they need help restoring their data, then one of my team members will go in and restore the data. The user has no direct interaction with the product.

It is pretty extensively used right now. It is backing up all the data that we have right now. We are looking into some additional features, so we might not start looking at those until later this year. Commvault has come out with some new features and we want to look into those. For the first two years, it was a stabilization period for us to get the product implemented, ensure everything was stabilized, all the important data was being protected, and data was being stored in necessary places. We also looked at all the trending over the last two years to ensure we had enough capacity in all the areas to maintain the server and storage space. Now, we are at the stage where we are pretty comfortable on how we can scale this product when needed. We are looking into additional features that Commvault has, and we will start looking into these towards the end of the year.

Tech support has been good. I haven't had a lot of interactions.

Every once in a while when we have to make any architectural changes to the deployment, my administrators reach out and consult with me. We sometimes engage with the support team or Professional Services team. Their responses have been pretty good so far. We have never had a situation where we were kept waiting for days to get an answer or solution.

I used Commvault from 2011 to 2012 at one of my previous organization, but it was only for a short period of time that I worked with it. I then had to move onto other things. That experience helped me when we deployed the newer version of Commvault. At the time, it was Commvault Simpana, and now, it's only Commvault. That experience helped us to understand its requirements and how we could set it up.

We were using Dell EMC Data Protection Rapid Recovery. It wasn't flexible nor scalable. It did not meet all our requirements. It wasn't able to back up physical and cloud environments. It could not store data in the cloud, so we had to look at options to store and protect our data. We were unable to back up our Office 365 and SharePoint data. With Commvault, it has made it seamless for us to store data in the cloud, not only protect it. 

We can set up proper retention policies now. So, if we need to store any data, for example, over a year, seven years, or 10 years, we can accordingly store it. We can then apply policy to that storage, which after that retention period, we will not have to go in and do a manual cleanup.

The deployment took about a month. The planning was another month or two.

We wanted to ensure that we were able to protect all our systems and data not protected up until then. At the same time, the strategy was that we did not want to incur a lot of significant costs on just deploying the solution itself. Plus, we did not want a lot of administrative overhead while maintaining the servers and application environment. We did not want that routine daily administration activity. We wanted to set up the environment and not worry about it until something went wrong.

We had assistance from the vendor, so they did assist with the setup. The system was completely new for some of my team members who had never worked with it before, so it did take them a lot of time to get familiar with it. Those administrators are able to manage the system very well now compared to what they were able to do in their first year when they had to frequently go back to the vendor and ask them, "How do we do this? How can we do that?"

We worked directly with the vendor. The vendor's Professional Services team was able to assist us with the deployment.

After deploying the Commvault solution, we are saving four to five hours a week.

We have been able to save on infrastructure costs by not storing long-term data onto systems. Instead, we have been able to store them on cheaper cloud systems. There is a lot of savings there if you consider all the cost involved to store data on an on-premise server storage system, plus the maintenance, and the support which goes behind maintaining that system. 

I have seen return of investment.

There is a bit of cost involved with signing up the entire solution. It's not a cheap solution.

We did evaluate Veeam and Cohesity. 

At the time, Cohesity was not mature, as they were fairly new to the business. We had a few meetings with them, and after our discussions, we found that the solution might not meet all our requirements. E.g., the physical server backup was one important feature that was not supported at the time. 

Veeam is a platform that I have extensively worked with in all my previous roles at other companies. So, we do have a Veeam implementation that is used by a different team in our organization. They manage all their backups through Veeam. Our plan was not to use the same solution in all environments. We wanted to use different solutions within the entire organization for exposure to multiple data protection solutions. Also, Veeam did not support physical machine backups and only supported virtual machine backups.

In my previous deployment, there were no cloud features. The cloud was not popular and everything was on-prem. Even when we moved to Commvault, Veeam lacked a lot of features, which is why Commvault seems to be the best choice for us.

We already had our cloud solution in place. After understanding that Commvault does work with that cloud provider and it would help us store our data, we did not have any further concerns about cloud vendor selection. The cloud environment and Commvault environment were set up around the same time. We moved to the cloud at the end of 2016, and then, in early 2017, we moved to Commvault. So, everything worked out well.

