Commvault Cloud Reviews

Our customers use Commvault as a backup solution.

I work as a system integrator. We implement and support Commvault in our customers' environments.

We usually deploy the latest major release.

We can monitor, with normal detection, from the regular backup. We can determine whether it is suspicious if the client suddenly has major changes in their data.

The most valuable features are the integration with the storage center and support for most applications, databases, and security system platforms that exist on the market. 

The user interface for Commvault is quite user-friendly. It is easy to manage the Commvault environment using the user interface.

Commvault Command Center is fully supported and has many features for us to manage the environment.

Commvault is able to do the recovery process from their console, so we don't have to actually log into it. Also, Commvault can direct information to another server. The recovery option is a very good feature.

I can collect the target data, then we connect it to Commvault. There is not another system that can connect to our target database or target storage. This is very important for us, because there is the threat of malware right now. This can protect not only the product, but also the backup data from outside threats.

Commvault supports remote office backup. It backs up the local data, then keeps monitoring and managing it.

I would like Commvault to have a feature for cybersecurity threats, e.g. securing the target backup repository. Commvault just started testing and releasing this feature, but it needs to be stabilized. 

We have been implementing Commvault for our customers for around three years.

Commvault is very stable.

Commvault is very scalable in terms of the data that Commvault can maintain.

Commvault support is very good and helpful. We receive a lot of help for our problems.

Positive

The deployment of Commvault is pretty straightforward. Commvault can do remote installation for the client. The deployment time depends on the customer's or user's permissions.

One of my customers has seen savings when using Commvault compared to other storage solutions. They compared the price of Commvault with performing maintenance on their backup system, and Commvault's price is competitive versus other backup software.

Commvault helps our customers' admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and other projects. Commvault is very good in terms of performance backup. I think support time has been reduced by around 25% to 30%.

Commvault is quite high in terms of pricing and licensing.

I have also worked with IBM Spectrum Protect and Veeam. Overall, Commvault has better support than other backups. Their support is very fast when resolving our problems.

My customers use dedupe applications, so we don't use Commvault's feature to reduce storage costs.

Commvault is very feature-rich. Its licensing is quite easy to configure, though we must pick the right size for the backup environment so the customer can have the best price.

I would rate Commvault as eight out of 10.

We are a solution provider and we have contracts with some of our customers to support their data centers and infrastructures. Our support is based on their needs and we choose solutions for their environment. One of the products that we use in this capacity is Commvault.

Commvault is an enterprise-level data platform that is used for backup and replication. It offers four product lines including complete backup and recovery, the HyperScale integrated appliance, disaster recovery, and Activate Analytics. We use the backup and recovery solution.

Commvault provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover data. Most enterprise solutions in this area provide similar functionality but the Commvault GUI provides better reports and access to your assets. All of the features have been integrated within one interface. On the other hand, Veritas has third-party solutions that generate better reports and offer better control over your environment, such as OpsCenter.

In terms of recovery options for data and workloads, Commvault has several features available. An important feature is that you can recover data based on your policy. It also provides the capability to back up and recover specific types of data, such as an SPS server.

The next step, after having a good backup solution, is disaster recovery. This has to take into account the software that you are using in your environment and Commvault can help with this in some aspects. For example, it can replicate your SQL servers on your disaster site. In a regular recovery scenario, I think that most backup solutions are the same.

This solution allows us to easily isolate storage targets from public networks. When we implement our backup solutions, the first step is to separate the network. We create a private network and we use separate storage for the backup in order to isolate all production services from backup services. It is very important to separate the working area because of ransomware and other threats.

Commvault also has other features to protect backup data but I prefer to have a separate backup environment with its own equipment. All of it should be physically separated from the production area. One service is for production data and the other is for backup data.

Separating the production and backup data not only helps with attacks but also helps to manage performance. In IT, we are always faced with two important metrics, which are security and performance. Using physical isolation, data protection is improved, and I prefer to use physical isolation rather than logical isolation that is available using the software.

