Commvault Cloud Reviews

We are using it for backing up all of these services in the full infrastructure.

The most valuable features are the ease of use, the graphical interface, and it's high speed.

The GUI is easy to use.

The compression and deduplication ratios are very good.

The price could be lower.

When I compare it with Dell EMC Networker, they have a feature called persistent binding, which means that the backup would be going through the fiber channels instead of the network. Commvault relies on the compression and deduplication ratio, although they could also utilize the fiber channels. Persistent binding is a feature that I would like to see in the next release of Commvault.

I have been using Commvault for more than one year.

I experienced instability only one time, but it was restored.

It's very stable.

It's scalable. That's why it's HyperScale.

We have four administrators in our company who are managing the infrastructure. 

Technical support is very strong.

When we made a paradigm shift after moving from the EMC network to Commvault, there is a difference when using both of the products. The other one is powerful but it's more complicated. This one is easier.

It's a Commvault HyperScale model, which is easy to scale.

If you refer back to the manual system, it's straightforward and the architecture is very easy to understand. Implementation is easy.

It's based on a HyperScale with three different nodes running on a RedHat operating system.

The price is not cheap, but when you compare it to the other products they are all almost the same level in terms of price.

If we compare with other products we can recommend Veeam. 

Veeam and Commvault are almost the same but Commvault made an announcement EMEA and Commvault now have a fully managed product and they have a backup as a service with unlimited storage. 

We are also evaluating Barracuda.

At the moment we are evaluating the additional features in terms of Office 365, backup, and SharePoint to analyze the differences.

Overall, this is a unified solution and it's wonderful.

I would rate Commvault a ten out of ten.

We are a solution provider and we offer Commvault to our customers.

In my company, we are also using it for backup and recovery.

The price should be reduced because it is too expensive for our customers.

I would like to see a more user-friendly GUI.

I have been working with Commvault for between five and six years.

This is a very stable product.

Commvault is scalable. We have about seven or eight engineers 

The technical support is very professional.

In the past, we have worked with similar solutions from competitors such as Dell EMC.

I found the installation easy because I have a lot of experience with backup solutions.

My advice for anybody who is looking at Commvault is that it is better suited to larger businesses.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use Commvault as our main backup solution.

Commvault is also a very reliable backup solution; this is one of our main use cases. There are several other use cases, but backup is the most dominant feature.

Our organization has between 500 to 1,000 employees. The IT department and a few admins use this solution.

Commvault has a very extensive report section, at least in the Java console and web console. There is a transition being made from Java to a web console currently, which offers a more sophisticated, more advanced, and more modern interface. 

I have been using Commvault for over eight years.

Commvault is both very stable and scalable.

The technical support is very good. We don't get direct support from Commvault as our first line of support; there is an intermediate organization that is very capable, who are masters, the highest degree of admins — they provide us with support. If there's any problem or any advice that we need, they are always available to support us.

The initial setup is rather complex, especially when switching versions.

The price could always be lower. I do not have the exact pricing information but I know it's not cheap.

We would like to evaluate other options. Other products could be more suited to our needs, but currently, we don't have the time to evaluate other options.

Think about your backup strategy before you begin making a blueprint — that's very important. Do not deploy it and then try to change it. This will only lead to unnecessary difficulties. What are the needs of your organizations? RTO and RPO are also very important. If you want to switch versions or solutions once it has already been deployed, it's not impossible to do so, but it's going to take some serious time and effort.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

In every product, there is always a balance between the features and how you use them. This solution provides many options; however, If you want to understand and use all of the features that are available, as there are so many, it's going to be quite difficult. I think that's quite common with every application: you use a specific set of features that you're used to and which are easy to use. There are almost too many features; it's almost too much for an admin to handle — It's just overkill. 

A more simplified interface or front-end would be more preferable. This is not to say that the back-end should be easier, it can be complex. Moreover, it needs to be complex to satisfy demanding customers.

So far we have tested the backups, add-on based backups and VM-based backups, as well as snapshot-based backups. We have done restores, file-server backups, and object-based restoring. We have done database backups as well.

DR is the most important thing. For other things it seems comparable to other backup solutions, but right now, we do not have any DR site. Using this, we are planning to set up DR.

Restores and backups seem very fast.

The site setup also seems good. We have only done one or two servers in two locations and it seems fine. This is important for DR, so that if anything happens on one side of the system, at least we have another site that we can make available for our service.

The solution’s user interface for managing the on-prem environment is good. 