Go through an assessment first before selecting the product. Every business is different and has different requirements. Do a complete assessment with the data protection partner, whether it's Commvault, Veeam, Cohesity, or someone else. Go through a proof of concept, if possible. Mind your business requirements, RPO, and RTO. Look at your budget too. This should help you to make the right decision.

The biggest lesson would be to have a proper data protection strategy for the organization. There were a lot of things that we had to implement after implementing the product. It's better if you completely understand your business requirements, then implement this product.

I would give it a rating of an eight (out of 10) because it does not have an easy deployment. The deployment is not something that just anybody can go in and deploy. It needs a good level of understanding for deployment. Once you deploy, you need to be familiar with how to administer the product, how to set up all the reporting, etc. Just navigating the admin interface is not really that easy.

Commvault is our primary solution for all backup and recovery; for index, for analytics, for everything.

When it comes to the storage that we use for backup and data aging, we were limited, at first, by the amount of storage that we could provide for onsite storage and archiving. Commvault's compression and deduplication within the application is allowing us to almost triple the amount of storage. For example, at one of our primary sites we're only able to store about 60 terabytes of capacity, but we actually back up 1.5 petabytes. We're able to squeeze that into the 66-terabyte license capacity. That is huge and saves us quite a bit of money in storage, and even more money on license capacity.

The solution also helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and to spend time on other projects. Throughout the corporation, we only have a handful of people who deal with the backup and recovery portion of our operations. With the number of requests that come in from time to time, it's nice to know that the single pane of glass, and the application as a whole, allow my engineers to quickly find an issue or resolve an issue that our users are having.

All its features are useful and beneficial, but if I had to pick two it would be the reporting and the support that they offer.

I'm a big fan of the reporting. You can build your own reports; it's very customizable. You can have individual reports going to groups of people or individuals. You can have them go out multiple times a day. It's basically a free-for-all as far as reporting goes. If anybody wants a specific job report every day, you can build it, schedule it, and have it go out and never touched it again. It's pretty nice.

Commvault also provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise locations. I've done it multiple times. I've restored files, virtual machines, databases; everything from one location to another location within the United States. I've moved virtual machines, databases, and files between the two. An easier solution than the normal way of moving a server or application is to run a restore to another location. It runs faster and it's encrypted. It provides us with ease of use, instead of using a third-party tool. And I know that everything, all the permissions, all the user access, remains the same no matter where I restore to.

Their single pane of glass solution is daunting at first. It's not the easiest interface but, as with anything that you use, eventually you'll get better and better at it. I've worked closely with their user experience team to improve their web-based command tool. 

We try not to use the CommCell tool that is provided, because it's a little old and a little too powerful to give everyone access to it. So we've started using their Command Center tool. At first, it was hard to find things with that, but you end up finding them. Command Center definitely gives us a complete view of our data. But finding some of the granular, very small items that we sometimes have to find, such as auxiliary copies for tapes, I still find that it's easier to navigate and, sometimes, only possible to find them using the CommCell tool. Maybe that's just an area that hasn't been added to the Command Center yet.

Since I only use the backup and recovery, I'm not using Activate or Orchestrate. And I am strictly on-prem so I'm not using any of the Metallic or Hedvig solutions. I can only speak for backup and recovery. I would like to see a little bit more access into the CommCell areas via the Command Center. That would be my only small request.

In 2019 there was a flaw with their Active Directory plan which didn't actually allow you to recover the full Active Directory properly. I brought that to their attention and they made the change and fixed it. That was the only area that needed to be fixed.

I have been using Commvault for five years.

It's very stable. To be completely frank, I beat the heck out of it, 24/7 and 365. We're a healthcare laboratory company that never closes. We're an around-the-clock operation in all of our locations. The backup jobs are running, and the reports are running, around the clock. Everything runs constantly but we have had zero downtime.

It scales out pretty easily. There's not much on the Commvault side that scales out; it's more the storage repository that's required. There's not much it can't do. 

