Commvault Cloud Reviews

1. There are many features that I value Commvault for, but to name only a few:
2. Wide support for different OSS and applications. You can backup almost anything with Commvault.
3. Policy-based configuration, which allows for easily configurable policies for even larger environments.
4. Central administration: Management and deployment are done from one administration console. No need to login to clients neither during configuration nor during installation. Upgrades and SP installation can also be done automatically or manually from the administration console.
5. Great working global deduplication which saves a lot of space and bandwidth if you want to use replication. It can be configured as a source or target side.
6. Ability to easily configure data flows between primary and secondary storage using different storage (disk, tape, or cloud) with different policies for each storage.
7. Built-in reports provide better visibility with almost zero effort put into the configuration.
8. Great archive feature, OnePass, for the file system and Exchange servers.
9. Great stability and resiliency, and many others.

Licensing could be better explained. Sometimes, it's unclear what features are available in different licensing models.

If you set it right at the beginning, then it basically just works with very little administrative effort.

Commvault scales great in a scale-up and scale-out manner. E.g., if your backup server (MediaAgent) isn't enough anymore, you can simply add another. Same goes for disk space and other resources.

Very good. Guys from tech support are very quick to respond. On average, I had my issues solved in a day or two.

I use other solutions (TSM, Veeam, etc.) and Commvault is my number one for ability to easily manage very complex environments with very little administrative effort. Also, resiliency is it's strong advantage, i.e., if you backup SQL DBs with Commvault and someone does a backup outside of Commvault, it will automatically convert the next job (whether log or differential backup) to full where other solutions could simply fail.

Another great example is when doing VMware backups, Commvault automatically discovered hosts affected with a known CBT issue (in v6.0) and turn it off, where needed. This is the difference between just having a backup and having data that you can count on if you need it.

Initial setup may take some reading, but can be done pretty quick in simple environments. The administration console may be overwhelming at first look, but is very easy to use after some practice. I would say that given so many features and options hidden behind it, it is a job well done.

Evaluate different licensing models before buying. It can save a lot of money.

Commvault is very committed to their product, so with either a small or very large environment, you can't go wrong choosing Commvault.

Since our corporation is big, it was really difficult to back up specific data types, manage admin roles, have true visibility of where my data was stored and whether it was effectively being backed up.

Now, I know where my backup data is. I can leverage on cloud storage technologies as well and restore it with granularity level that I have not seen in any other data management tool.

There are a lot of good features. Here are some of them:

• Capacity-based licensing
• A very stable and scalable platform (you can backup/restore/protect a couple of MBs or hundred of TBs as well from the same console/platform).
• Relatively easy to use GUI
• You can protect/backup virtually any kind of data from virtually any corporate type application (in-house or commercial) from one management console.
• Has the highest backup/restore granularity that I have seen in any data management tool.
• An extremely fast search engine for restoring and securing data and is hardware agnostic so you do not depend on excessively expensive storage hardware.

Reduce the complexity for better understanding of the reports. There are a lot of variables in which you can get confused while elaborating on reports.

No.

No.

A 10 out of 10.

Yes, we used a different solution. We switched due to consolidation and cost effectiveness.

Straightforward.

Know which type of data you are going to backup/protect and select the most appropriate bundle for you.

Yes. TSM and NetBackup.

Try it. Think in functionality and solution rather than conventional big names believing that there is nothing better.

Let's take the example of 5TB file data. Out of 5 TB, around 3 TB data is non-usable (Achievable).

With Commvault, we run a single job as a one-pass job, it will run backup and archive in a single job, no need to run two jobs for backup and archive them differently. It saves my backup window.

One-Pass (Archive) DataBase backup (Online Backup and Granular level restore), VM backup and restore.

Endpoint backup.

No.

No.

Good, a nine out of 10.

No.

Straightforward, it takes 30-40 min to setup the server.

New licensing is easy and affordable.