Using this type of configuration, we were able to successfully recover data for one of our customers. They were faced with a ransomware attack and had lost more than 40% of their data. We were able to completely recover their data in less than three days.

Like other enterprise backup solutions, Commvault is very well suited for enterprise-level customers.

Commvault integrates well with all types of operating systems and supports heterogeneous environments. It integrates well with storage solutions such as NetApp, and we haven't had any trouble integrating with hardware such as tape drives or otherwise.

I like using the command-line interface versus the GUI. I find the CLI is easy to use for customizing and generating reports, as well as for managing the software. That said, I think that the GUI is enough for many administrators in a simple environment.

The support documentation is good. Based on the help and documentation, I have been able to generate scripts that I run on a daily basis to get the reports and features that I need.

The deployment process should be simplified because it is not something that just anybody can do. 

One of my colleagues in Australia is using Commvault and has told me that the solution does not yet have complete support for integrating with cloud providers. Specifically, it is not integrated with Amazon services. In the future, I would like to see better integration with cloud environments.

Commvault is only installed in our Windows environment, on Windows server, and I prefer to use Linux because I find the environment simpler to use. In a Windows environment, it is not easy to use command-line-based products.

There are two people on my team that manage Commvault for my customers. It is supposed to be one of the least time-consuming solutions but in reality, it consumes 60% of their time. Compared to other backup solutions, it takes more time to manage and operate.

Commvault doesn't support container-based systems and does not offer agentless backup.

I've been using Commvault for one of our customers for less than three years.

Stability-wise, Commvault is one of the best backup solutions on the market.

This product is scalable enough, although it will be complicated to do, depending on your environment. Veeam, for example, is not as complicated to scale. The same is true with Veritas NetBackup.

I think the reason for this is that Commvault is installed only in Windows environments. Veritas NetBackup, for example, can be installed on Unix or Linux, and those operating systems are easier when it comes to scaling. Most software depends on the features that are available in the host operating system.

We don't have access to support due to sanctions, so the support and management are done by our local engineers. It is difficult for our customers to use this type of software without support.

I have worked with other similar solutions including Veritas and Veeam. Veeam is easier to implement than Commvault, although Commvault is quicker to deploy than Veritas.

Veeam is suitable for a small business but when it comes to enterprises, Commvault is one of the solutions that we implement. Generally speaking, Commvault Backup and Commvault Complete Data Protection are good solutions for enterprise-level companies.

Veeam is easy to use and is easier to implement but we do not only deal with small businesses. Most of our customers are enterprises and we have to select the best solutions for them. Other disadvantages to Commvault are that it doesn't support container-based systems and agentless backup is not supported in this software. However, it is more powerful when it comes to integrating heterogeneous environments.

Commvault is not a product with an easy deployment process. It is not something that just anybody can do on their own and it is best suited for enterprise users. Documentation is available online but other similar products, such as Veeam, are easier to implement. There is not enough documentation for Commvault available online.

One of my customers implemented Commvault in less than one month, which is not bad compared to other enterprise solutions like Veritas. An enterprise often includes complexities such as a heterogeneous environment, so a deployment that takes less than one month is quite reasonable.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Commvault is to make sure that they have a support contract. Support is very important, as this is a time-consuming product when it comes to management and regular maintenance.

In summary, this is an enterprise solution that you can trust in your environment for backup and recovery. In fact, it is one of the top 10 backup solutions on the market.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I use it for backing up the database of our Microsoft People server system.

Commvault has saved us time in managing our backup and restore processes, as well as backup management. It has definitely made our backup administration more efficient.

The most valuable feature is the ability it gives me to automate backups well and consistently, and to follow up on them as well. It also provides consistent recovery processes. Whenever we have needed to do a restore, it has worked quickly and efficiently.