One thing that I have been requesting is a Linux-based virtual server agent. You have to stick with Windows for the actual CommServe. We'd like to move to a Linux-based OS to release some licensing. I'm sure, eventually, that will come. We have a few Macs in our environment with Commvault on them. We don't often use the Edge client that they provide because the laptops and desktops we have use what is called DFS or file redirection. The files that they have saved are saved on the server instead of their laptop. Since we deal with PI and PHI, we can't have any of that stuff on a laptop. We have 10 Edge backup licenses and we have it on four or five of them, and one of them is a Mac.

Everybody in our company is affected by Commvault. We have about 7,500 employees and everybody uses a product or an application or a database or a server that is involved with Commvault.

For deployment and maintenance of Commvault we have just five people. That includes me as a data center manager and the other four are server engineers.

Commvault's support is a 10 out of 10. I've learned so much from the support. They're very fast and they're very flexible. If they can't figure out a solution right away, they offer a work-around pretty quickly and they always want you involved with the solution. They even offer custom solutions for things that their applications don't do. If you run into a service pack limitation or a limitation with the product itself, they'll actually add the solution they come up with as a feature in their application.

We needed to pick a global solution. I had been reading about Simpana, which is Commvault now, for a while and I had the opportunity to jump right into it and learn about it while deploying it. I had never used it. Everything, on paper, was exactly what we needed as far as it enabling a very granular setup goes, without it being a one-size-fits-all-application. That's what I liked about it: being able to customize and mold each location to use Commvault.

I had other requirements but they were requirements that I didn't know that I had until after I had found that I could do them in Commvault.

The setup is extremely easy. The first time I did it I was a little worried that I didn't do it properly because it was so easy. The overall configuration is a little bit more difficult, but that's roadmap-based configuration, so you have to think very far down the road when putting this together. You can't be thinking, "Oh, I only need this for a couple of months." It's a 10-year plan.

The setup itself took a couple of hours.

Since I had never used Commvault before, we had implementation support from Commvault. They walked me through it. They asked questions and I gave them answers and then they showed me what they were doing. What they showed me made sense. From there, the configuration started, which was mostly on my part. A lot of it was pretty straightforward. There are things that are difficult in a domain environment, things that take a little bit of configuration, such as setting up additional users and passwords for service accounts. But overall, it's a very streamlined process.

I think Commvault's model is now cost-efficient. When we first started with Commvault, I thought it was overpriced. I thought, "That's a lot of money for a piece of software." But as I used it, and developed a trust in and knowledge of the application, I definitely was made aware, very quickly, of how it was worth every penny. Over the years, it has actually become cheaper, due to the fact that I've become smarter about how to use it better. With that knowledge, you learn how to save money with the application.

I've used other solutions in the past, such as vRanger, Symantec Endpoint Protection, Metalogix for Exchange, as well as Data Domain. For data recovery, the others are definitely not as streamlined. I've had quite a few situations where I've had to recover large amounts of data but I don't have a comparison of the recovery times of Commvault versus the others because, in the last five years, all I've used is Commvault. All my large or business-critical restorations have been with Commvault. But judging by what I've done in the past, Commvault is far easier and far more consistent than any other application I've used.

In terms of advice, the biggest thing I would like to say is don't look at it as a dinosaur. A lot of people associate Commvault with being old and antiquated, and not having all the bells and whistles. If you look past that, you'll see that it's more far more capable than anything else that's on the market. You have to get through the complexity of the application and from there you have to trust that it will do what you want it to do.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Commvault is don't be afraid to call support.

We use it to back up NetApp shares, servers, and virtual servers. We also use it for Active Directory and databases. We used to use it to back up Exchange servers, but we're moving that to the cloud. It has a lot of features but we mostly use it to back up and recover stuff.

I can't really say how Commvault has improved the way our organization functions because, while I know there was use another product in use before Commvault, I came here way after the company started using Commvault. I wasn't in this role during the transition. When I've talked about this with the more senior guys, they say Commvault is supposed to be the best product available at this moment.

