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Has the highest backup/restore granularity that I have seen in any data management tool
Pros and Cons
  • "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)."
  • "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."

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No.

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Commvault Cloud
June 2025
Learn what your peers think about Commvault Cloud. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and support?

A 10 out of 10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes. TSM and NetBackup.

What other advice do I have?

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

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
reviewer603831 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Consultant
Consult with the Commvault team for proper hardware sizing and take suggestions on implementation phases
Pros and Cons
  • "One-Pass (Archive) DataBase backup (Online Backup and Granular level restore), VM backup and restore."
  • "Endpoint backup."

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

Endpoint backup.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and technical support?

Good, a nine out of 10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No.

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

New licensing is easy and affordable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, Symantec, EMC, and HPE.

What other advice do I have?

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

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Commvault Cloud
June 2025
Learn what your peers think about Commvault Cloud. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
PeerSpot user
Unix&SAN team lead at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
A wide range of application-specific agents with very flexible options related to backup, recovery and data management.
Pros and Cons
  • "Well documented SQL views and customizable reports, together with scripts and workflows provides ability to automate processes and ensure proper controls are in place."
  • "Mostly controls, visibility, cost allocation."

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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

Also, pretty we 

What needs improvement?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.).

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

I cannot estimate ROI for backup/archive solutions.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Infrastructure team leader - senior infrastructure analyst, storage and virtualisation at a construction company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
One of the biggest features is the global deduplication of our data sets.
Pros and Cons
  • "The cloud integration is a massive win for us, giving us a single backup service for all of our on-premise and cloud systems."
  • "The new HTML5-based management portals are very nice, but do not yet have all of the features of the Java-based client."

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
SanjeevKumar5 - PeerSpot reviewer
SanjeevKumar5student at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
User

yes, it helpful to me.

PeerSpot user
Senior System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Leaderboard
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.
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is the ability to backup over the dedicated Fiber Channel directly from SAN."
  • "Bare-metal restore needs some work. It's not intuitive and seems to have been an afterthought."

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We've had no issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Veritas

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

Vendor, I was not impressed with performance of vendor.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Dan Gillman - PeerSpot reviewer
Dan GillmanSenior System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
LeaderboardReal User

We created a workflow using the Commvault Workflow and was able to automate a number of daily processes. It's a great tool and works as expected.

See all 5 comments
PeerSpot user
Systems Administrator at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
You can have deduplication on your primary as well as your secondary backup copies (tape, cloud, disk).

CommVault - Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances five times in a row.

Looking at the competition in the market, big names comes up; so how possibly CommVault has maintained this position in the last five years? Let us go over a few points that stands out in the Simpana 10 software suite:

1. Deduplication - this leads to a reduction in data being written to the selected storage for your backups. You can have deduplication on your primary as well as your secondary backup copies (tape, cloud, disk).

2. Bug fixes and hotfixes - Commvault has build their software from scratch; no acquisitions were made to build the suite up. We can therefore say that they have a very talented R&D and global team. Added to that their support centers operates around the clock from corners of the world, and for those with a support contract I must say you will be blown away by the number of things these support guys can actually teach you.

3. Partnership and integration: So how come CommVault push to the forefront its support for multiple platforms and vendors(storage etc)? I have been to a few CommVault events, webinars and have noticed how the list of partners have been growing; Software partners, hardware/storage, Cloud.

4. What else have we noticed about CommVault? Single software platform; right!

With Version 11 release this year, lets see what else Commvault has for us.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees
Vendor
NetApp E Series and CommVault Simpana

Data protection is a challenge for most organisations and many are very dissatisfied with their current solutions – common issues tend to be:

  • Point solutions are used for VMware/Hyper-V, physical servers, laptops, remote offices and archiving which increases complexity and costs
  • Purpose-Built Backup Appliances (PBBAs) are used, whilst they work well, they further increase the costs
  • Ever increasing amounts of data are becoming difficult to backup in the amount of time available
  • Tape backups can be unreliable, restores are slow and they are expensive to manage

To address the problem NetApp and CommVault have created joint reference architectures that consist of NetApp E-Series storage and CommVault Simpana software – just add virtual or physical servers and away you go.