The Command Center is pretty good. It provides us with a view of the main features and main areas, but they might be able to do things better. For example, are there any particular issues on a backup — to get everything on one tab. At the moment, we have to go to different tabs. It would be helpful to get the main notifications in a single dashboard.

Also, in the restore field, I couldn't find a separate option to restore the permissions only. I have to restore the complete data. Suppose I am restoring a particular file. If I want to restore the permissions only from that particular folder, that is not possible. I have to restore all the data for that particular folder. If there was an option to just restore the permissions, that would be better.

Right now we are testing this solution in a PoC. We have been testing it for around one month. We have done most of the test cases, but we still have some test cases to finish.

We have not done cloud-based testing yet. Perhaps after we finish the failover testing, we will start with that.

The stability is good. Compared to Veritas it is good.

The solution seems compatible with almost every platform, including VM Hyper-V, and most databases, including SQL, MongoDB, and Postgres.

Currently, we are using Veritas, and I have also used Veeam in the past. Veeam is a good product but I prefer Commvault for backup and DR.

The DR setup is a little better with Commvault, with the failover features that are available. Also, we have been having many issues with Veritas and their technical team has not been able to solve most of them. They have not found what the issues are and they are taking too much time.

The initial setup is complex because we are going to set up a DR and cloud. There are different networks in our site as well.

The deployment didn't take much time. Within a day to two days we had configured everything. But the test cases are taking time because right now we are working from home. We are connecting our systems remotely so there are some connection issues, due to our internet connectivity.

We have checked some other products, but we are not testing them because price-wise, Commvault is better than the other solutions.

If you need a better DR solution, this one is good. We will do failover testing: Where one site is down, the other site should automatically take over, so that everything will be available. If that works well, then this would be the main thing that I would highlight.

We use it mostly for backup and sell it to our customers. We are moving more into data management. Our customers also use it for data classification, it's becoming a major role. 

The previous version of Commvault was complex from a licensing point of view. Veeam is taking up the virtualization space. 

It helps my customers recover data and to replicate the data as well. 

Commvault software is a single platform where you can enable whatever you want to use, like endpoint protection. You can enable those licenses on a single platform screen. This is where I see the value ad. This is a single management tool.

With other products, you need to have different management tools.

They don't market their products well. They don't do a lot of marketing to enable them to move forward. 

It's a very good product. It works. If their marketing was great, the product would sell itself. It's harder because their competitors have much better marketing. Everybody knows Veritas and Veeam because they market well. If a customer chooses Commvault, it would be the first time they've heard of it. 

My company has been using it for the last five years. 

Scalability is great. In the new license model, I can scale it on the virtual environment. We are going to increase our Commvault center in our data center. The maintenance will increase. 

Their technical support is very good. I am very satisfied. I work with somebody who is connected to the development side as well so they make sure to implement changes if we encounter issues. 

Commvault is an enterprise product set and Veeam only started the virtualization layer. Commvault is already at the front. Veritas has a lot of appliances and Commvault only started doing appliances a few years ago. Veritas marketed their appliances aggressively but Commvault didn't. I think Commvault is moving into data management. 

It's not that easy to implement. It takes some time to implement and make it work. It was complex to implement and understand how to get everything correctly. 

Commvault changed their model to make it easier for partners and customers to understand. Before there were 16 licenses for one area but now they've made it easier to work.

Understand the way it works in terms of sizing and configuration. As soon as that is correctly done, it's not so difficult to understand. 

We are mainly using it for backing up our VMware environment, some file servers, and some SQL databases. We also use it for some replication.

Before Commvault we had one product for backup, one for replication, and a few consoles. That was hard to manage for the administrator. With Commvault it's just one product, just one license. It does not require a special, separate license for deduplication or other stuff. It's easy to manage everything now.

Commvault provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premises locations. We usually have daily, incremental backups and a full backup weekly. That leads to reduced storage space for our Commvault storage. It's saving us about 30 percent.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has enabled our company to accelerate growth. We have a database and there are some major changes that happen to it at the end of month, or sometimes the developers have done something to change it in a whole different way. Before they apply those changes, we take a backup with Commvault so if something has gone wrong with the update, we can always revert it back.

Also, because it has alerts enabled, the solution helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks so they can spend time on other projects. We don't monitor the backup system all the time. We only look at it when we get email alerts. If something has failed, then we'll look at what the error is and what's happening. There are daily backup reports configured so that at 10:00 am, every day, I get a backup report. It says what has been backed up and what has not.