In general, it gives people confidence knowing that their data, on their servers and home shares on shared drives, is backed up. It gives our end-users confidence.

And the solution has helped us to optimize infrastructure usage. The deduplication in Commvault is great. We have 90-something percent savings using its deduplication technology. It's awesome. I love that aspect.

The solution provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise locations. Some of the guys have been using it to move a virtual machine from VMware to the Microsoft solution, Hyper-V. They back it up and then they restore to the different virtual machine provider, and that works great.

We have never managed to use it to full potential because we don't have a dedicated team to take care of Commvault, so we barely keep it running. It takes a lot of our time when we have ten other systems to take care of. That's why I'm not the biggest fan of this. Just to keep it running is time-consuming. There are five people on my team. Commvault was supposed to be one of the less time-consuming solutions, but in reality it takes 60 percent of our time just to keep it running, and that's not even fine-tuning it; that's just to keep it running. It's a pain.

It constantly breaks and then we spend three or four days trying to fix the issue, working with support, going back and forth. When we finally resolve something, another issue pops up. Then we spend another three or four days trying to make it work. I'm not saying it's the product's fault. Maybe we didn't implement it correctly in the first place. I don't know, I wasn't here. But it takes a lot of time, and every issue is different so I cannot build experience. With another system, I know if I do this, this, and this then it breaks, and I know that I have to do this, this, and this to fix it. But every time Commvault breaks, it's something different, so it takes us a lot of time to fix it. It is frustrating.

Another thing I find frustrating is that when it fails and it says something like "Error code 19: etc., etc... Click here for more information," when I click I get an error page. Having the error codes documented in the Commvault Knowledge Base would help us a lot.

When I came to the role, they said, "Oh yeah, you're going to be doing this, this, and this, and maybe a little bit of Commvault. In reality, 60 to 70 percent of my day is just tinkering with Commvault.

I've been using Commvault for about two years.

It's not very stable in our environment. Every day there is something weird going on. When we solve the "weird thing of the week," the next day something different goes on.

The issue of scalability isn't applicable to us because we're not trying to just grow, grow, grow. It's not that we're going to have 200 percent growth next year. Our environment is more or less stable. We have 800 servers. Next year we might have 850, but it's not doubling.

Pretty much everything we back up is done via Commvault, except for desktops or laptops.

Their follow-up is great. If they send an email saying, "Hey, can you try this and this," if I'm busy with other stuff, the next day they follow up again and again and they harass me. But it's great because my experience with other companies' support is that you have to chase them instead of them chasing you.

Some of Commvault's people are better than others. That's normal. We're humans after all. I only had one case in which I could not agree with the guy, so I had to request another person. But most of the time they're okay or good. Once in a while, you get this really great person, someone who is really awesome. Overall, the support is good.

There were a couple of guys from Cohesity trying to get business from us. We met with them, but it never went anywhere. We heard what they had to say and it looked cool, it looked promising, but of course they are much smaller than Commvault. We didn't try Cohesity. They only did a demo for us.

It's not easy for us to make those kinds of changes. If we have a contract with Commvault, we can't just say, "Okay, let's forget about this. Let's bring in somebody new." We are government, so we can't just do that. We need to go through a bid process so it's not as easy as in other companies.

My advice is to have a dedicated team for Commvault, if possible. In our team we are dealing with DNS Exchange, antivirus, Active Directory, and Commvault. I feel I'm not successful enough in Commvault because I am always thinking about multiple things. If you really want to be successful with the product and use it to its full potential, a dedicated team just doing Commvault would be great. In reality it might not be easy to do, but if I had a magic wand, I would have two or three people just doing Commvault.

I think it's a great product that we are under-utilizing. The lesson I have learned from using it is that when I think I'm getting a handle on Commvault, when I think I'm learning it, something else happens that shows me that I know nothing about Commvault. It's a good product, but it's just it takes a lot of effort to support it. Sometimes we just don't have the time. When it works fine, it's awesome.