The completeness of Commvault's coverage for databases is also pretty good. It covers all the bases with the major databases that we utilize within an enterprise.

I also like it because it's pretty easy to use and that it is pretty reliable. The user interface for managing it is good.

In addition, it auto-discovers the databases and that means lower maintenance on my side for individual database configuration.

There are two ways to use it and I prefer the web-based one over the app. I wish they were a little bit more matched in what they offer because the features aren't as available in the web-based interface as they are in the app.

I have been using the Commvault solution for about two years.

It's pretty stable.

It seems to be scalable. I'm not really involved in that side, being a user and not an administrator of it, but I know that they've had to add on and do upgrades to it. It seems to be working well. I haven't seen any disruption from that.

I use my internal company support team and they reach out to Commvault as necessary.

We were using Dell EMC NetWorker. We switched due to bad support and because we were having lots of issues. They were also slow in keeping up with the technology.

In general, I would give Commvault a thumbs-up. Make sure your people are involved in the procurement process so that they understand what it offers, and be sure to do PoC testing. But that's generic to any implementation.

Because my work with Commvault isn't necessarily technical in nature, it's more process-oriented, people in a similar situation should work closely with their administrators to make sure the admins understand what they need to do. The problems that we have with it are mostly to do with internal workflow.

The Command Center for getting a view of your data is okay. We have some internal issues with the way that the people who manage the system display things to us and give us access to certain things. But otherwise, it's okay.

We are doing backups for a customer's 365 tenant details. This is for 365 backup and recovery. The applications that it protects with backups include: all the details on 365, SharePoint, Team, and mailboxes.

Our client does the needed backup within our required window. We have a daily backup at 11:00 every day. We have not felt any pressure or performance issues with our 365 tenant.

The restore has been great. It has been faster than doing restores with the on-premises solution.

Quick backups and restores of data are the most valuable features. It is important that it is an easy solution to integrate with the SAML authentication of the tenant, so we can have the users log into the systems and do their own restores, if needed.

Metallic's backup & granular recovery of data for Office 365 works great. We have tested it many times for production reasons. We have done some tests and have always managed to do the recovery as we wanted and without any issues.

For simpler environments, they have some templates for startups. Possibly for a smaller environment, they need to do more automatic configuration and selections of users who want to do backups. This is mainly for smaller environments. I would like them to have the same system fit for all environments: small and big environments. Currently, we have to do a lot of configuration of the layout, which takes time. This solution is appropriate for enterprise-level enterprise, but I would like it to be easier to use for SMB environments.

Less than half a year.

Up until now, it has been a hundred percent working great. So, it looks stable.

Our customer's environment is not that big, but it looks like it can easily handle a big environment.

We back up a little less than a thousand users, whom we are licensed for, and a lot of them are company employees. 

There are two sysadmins managing the solution. One of them mainly does the monitoring and getting the work on the system.

The technical support was good enough when we needed their help. They were available for assistance and gave us good support. They fixed the issues that we had in the system. 

When we looked specifically for a solution that would hold the backup on their cloud environment, Metallic Cloud was what we wanted. We didn't want to bring the solution into our environment, but we wanted the whole solution. Metallic was exactly what we were looking for. From my point of view, Metallic Cloud was the best solution that we could find.

Previously, the client didn't have backups for the 365 report. People who deleted their emails or files on SharePoint just lost them. So, this solution was quite important, because trying to do backups from an on-premise environment wasn't successful. It took a lot of time because of the low bandwidth over the Internet.

This solution mainly gives us backup functionality that the client wasn't able to do before. It is saving them a lot of bandwidth over the Internet and giving them functionality that they previously didn't have, such as, backups to their 365 tenant. They save 150 to 200 Mbps for nightly backup runs.

Most of the important things were straightforward. It was quite easy. It is a SaaS-based, web-based configuration. It is very simple and easy. You learn by some kind of runbook, step-by-step. That's it.