In addition, we have had a few crashes of our VM environment and we have had to restore some VMs, as well as some files that have been deleted by users off our file server. We had another solution before, but that was before I started with the company. People say it was pretty crappy and that sometimes, when they were doing recovery, it took about eight to 10 hours for a VM. But with Commvault, the last time I did a recovery of a 500 GB hard disk with a VM, it took about one-and-a-half hours. That is good.

Finally, Commvault has helped by telling me there are outdated tools in the VM environment.

The most important feature is that everything can be controlled using a single console. That is the best feature of Commvault.

The user interface is a bit tough, to be honest, but once you get the hang of it, it's okay. In the beginning it was tough, but now I know what I'm doing. We had free training but after that, just to learn the interface took me four to six months. There are still things to learn because with every service pack there are changes. Service Pack 18 was recently released and there are some features that I haven't even seen yet.

I would like them not to push Command Center. It is good, but I would like them to enable all the features for the Java console. Some things are not in the Java console, like Office 365 agents. In fact, they are there, but one of the engineers had to show me how to configure it. It's not done the same as in the Command Center.

I have been using Commvault since 2018.

It's stable. 

Sometimes the Java console might not respond. It might happen one out of 20 times that the Java console might crash. And then we have to use Task Manager to end it and reopen it. Other than that, the server has never crashed nor has the database ever crashed.

We have actually moved into 365 recently. We had to buy some licenses but they agreed to give us some trial licenses for testing, but it is based on the user base. Commvault is supporting everything that we are doing.

The technical support in the India region is a bit disappointing, but after 6:00 pm it is switched to the U.S and European teams, and they are much better in supporting and understanding the issues and fixing them. Sometimes the Indian team is also good, but we don't usually raise a ticket until after 6:00 pm. If it's a small issue that doesn't cause any harm to the production environment, we will go to the Indian team and some of them are good enough to help us.

Our company switched to Commvault because it had some issues with recovering data and the recovery time was high. Also, the local support team for our old product was not available when we needed them. That's why they were looking for something new and they found Commvault.

The setup was straightforward. We didn't have many complications. When we had to install the agents on the servers, there were some issues with authentication with the SQL database, but that was from the database side. That was sorted and there was nothing much more than the usual administrative stuff.

The initial deployment took about three weeks because we had some complications with database servers. Some of them had to study the user account permissions. After that was sorted out, it was fine.

Our strategy was to install it on critical servers. After the vendor installed the physical servers for Commvault, we had to download about nine to 10 GB of their setup files. After that, they installed and there were some prerequisites to complete such as .NET. After that, it was pretty easy. Once we installed we had some local support. We also had to plan and provide retention periods.

We had support from the local distributor. They were very friendly and they were cooperative and concerned with our requirements. They addressed them properly. Overall it was a good experience. 

And they provided us with the training after the deployment. We played with our environment for two to three months after the deployment, and then they gave us the training. That approach was better because we had an idea about what we were learning. We had questions when we went to the training so it was very good.

Commvault licensing is a perpetual license so only the support is being renewed yearly.

I don't like the solution's Command Center. I don't know why they have pushed it. The old Java console is much better. Maybe it's because I was used to it. One good thing about the Command Center is that it has reduced the steps we have to take. If we had to do 10 steps on the Java console, it's been reduced to four or five steps in Command Center. But I'm confused about whether I'm doing things right because there are some steps missing. For a newcomer, Command Center would be good. But for me, I still prefer the Java console.

Currently, there is only me, as a system administrator, and another guy on the database team who use Commvault. That's all. We don't have many administrators.

We use it in the most traditional way: for backup and restore. We don't use it for all the other things that are also possible with it because we are quite a big company. We have all the specific tools we need for specific purposes.

We tested Commvault in the past for archiving, but in those days it was not really stable yet. So we selected other solutions for that.

We use Commvault on everything. We are using it in our own data centers but also in the cloud. We use Azure for most things, but we also are working on testing some things on AWS.

The benefits to our company are the performance and scalability and the willingness of Commvault to connect to talk with us about any requests we have for changing the product, and to do understand what we're looking for. If possible they also implement these things in quite a short amount of time. If a new feature is needed, or it should be doing A instead of B, they're always willing to listen to requests and build them. That's great.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has enabled our company to accelerate growth and drive innovation. We're using it in a traditional way but our resources and services are moving to the cloud. It helps that the way the product works, what we are used to doing in the traditional way on-prem, can be done the same way in the cloud. That makes it easier overall and makes the transition easier.