IT has the regular ComCell Console that looks ugly but is full of functionality. And it has another way to manage it called Command Center that is a nice-looking web interface but I find it doesn't have all the functionality, so I stick to the old interface because I can do everything there. I haven't used Command Center often. I don't find it's the best feature because there are some things that I cannot do in there. I got used to using the ComCell Console and have kept on using it.

The fact that the solution is a single platform hasn't really enabled our organization to accelerate growth or drive innovation. We're government, so we are not driven by growth or innovation. We prefer to have stability and reliability. We're not a company that is trying to quickly sell something. We don't care about that. We're not trying to grow; it's actually the opposite: The less impact that government has, the better.

In terms of the solution's breadth and depth of cloud support, we're not using cloud yet. In government, we don't want to have the latest and greatest and the shiniest thing. We have to be very careful. In a private company, somebody just says, "Okay, let's go cloud," and that's it. Next day everybody is in the cloud. But we have to be accountable to taxpayers and we usually have to justify the expense. Decisions are not made that fast, so we are not in the cloud yet.

We have not tried or simulated a disaster recovery scenario. It's something we have to test. We tried once and we killed the network and everybody complained, so we had to stop it. We have recovered the files here and there when people say, "Oops, I just deleted this file. Can you recover it?" But a whole disaster recovery is something we have never done, and I hope we never have to.

There are five administrators of it in our organization while a couple of more use it to move VMs from one place to another. There are three more on the SAP team who use it to push backups to us, and three more from the DBAs. We don't back up laptops or desktops. Our end-users don't have access to this, nor do our other IT teams such as the applications programmers. They have to come to us to restore something.

It works fine when it works. It's a good product but it takes a lot of effort to support it. I don't know if it's because we didn't implement it correctly or if it's our infrastructure or the product, but that's my general impression.

How we implement this solution in a government institution is a little tricky; it's more closed. One of our most important use cases is how we protect and back up documents and files from users outside of our building because we must follow security standards. We use only HTTPS protocols, a special proxy server, etc.

The solution helps our admins minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and to spend that time on other projects. It's not easy to calculate in minutes, but we have found that it's approximately 80 percent faster to do a backup and restore if we need to.

Using Commvault, we have saved on infrastructure costs. Before, we had a few other solutions for backup. Each of them asked for a data store for storage space. Now, with one solution, we have reduced the amount of hard disk storage in our platform. And with Commvault, the file compression is much more efficient than with other solutions. We currently have 50 to 60 TB in our data set, for the entire ministry with 350 users. Before Commvault, we used much more. I would estimate we are saving 60 to 70 percent of the storage we used to need.

I have also cut more than 50 percent of my daily tasks as a result of Commvault. I don't need to worry too much about backups because I know the system will do everything by itself. Every morning I get reports from Commvault and, if there is a problem, I will get a notification in my email. So it allows me to work on other things.

For now, we are very lucky that we have only needed the solution to restore some clients' data. Only once in the three full years that we have been using it did we need to restore our main mail server. There was a problem with the Windows update where the machine would not patch the Windows update and everything crashed. With two clicks we were able to restore the machine live, so we did not have to reinstall the machine. And a few times, Commvault has enabled us to restore a user's data set.

The most valuable feature is sharing data sets like they're in a private cloud. We call it our "private cloud" because we can share anything that is inside our backup set with our colleagues or with other people, and yet, everything is still in Belgrade, in Serbia. It's not somewhere else on cloud servers. Everything is in our environment. For example, our inspectors exchange data between themselves, so they put everything in one folder and anyone with rights can see it. That is a feature that we use very often.

Another important feature is the protection against ransomware. If an employee gets a virus on their computer we will not worry about it, or if their computer is hit by ransomware, their data will be protected in the backup. That feature is very nice.

In addition, there is a new feature for GDPR regulations and protecting personal data. We don't use it fully because it's new and we are still experimenting and trying to make things easier for all of us. But we could say, "Okay, this database has some personal data in it so please do extra tracking, ask for more credentials, etc., to be sure that nobody can reach that info unless they're supposed to. That is a very nice feature.