So how do these joint reference architectures solve these issues?

  • NetApp E-Series provides:
    • Huge amounts of high-throughput and easy to expand storage, at a cost per TB way lower than PBBAs, that either negates the need for tape or keeps its use to an absolute minimum
  • CommVault Simpana provides:
    • A single solution to address all the above data protection use cases – managed from one console
    • An advanced software based de-duplication engine, similar to that found in PBBAs, tightly integrated with the data protection application
    • Advanced techniques for reducing backup times (i.e. source-based de-duplication, archiving, incrementals forever and array snapshots)

So we know it is good, but how much does it all cost?

  Hypervisor licenses Non-hypervisor licenses Replicated Disk Libraries Price
Small 6 CPUs 1 Tb 2x31 TB NL-SAS usable £23,000
Medium 12 CPUs 2Tb 2x103 TB NL-SAS usable £63,000
Large 24 CPUs 4Tb 2x181 TB NL-SAS usable £85,000

The beauty of this solution is that it includes two disk libraries therefore backing up to tape will often not be required, unless very long term retention is needed and even then it is likely to be very infrequent.

The above table is designed to demonstrate the affordability of the solution, in reality most organisations would want to customise both the software licenses and the amount of storage capacity to meet their exact needs.

Download the NetApp E-Series & CommVault Simpana datasheet to learn more.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. We are Partners with EMC and CommVault.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2256603 - PeerSpot reviewer
Commvault & EMC Networker, Avamar Backup Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
Provides helpful documentation and has good scalability
Pros and Cons
  • "Commvault provides the status of a backup or restore operation."
  • "The product's migration process and stability need improvement."

What is our primary use case?

We use Commvault Complete Data Protection backup and recovery.

What is most valuable?

Commvault is easy for auto-upload, auto-download, and push install and update capability. Also, It saves a lot of time by allowing us to restart the agent. We can do it all from a single console. The documentation on the portal is also beneficial. As we type in a search, hundreds of documents pop up without having a Google search.

Commvault provides the status of a backup or restore operation. It is a great way to troubleshoot problems and ensure that data is always protected.


What needs improvement?

The product's migration process and stability need improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Commvault Complete Data Protection for a year since June last year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The product's stability could be better.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Commvault Complete Data Protection is scalable. We are using a socket-based license.

How are customer service and support?

We communicate with our support partner regarding product-related issues.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Compared to Dell,  the push installations are much easier with Commvault. I used to have to log on to every server to install and deploy new clients, but with Commvault, I can do it all remotely. It saves me a lot of time and hassle.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is easy. The implementation took a few weeks for the distribution center. The agent installation is easy for clients and takes about 15 minutes. It requires one engineer and one architect to execute the process.

It is an easy-to-maintain product. From a backup failure perspective, backups are almost always almost successful. We have an issue with one of our distribution centers. For example, we have a command center and a Java console. When we perform a task on one of these consoles, it does not always reflect on the command center. It should be synchronized at all times. Our engineer has logged a ticket with this concern. It could be because we are using an older software version, but that shouldn't be the case. If I switch from plan A to plan B on one console, it should reflect on both consoles.

Commvault only needs one person who travels to different sites to provide support services. Each site has 14-15 services. So, the web push screen is assigned to one person per site.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The tool is cost-effective.

What other advice do I have?

The tool has the most difficult migration process compared to other products. The migration from our previous network to Commvault was a challenge.

Once the tool is set up, it works well. For example, recovering data from Oracle is much easier with Commvault. I don't have to manually search through every backup file to find the file I need. I can search for the file name or other information, and Commvault will find it. I rate it an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Commvault Cloud Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: June 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Commvault Cloud Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.