There are ways the solution helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks, but in some ways, the solution doesn't. But that's more related to our way of working and not related to Commvault. Using it saves us about 40 hours in a month, thanks to its automation features.

In terms of saving on infrastructure costs, in our environment that's not measurable because we have a dedicated platform and dedicated infrastructure for it. But we see the benefits of the deduplication. It's saving petabytes in our environment.

The backup and restore activities are valuable and being able to use it in a hybrid space. You can easily back up on-prem and restore to the cloud and vice-versa. The scalability is also good.

The solution's interface is easy to use. For manageability, it doesn't matter where the resource is coming from or going to. That's the great power of the Control Panel: It's easy to use and does not matter if you manage on-prem or cloud resources.

Commvault works quite well as it is. But we are an MSP, so for us it's fairly hard to customize it for branding it.

There is also room for improvement in the multi-tenancy and security. That's been a hard thing for us and for Commvault as a vendor. Sometimes it's hard to implement new features in multi-tenancy environments. The new features are great, and it's good that they are there, but they are not always usable in an MSP environment.

The solution's breadth and depth of cloud support are good but could be better. Some cloud features that are common-sense, especially on AWS, are not completely integrated yet in the product. They are a work-in-progress. Overall, cloud is moving and innovating also very fast. That also makes it very hard for Commvault to comply with all the new features. Sometimes a cloud provider like Microsoft changes something and a feature is broken in Commvault.

We have been working with Commvault as a backup product for about 12 years now. As an MSP, it's very hard to switch from vendor to vendor. But the solution also works great. We have no real reason to switch to another product at this moment. We are always looking at the competitors, but not all the competitors can comply with all the things that we need.

It is very stable. We have some little issues with it, but when we have issues they're always related to the application we want to back up, not to the product itself. We ask a lot of the product; we use it in a fairly hard way on several things. Sometimes we hit the boundaries of the product and we encounter issues. But in day-to-day business, we don't see any real issues related to the infrastructure or the load we can give it.

It scales very well. If we need more capacity or more power for performance, then we add additional nodes without needing to do a complete redesign of the product or the environment. We can easily add extra power.

We have about 10,000 clients running with approximately 2 petabytes of data being backed up. That will double in the upcoming year to two years. We also have about 1,000 end-users of the product and most of them are doing restore activities.

Their technical support is very good.

But a hard thing for them is understanding how to work with an MSP. They assume, sometimes, that as an MSP, we have access to everything. But that's not the truth and it's not possible. That makes troubleshooting hard for us and for them as well. But they are quite fast in responding and try to help as quickly as possible. Still, most of the cases that we have with customer support need to be escalated directly to development.

We previously used an IBM solution. The main reasons we switched to Commvault were cost and complexity.

The setup of Commvault was complex but that's related to our environment. As an MSP we have very high security guidelines, so that made it hard. But that's not related to Commvault, it's related to our security environment.

Our deployment took almost a year. We had to make sure our design was good before we did anything. Most time of the implementation time was in the design phase. The actual building-up of the solution was quite fast. We were done in a month, starting from scratch.

For deployment and maintenance we need four to five people who are backup system admins.

We did it by ourselves.

We have seen ROI in several respects, but not as fast as we want.

We look at everything on the market. Every year to two years we do a new evaluation of the new techniques and products. We are always comparing it with Veeam, for example. We have Veeam running in several places. We test the two solutions and compare the results with each other.

Out-of-the-box, the manageability is one of the big differences. For end-users, sometimes Commvault is too complex and, while it's getting better and better with the latest versions, it is still not there. The most important thing is what my end-users say to me about using Veeam. It's very straightforward, easy-to-use, and does what it needs to do. Veeam and other competitors are point solutions. They are very good in specific situations and specific environments.

On the other hand, Commvault is a product that can manage a lot of things, and most competitors don't have the scalability and the large support-matrix for as many products, versions, and applications. Commvault allows us to use one product for almost everything. It's better than the competitors. We want to have everything in a single console, if possible, and that's what Commvault does for us.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Commvault is to take your time. Especially in complex environments, the design stage takes a lot of time, but you need to do it well. Otherwise, you will have trouble in your implementation. We learned that the hard way. We wanted it built fast but, when the design was ready, we needed to rebuild several times.

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.