The Commvault Command Center is good. Even when I'm not in the office, I can track and see that everything is okay with my system. The Commvault team uses it for protecting our make system and to make it better. They see the health of the system, what features we use often, or not, to help with right-sizing the software.

Overall, we like the fact that it's a single platform for everything. We have one console that has everything that we need. We can add or remove users, retire a user, add a new server, or even start a backup by itself. We don't need to go to the client's site to fix something. We can do everything from the console, wherever we are. If we need to restore a client's computer, we don't need to go there. It can be done from a local PC. We have 22 locations in Serbia, so it's not possible to visit all of them in one day. We can do everything from our console. The only requirement is that that computer is on, and we can do everything from one place. And with one click we can start a backup procedure for any server we want.

As a government office, we think about protecting personal data. Serbia is part of an open government partnership, which is a global project. Commvault should think about protecting open data, especially if there is personal data involved. Perhaps they could divide the data and say, "In this database is personal data and you cannot use it in an open data format."

And they can always improve the interface design to make it easier. Sometimes, you need to click two or three times to do something. They should look at what tabs are used most and make them more accessible, to cut the time it takes to get to that information.

I have been using Commvault since 2015.

We started by testing the solution with a local company, one of Commvault's local partners, here in Serbia. We first wanted to test how it would really work in our environment. After that, we procured it at the beginning of 2016. So in the summer 2016, we officially used it with our license. Before that it was just testing, tendering, procurement, etc.

Every type of software, even Microsoft, has some problems. It's not possible to make something without some patches or little bugs. But until now, over the years we have been using it, we haven't had any big problem where we said, "Oh, this is not working." We have had some problems and opened tickets and support has helped us very fast. 

We can say we are generally happy with Commvault. It's not possible to expect to buy something and never have a problem with it. That's especially true when you add something new; it depends on your hardware environment. It also depends on your network and your users' backup behavior. It's not possible that something will be perfect.

For our use, it scales well. They have many solutions, both on-premise and now, with this Metallic software as a service, you can use it on the cloud. So it's scalable. You can choose what you need and deploy it. 

As a government institution, we are not allowed to use public clouds. Everything must be in our data center. We can mix in a hybrid solution of private clouds and on-premise, but for now, we only use on-premise.

If we need something, if we have any problems, we can open a ticket and their support will help us, and they do very well. We must send an email to our local partner describing our problem and that we need Commvault support. They send it on our behalf to Commvault. Then Commvault opens a ticket. It's not possible for us to open a ticket directly. We need to go through our local partner. That path works for us.

We're happy with the support we receive from our partner. If it's something smaller, they try to fix it by themselves. But we usually open a ticket, in case something has happened or just to have the possibility of tracking all changes.

Commvault also has a very good portal where users, before opening a ticket, can try to find solutions. If others have had a similar problem, we may learn how to solve it.

Before Commvault we had other brands. We use Acronis Backup among others. We wanted to have just one solution for all our needs: for servers, for SQL Server, for laptops, etc. Our partner suggested we try Commvault and we saw that it was a good solution. It really helped us in dealing with backups, so we chose to buy it. Especially when you have public procurement, you cannot say I want to buy this particular solution. So it is tricky to do public procurement and get what you really need.

Our requirements included having one console for all systems. Before, we had Acronis for servers and we had Backup Exec for clients and we had Windows Backup for Windows servers, etc. So the main requirement was to have one place, one console, from which to manage everything: laptops, PCs, servers, databases, and everything. That was the main reason we wanted Commvault.

The second requirement was because we have employees who are outside of Belgrade; they are not sitting in our building. We needed the possibility of backing up their computers, computers that are not in our primary network. With Commvault we managed that very easily.

We now back up more than 70 PCs from our inspectors all around Serbia. With one solution we back up all of them. That was most important because people lose their computers and some computers crash. It was very necessary to have the possibility of protecting their data with a backup solution.

There were other factors as well, like having a partner in Serbia. Also, if we wanted to add new functionality we didn't want to have to buy other software or to experiment. We wanted to be able to just buy a license for the additional things that we needed.