Yes, Symantec, EMC, and HPE.

It's a good product, but consult with the Commvault team too, for proper hardware sizing and take suggestions on implementation phases.

We have covered all our important applications by backup policy and ensure that application owners are aware, how data is backed up and what RPO is expected, as well as cost of such backup implementation.

A wide range of application-specific agents with very flexible options related to backup, recovery and data management.

Also, pretty we 

Mostly controls, visibility, cost allocation. Other general features like backup protection (via multiple copies), storage optimization (like compression/deduplication, tape refresh etc.) were in place before we switched to CommVault.

Previously, with versions 8 and 9 yes. But starting from version 10 there were no major issues.

In general, no. But some features like context indexing and searching have some limitations, which should be considered from the very beginning.

Customer Service:

I would rate at 9 out of 10. Customer service is arranged pretty well.

Technical Support:

Depends on the topic. Issues related to configuration are resolved in a timely manner by first-line support. But if something needs to be escalated to development, it's really hard to predict when the issue will be resolved, even having BCS. The only way here is to have Professional Service in place, which is not reasonable from a cost perspective. Though, at the stage of initial assessment, first-time deployment or analysis of bottlenecks and potential issues/risks in future, Professional Service is definitely makes sense.

Overall rating: eight out of 10.

Yes, we had different solutions across locations. The decision was made to unify the backup solution across our branches. CommVault was chosen based on multiple factors.

Initial setup is pretty straightforward. But further migrations required a lot of effort (like DR setup, migration to another major version, migration of major components (CS/MA) to another servers, etc.).

We implemented in-house. Vendor (partner actually) was engaged during assessment of our environment before major version upgrade. Professional Service was very valuable. Level of expertise was really impressive.

I cannot estimate ROI for backup/archive solutions.

Can't provide such advice. It highly depends on initial environment and estimated growth for year and more.

Definitely yes. I would not reveal other options we looked into but I believe everyone is aware of the top five backup solutions.

We have changed out approach to our ROBO backup solution. Utilising Commvault we can now automate the decommissioning of our remote project sites and convert these on-premise backups into Azure hosted VMs. This not only brings the service online faster for our users but also reduces the operational impact of our remote IT staff, as they now no longer need to manually manage the data into the cloud or our eventual archive platform.

One of the biggest features is the global deduplication of our data sets. AWE have deployed a disk-to-disk-to-cloud solution for our on-premise backups. The capacity savings of this approach lead to significant cost savings on the long term retention of data in the cloud for us.

We have also been very impressed with the integration with public cloud services. We have deployed our Commvault environment on-premise and into Azure and this has given us the ability to not only make use of cloud storage for long tern retention, but also achieve the same level of protection as our on-premise systems for our Azure hosted IaaS VMs. We have also deployed backups from Commvault in Azure to our Office 365 install base too.

The cloud integration is a massive win for us, giving us a single backup service for all of our on-premise and cloud systems.

I have also been very happy with the automated updating of the platform. Since we have been running the platform we have had around five service packs released. These are automatically updated after a period of time (we set the system to defer updates for one month). The updates run without service disruption and patches the central management system, the media agents and the client agents too. Compared to our previous vendor this is another huge operational saving for out IT staff and ensures we get to utilize the new features that are dropped with each new SP.

The new HTML5-based management portals are very nice, but do not yet have all of the features of the Java-based client. I’d like to see all of the features move over to HTML5 so that we do not have to use Java ideally.

We have had no issues with stability. The service has been running for 18 months with no loss of service due to the platform.

We have grown our initial, on-premise VM-only backup solution to cover all three of our on-premise datacentres as well as our Azure IaaS and O365 environments. This was easy to do and the central management tool set easily coped with our rapid scaling up to our entire estate.

Customer Service:

We have had excellent engagement with our account team and they have been very helpful in ensuring that we get the most out of the platform. We get regular contact and they are keen to listen to data management issues that we have and see how they can address them with the Commvault platform. This has led us to be engaged in a couple of Beta test programmes and get early access to new features in some cases that resolved our challenges.