In a couple of hours, we finished 80% of it. Over the next couple of days, we did a couple of tunings.

We did a PoC at the beginning. We weren't sure that we were going to purchase it because we didn't have experience with this product before. So, it was a testing environment first. When the test environment went well, we just went into production. We went from PoC status into production status. 

After we decided to move to production, we decided what would be our guiding rules for system backups, e.g., what would be the policy that we would have to decide internally. We had a small discussion about what we wanted to back up, what was the policy, who should do the management, and who should get the report. It was some type of late policy implementation after the product was already working in backups because we just moved from PoC to production immediately, which was easy enough.

The first backup is always long and takes a lot of time. After that, the daily incremental backup speed is quite fast.

We had some small issues, but we received good assistance from their support to fix those issues. The issues were mainly report type issues and changing it from HTML to PDF. These were very limited, small issues. I think they were related to small bugs in the versions. The support was helpful. So, we just got support for the issues that we had encountered during our implementation. Otherwise, we did the implementation ourselves.

One and a half people were required for the deployment, one of the system engineers and myself (as CISO of the company). I did most of the configuration, then one of the system guys helped with the SAML configuration of the Azure tenant.

Metallic has reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our client's backup operations. It is reliable. We trust it and don't need to monitor it as much as another backup. This is quite labor-intensive, manual work, so it saves our technician time. It is saving us an hour or two a day.

It is not the cheapest solution. I think the pricing is fair for mid-side customers. It is between all the other options.

Costs are fairly predictable because you pay per user. It is quite easy to do the calculation.

If you have different use cases in the 365 tenant, I am not sure that the product gets the full agility of those licenses. If I want to do backups for just some of the users, I still need to do a backup for the full SharePoint and have a full license for all of the users who use SharePoint. If there could be a higher variety of license type for this that reduces the cost, that would be a nice functionality.

We were looking for a backup solution to do backups for all 365 data as well as SharePoint, Teams data, OneDrive, and mailboxes. We wanted all the data located on our 365 to be robust from one side, but easy enough to manage from the other side, not complicated, and reliable. After we did the PoC with Metallic and found it a suitable solution, we decided to keep working with it.

We mainly decided to use Metallic because Commvault has a good solution on-premises. We know Commvault as a company. They have a good product and we have a good relationship with them. Commvault is in Israel, so we decided to try the cloud product in the environment, and it was good.

We did PoCs with all the options that we evaluated. We mainly checked the supported functionalities and eliminated those that did not support our required functionality. In the end, we had two options and decided to go with Metallic.

I would give Metallic's overall ease of use as an eight out of 10. It is not too complicated. It is quite easy to use for people who are familiar with Commvault. They can understand the language pretty quickly. If you have Commvault on-premises, which we have for the same customer, you can understand the language of the solution pretty quickly.

Know what policies you need and what you want to back up beforehand. If you are planning to do backups of a few users, and not all your users, research the type of applications you need to do backups, e.g., if you need SharePoint, mailboxes, or OneDrive. Each of these applications behaves differently regarding license activities.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect, but it is a really good product. There were only small issues/bugs that I found in the beginning, e.g., small report issues and it was a little bit complicated the first time configuring for SMB users, which is a bit more complicated with limited options. However, since we have experience with other products, it was fast. I don't know another SaaS product doing 365 backups better than Metallic. This solution is the best one that I'm aware of.

Generally, we use the product for backup capabilities as a primary function, and we also use it for disaster recovery.

Previous to this solution, we were on tape. Its restorations were very painful. We've been able to accommodate more use cases for restorations now that we have this product in play.

The backup feature and the live sync are both really good aspects of the product. Live sync is for databases. 

Commvault doesn't store in an immutable state unless it's in archive-form. That's an advantage. We have found several instances that we have backed up a server and it started encrypting data after we started the backup and it was trying to recount the Commvault. It is very sensitive, and is positive as is very sensitive to ransomware, however, you need to understand it's not a ransomware alert; you need to understand the alert in order to figure out if it's ransomware, however, it's a good heads-up.