For me, the initial setup was not so complicated, because I'm an IT guy. I understand what is needed. But if I look at it from the point of view of someone else, it's still not too complicated. The documentation is very well written and tells you what you need to do next. Of course, you need to know some rules about backups, but the installation is usually done by guys and girls who are in that field. A regular user will likely never install Commvault by him or herself. And even though I am not a technician and I am not a backup engineer, the setup was okay for me. I was able to understand what the system was asking and what I needed to do.

In terms of how long the deployment took, we tested it just to see if we could back up a part of our database. We have two networks. One is the primary, official, and public network, and the other has secret information. So we tested backing up both of them. Including testing, the deployment took around two months from zero to putting everything on. That also included deploying it on our system, connecting it with our storage, our databases, and installing it on some clients to see how the clients work.

Our implementation strategy for Commvault was very simple: Do it fast and secure all the information we need. We needed to back up everything we had. We just wanted to do it correctly, by the book, and to protect everything.

We used a local Commvault partner, Fractal Dimension, to deploy everything. They also provided some courses on administrating it in our institution. They did everything from the beginning to the end.

I have known Fractal Dimension for a very long time. We have worked with them on other projects here in the ministry. When we were looking for a backup solution they said, "Let's try Commvault."

I hope we have seen a return on our investment but it's not easy to measure in money, because we haven't had any big problems or lost any very important data. But generally, the ROI comes from not having to worry about these things. That may be the best return on our investment. I know that if there is a problem, I'll be able to restore without problems.

It's not cheap but it's not too expensive. We have a yearly contract for support from Commvault. Of course, even for that, we need to go through a public procurement process, because there are a few Commvault partners in our country. Our yearly cost is around €20,000.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees. If we want to add a new feature or to buy new licenses for new clients, of course we have to pay more. The cost is based on the number of users and the amount of data. They sell it per terabyte.

We have a contract with Commvault through our local partner so that every year we enter into a new contract for the coming year for updating, upgrading, and support. That enables us to download and deploy every new version, service pack, and hotfix. The latest one is service pack 18 so that is what we are using. That was part of our requirements for a solution: to have the possibility of continuing with it, rather than buy it once and then stop updating. Our goal was to always have the newest version and to have support for tickets.

Whether the licensing model is cost-efficient depends. Government has needs that are different from the private sector. Banks and financial institutions, for example, have other needs. It depends on how they work with backups. Do they need a backup restored in five minutes or in five hours? For my system, if a computer doesn't work one day, it's not a big deal. But in a bank, if you cannot get your money in five minutes you get mad. But overall, the pricing is okay. For what you get, it's a good price compared to the market.

We only tested Commvault because our partner explained to us that it would probably do everything we needed. We spoke with them, had three or four meetings to explain what we really need and what our system looks like. After some weeks they came to us and said, "Okay, we think we have a solution for you." We only tested that solution because we didn't have much time to test others. It was almost the end of 2015 and we needed to budget for the next year.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Commvault is that if I set everything right, everything by book, I can solve any kind of problem that I may potentially get. I know some people using other backup solutions didn't set everything up very well or by the book. But that is why companies make documentation and say that if follow the book you will not have problems. If you try to escape that and to take some shortcuts, if problems come up, nobody will be able to help you. A good lesson is to just follow the rules, according to the vendor.

We not only use this solution to restore data, but when clients get a new computer we don't need to spend time transferring their data from the old computer to the new computer, because that data is already part of the backup set. First, we decide what we will back up.  We separate their private data from official work documents and we back up only what they need for work. So when they get a new computer, we don't transfer data. If they want to transfer their private data, they do that themselves. We just install the Commvault agent on the new computer and say, "Okay, this is that person's new computer. Copy their backup set to their computer. In a few minutes, depending on how much data they have, their data set will be in their computer. That is another good way for using the backup set in our system. Doing it this way, we save almost a whole day it would take to transfer the old data.