Technical Support:

Very good! We have had some very good dealings with support. In the main, this has been around us securing new systems and tweaking policies to get the best result for our infrastructure. In most cases the person answering the call resolved the ticket first time. When calls were escalated, the response was fast and the issue resolved to our satisfaction.

We often had scale issues with our previous vendor deployment or found other solutions were better for a particular system and so would introduce differing technologies to address these challenges. This led us to have a large and awkward-to-manage backup estate.

The biggest driver for us was to get all of the backup services into one tool set and to get better control and visibility of our data estate.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The only complex part was seeding our initial backup into Azure as, at the time, we were not on Express Route. We set bandwidth limits for aux copies during the working day and allowed the copies to burst out-of-hours. This just meant it took a week or so for the initial seeding to complete but all subsequent incremental copies ran fine.

After implementing Express Route we changes our architecture to copy the data through Azure hosted media agents into Azure storage. This then allowed us to seed much faster, although we now use the Azure import service for migrating large archive sets when required, as this is the fastest/cheapest approach we have found.

We used a vendor team to perform our initial deployment (a single resource). The consultant was very knowledgeable on the Commvault platform and made good recommendations regarding policy approaches to the various services we were targeting. The consultant performed a handover to our internal staff and we complimented this with certified training courses for the team who engage with our backup solution the most so that they could take on the task of scaling the deployment to the rest of our estate.

We have consolidated all of our backup technologies into the single platform and reduced maintenance costs and complexity in doing so. The OPEX costs equate to around the same but the biggest value returns have been in addressing our scale issues, ensuring compliance with backup policies and a significant reduction in operational staff’s time to manage the estate.

There is now a subscription based licence option that, depending on your environment, could offer a more efficient method to licence the solution if you are OPEX cost driven rather than CAPEX. This was not a concern for our deployment and we implemented on perpetual licences which had more commercial value to our business.

Initially we were looking at Veeam, as our first challenge was to address our on-premise VMware estate. Although they had a good vSphere integrated solution, we found limitations in cloud and beyond the virtual environment to be an issue for us. This was driven form our desire to have a tool set which could encompass all of our estate and allow us to simplify management and compliance etc.

Take the opportunity when engaging the Commvault sales team to walk them through other data management challenges that you have. You’ll likely find that the "backup" solution that you were looking for might be able to address these challenges and provide you with a greater ROI. This certainly worked for us and we have several new initiatives being developed to get more even value out of our deployment.

Backups happen over night instead of 3 days. Storage for backups has been reduced by 60%.

The most valuable feature is the ability to backup over the dedicated Fiber Channel directly from SAN. There's no impact to the network or users.

Bare-metal restore needs some work. It's not intuitive and seems to have been an afterthought.

We've had no issues with stability.

As we have used and scaled out the product SQL integration with the companies automated scripts proved to be a challenge. The Work Flow feature is your only solution and therefor you end up with a mix of scripts then relying on the products work flow to run and return expected results allowing your scripts to then continue. Not a very clean solution yet.

Customer Service:

Customer service is very good. They called back within 10 minutes of a request. They understood the issue and resolved it.

Technical Support:

Technical support is also very good.

Veritas

Complex with several separate hardware pieces and software modules. Media Servers, SAN, Fileserver, Comm Servers, Fiber Setup etc. Not extremely hard but lots of parts.

Vendor, I was not impressed with performance of vendor.

If budget allows using the per socket license and not the agent based with per GB counter for Dedup is the way to go.

The amount of hardware required to run the software and do the heavy lifting is this solutions biggest downside. In a time of reducing hardware being required to then add a media server a comm server a SAN and storage server and another media server. Well it's a bit overwhelming. Package it and create an appliance already.

If SQL heavy plan to use the work flow for your automated processes that involve Commvault.