The solution has been quite stable.

Commvault can actually come in and assist you with aspects of the implementation - and they are quite helpful.

The only problem is that some of what we snap most of is the VMs. We found about 10% of the VMs that we can't snap because they're too interactive. It actually causes the application to crash.

It would be ideal if there was usable file states. Live sync is not live sync. It's not really live, it's live to the back it up, however, it's not keeping it up to date within seconds. We have an environment that is very transaction heavy, and the lowest we can get to is about 15 minutes. However, we need second RPOs. 5 second RPOs, 10 second RPOs.

I've used the solution within the last 12 months. I've used it in total for about three years or so now.

The solution is very stable unless you have to use Symantec Enterprise Protection. That comes into major issues. We've had corruption due to Symantec.

The scalability capabilities depends on which version you get. If you go to hyper-scale, it's infinitely scalable. If you go to an IBM object storage, it's scalable only up until a certain point.

We have approximately 50 people that have access to do restores. Ten of those having the additional responsibility of initiating backups for databases. And we have one engineer and two administrators.

We're considering going to the hyperscale version and then expanding it to have it distributed through three sites.

We've dealt with technical support quite a bit. 90% of the time they're really good. However, the other 10% of the time they disappear when the problem is too hard.

Overall, I would rate them eight and a half out of ten. They are pretty decent.

We previously used Spectrum Protect.

There were ongoing configuration problems and they continued to increase as everything was a dependency. You had to have the client and the right version with the firmware updated to the hardware and the hardware to the right version. It was a very, very complicated mess. Once it ran, it ran really well. However, when you had to upgrade, you had to upgrade everything. You couldn't do some iterations.

The initial setup was complex only due to the VAR we used. That we have since moved all away from.

The deployment ended up taking a year and we called in Commvault to actually finish the deployment. We contracted directly with Commvault and got rid of that VAR. Once they were involved, it took less than a week. They really helped speed up the process.

We only need one engineers and maybe two admins to handle maintenance.

We brought on Commvault in the middle of the implementation process. They helped us get rid of the VAR, which was giving us trouble. They were good to work with and we were glad for their help.

The team was very great. They actually provided us an engineer and he engaged remotely for probably 30 hours of that week.

It saved time. It didn't pay for itself, however, it saved time. Where it saved a lot of money was the cost of tapes and maintenance contracts with IBM.

The cost was one of the reasons we went with Commvault, however, that said, I can't give exact pricing.

We looked at Pure Storage. I don't remember what package they had for backups. However, there was one other competitor as well and I don't remember who it was.

In the end, the technology and the cost pushed us towards Commvault.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are typically one version behind the latest. We don't usually have the latest version of the solution.

We're using a private cloud on-premises as a deployment model.

My advise to other companies would be to just do your homework. Make sure it's the right solution for your company. We really didn't think about enterprise architecture. We put it in and then had a change how we operate. So make sure it's the right fit.

Our biggest lesson was the realization was that we need enterprise engineering and the enterprise architecture.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. They have some really good features. They have really good engineering. They have very good support. However, they're missing on some of the innovations that some other companies are coming up with. They either need to create their own innovation or buy it from somebody else and integrate it. 

We primarily use the solution as a backup.

Our other solution deploys every agent on every single server, and then you back up that way. However, when you have to deploy to the APIs using the Commvault to their instance, due to the fact that we are a VMware shop, we are capable of leveraging the snapshot capability within the VPI. And then we back it up, the entire VM.

The license is counted as one VM. The other option is based on the capacity model. The cost on a capacity model is more expensive than the VM path model. That's why we switched. The functionality is very similar. 