The time it takes to restore data, comparing Commvault and other solutions, is approximately the same. What does make it faster, in general, is that we don't need to install another application. We just install the agent and each user can log in to their account and can choose what they want to restore. If they don't want to restore everything, they can just select what folders they want to have on that computer. In that way, it's faster. Because the solution is user-friendly and we have created a user manual for our users with print-screen illustrations, even people who are not so familiar with IT can follow the manual. It's easy. We don't need to go there physically or explain on the phone to the person how to do it. They have the manual and they just click this and that and everything they want is restored as it was.

In our organization there are only two IT guys, me and another colleague, who work with Commvault daily, to see if that it's okay. Other people, once in a while, need to restore a file, if they deleted it by mistake. 

Clients only need to check things if they get an email notification that their computer didn't back up in a given period of time. We put that in place in case there is some problem. After 10 days they will get email notification that in the last 10 days their computer didn't back up and to check if their computer is turned on. When people go on vacation for more than 10 days, they will get that notification but they know it's because they are away that their computer is off. But if they are at work and get that notification, they call us so that we can track what's happened. But in general, nobody else uses it daily.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, I learned on my own what I need to know, for now. If I have a question, I call our local partner, or I will read through the Commvault forum to see if anybody has said something about the issue, to know in which direction I should look.

We use it on-premise because we are a government institution. In Serbia, by law, we cannot use public cloud for government institutions. We have servers and storage in our data center. For this year, we plan to expand it to create a disaster recovery location in another public institution. We will make a disaster location on their site and they will make their disaster location in our data center. We will buy Commvault HyperScale and, with our local partner, we will set it up so that in case our data center is offline, we will have another location where our data is available.

There is no reason for me to rate them other than a 10 out of 10. When you have support online, you really see what they do. They are fast. If you open a support ticket, they will call you within 24 hours to check and to organize a session. You share your screen and work together to solve the problem. They have good partners and they have good marketing. So Commvault is a 10, without any doubt.

This solution is mainly used for virtualization and Oracle data protection. The customers I work with use it to protect their machines and active databases.

It's a complete software that can protect all the main applications. Perhaps that's the feature I like most. The integration with the NetApp and other apps is also very nice.

I think the one thing that could be improved is the customer experience. The interface should be more user friendly.

The price could perhaps be lower as well.

I believe it's very stable. That's why the customers who buy Commvault stay with Commvault.

The solution is scalable, because you can add app features. It's very possible to scale.

We have four or five customers, so that's probably around 20 users. We are in a small country.

The technical support is very good. It was not very difficult. I had a bug and the Commvault supporter helped perfectly.

The initial setup is straightforward. We need one or two integrators to deploy and maintain this solution.

We evaluated other options, but Commvault is a very complete solution. In the end, it's a very useful tool. Our customers will already know Commvault. Their software always compares well with other vendors.

Perhaps, my best advice is to look for an integrator with expertise in Commvault to help deploy this solution. It's not that easy to install. It's not even possible after they all installed it. Customers should have someone with good expertise with Commvault to supply it.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

Customers who can’t afford storage on their on-premise servers can easily use the product to move to the cloud.

I like the Metallic Endpoint feature. Whoever has an Endpoint license can store unlimited data on the cloud. Commvault provides unlimited restoration for free. Other products have a limit on restoration. When we cross the limit, we must pay for restoration.

The product does not provide an option to save a copy of data on-premises.

I have been using the solution for three to five months.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. We have three to five customers using the tool.

Whenever we raise a ticket, the support personnel connects with us at the exact time that they committed to. I can rate the support team a ten out of ten without a doubt.

Positive

The on-premise solution is a lengthy one to configure. We can deploy the solution in three to four clicks, though. The product is purely cloud-based.

To deploy the tool, we must authenticate our email ID on Commvault. Then, we will get a link from which we need to generate a username and password. Once we enter that username and password, we'll get a region of the cloud where we need to configure the storage tool.

The solution is worth the money. Depending on the customer’s feasibility, they pay for the license every year or every three years. The evaluation is given for 30 to 90 days, which has to be paid.

A sales manager, a technical manager, a COO, one of my colleagues, and I handle Commvault in our company. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.