The VSA, the virtual system agent backup, is the most useful aspect of the solution for our organization. Based on our use case, it cuts our costs significantly. Early on, when we had the software at one point, we were using the front-end data protection, the DPE model, with the licensing using an agent. Then, as the technology continued to evolve, they added additional features like the VSA path, VM path model and other things. We are switching from the DPE model to the VSA model. That helped us to eliminate some of the costs.

Once you get comfortable with the solution, it becomes pretty easy to use.

People are going to be very impressed with that kind of support that they get from Commvault. It's excellent. 

It's a comprehensive data management for all platforms. It works with multiple clouds and vendors.

They have a strong development team and are market leaders in the space.

With any product, there could be improvements made. 

I can't think of exact features that are lacking.

It's been a while, however, it's my understanding that they have new features coming out. 

Our cloud is still pretty old-school, I continue to use the console as the traditional admin tool for daily troubleshooting. In a newer version, they're using something called Command Center. I haven't played around with that yet. I heard that it's very sleek. At this point, the console is pretty dated, so it's good they're doing an update.

The Chargeback feature has recently changed as well. I haven't had a chance to explore it, however, I believe they've improved on it quite a bit.

The solution can be a bit complex for new users.

The solution needs better Office 365 data backup management.

I've been using the solution for six years now.

The product is very solid. They are the number one data management platform on the market. They are leading in that sense above the competition.

At this point, there are no plans for increasing usage right now. We are reducing our footprint on-prem and we've moved everything to Azure. Unfortunately, we leveraged some of the native protocols from Azure side. Commvault has gotten reduced. Due to that change,  the pricing or licensing that supports the functionality of it may be impacted a little bit.

While you can call support for anything, they have great online documentation that you can reference for assistance. It's easier to check out that before reaching out to them directly.

Their support is the best. They're worldwide, 24/7. I give credit for that. I deal with a lot of other vendors. Their support model is far superior. Once you open the ticket, if, after an hour, it's not resolved, you can click on it and another engineer will come online within the hour to assist, depending on the severity of the case. 

I'd rate them nine out of ten for sure.

At one point, we almost tried to switch to another vendor. However, due to the economic scale and other factors, we didn't move forward. We decided to stay with Commvault in order to leverage all the modeling and pricing, and we were able to accomplish what we needed.

Since I have worked here, the company has always used Commvault.

The initial implementation has a moderate amount of difficulty. It's complex at times, however, it depends on what it is. Once you know it, it's not that complex to set up. Overall, it is easy to use. It's not that difficult.

Deployment is probably just a couple of hours. In that time, you can spin up the environment and then you can set it up and deploy it and get a backup.

While we have a lot of users on the solution, I am the main person who handles the maintenance.

Most of the upgrades we do ourselves. In the cases where we have a major upgrade, we typically use a consultant. We did use a couple of consultants in the past for the upgrade. Early on, we didn't have the resource and personnel to handle everything. 

After using Commvault for six years now, I'm a bit more comfortable and confident in handling everything myself more and more.

We work directly with Commvault consultants.

The ROI comes from the fact that it's a solid product that works the way it is supposed to. When you need data recovery, it's perfect. That's your money's worth right there.

The licensing costs are determined on a yearly basis. It might be around $40,000 or $50,000. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Originally, we were on a private cloud, however, we've since moved to a public cloud.

I'd advise others that the implementation depends on the skill level of those setting it up. It's best to consult with the technical manager or the technical team. They can give recommendations. The costs are very reasonable. It may be only $4,000 or $5,000 for three or four days worth of consultant work. They handle the consulting remotely, not on-premises. 

Of course, if you don't know the answer to something at any time, you can always call support. That's for break/fix scenarios. For most other things, the online documentation will get you through.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten. We've been very happy with the product.

We use it for backup and disaster recovery. We protect Windows and Linux servers, Windows 10, SQL, and Office 365.

It has streamlined data recovery, via a SaaS solution, to provide overarching protection. Metallic has also reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our backup operations by about 20 percent. In addition, it provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements because the egress charges are known.

• The SaaS offering is the most valuable feature because it provides endpoint, Office 365, and core server backup.
• The overall ease of use is good. The user experience is very in-tune and they are constantly making improvements as a result of feedback from customers.
• Its performance for both backup and recovery, and security, as an enterprise solution, is good. Integration with Active Directory and the Azure platform make it a complete solution.
• It's very easy to set up the storage across all platforms. This allows us to be dynamic and change on-the-fly.
• Metallic is also very nice because you're not connecting to a VPN to use the endpoint recovery.

There is room for improvement in the Knowledge Base and error reporting. I would like to see best practices in the Knowledge Base, and have the ability to diagnose errors without contacting support.

I have been using Commvault Metallic for three months.

It's stable. I've had some outages over the last week, but overall, it's stable.

It seems very scalable. We have plans to increase our usage of the solution.

Commvault's technical support is responsive.

There are multiple systems in place. We're in the process of replacing them.

As for the process of switching to Metallic, planning goes a long way. It's at an intermediate level between simple and complicated. We did the free trial and it was easy to get going.

We went with Metallic because it's a SaaS offering. It was one of the few solutions that offered SaaS with their own storage.

After doing it, it's straightforward, but it does require a little bit of understanding. It's in the middle between straightforward and complex. We're still in deployment but the initial setup took about one month.

Our implementation strategy is to cover critical applications: Office 365, Windows 10, and both Windows and Linux servers.

I've ran into some issues, which has made the configuration interface for configuring the solution for data protection more complex, but overall, if the instructions work, it's very simple.

The Commvault Success team helped. Other than that, it was just me. Their team was responsive. They pride themselves on making the product work for the client.

In terms of administrators of the system, there is just me in my role of network engineer. The individual users don't log in. We're a small business with under 200 users.

We evaluated Veeam and Rubrik. The pros for Metallic were that the costs were up-front and that it was a SaaS with dedicated cloud storage for endpoint and dedicated cloud storage for Office 365, separating those silos.

The drawback with Metallic is that it takes a bit of work to understand the process for registering clients, but once you have it down, it goes quickly.

Take your time to run the trial and understand what you're getting yourself into.

The move from on-premise to a cloud solution is definitely a change. Be patient with the process and open to understanding the SaaS solution.

We previously had two different backup solutions, one that covered physical machines and another one that covered the virtual machines. We decided to go ahead with an enterprise tool and we chose Commvault to back up both. It's backing up more than 1200 VMs and more than 150 physical machines.

We can follow any backup or restore situation in a granular way: Who did it and which files were restored. If they did a local restore or if somebody restored to another server or another location, we can see it down to a granular level. We can follow each action, including all the administration actions.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has enabled our company to accelerate growth. With the migration from Veeam and NetWorker to Commvault, the whole environment has become easy for us because we have one tool. It has helped to accelerate the growth because it's easy to expand the whole environment. As soon as we have more data to back up, we can easily change the way we back up the data or increase the storage devices for that data.

It is also a single platform to move, manage, and recover our on-premise data. It's not only easy to manage physical and virtual machines, it's easy to manage where you want to put the data and where you want to recover the data. It's clear to everyone inside the organization.

Another benefit is that Commvault minimizes the administration time. Administration that I personally do takes about two hours a day for the whole environment, and that is about a three-to-one reduction.

The solution has also helped us to optimize infrastructure usage by reducing storage space. With the deduplication option, we have reduced the end storage devices we need significantly. We need 70 to 80 percent less storage.

We do regular restore and recovery tests, five to 10 times a month, for files, folders, and whole machines. We haven't had an actual attack or virus situation. In terms of the time it takes to restore data, at the physical layer, it's four or five times faster than it was when we used EMC NetWorker. At the virtual layer, it's about 50 percent faster than Veeam.

I've worked with backup software for the last 25 years. I know NetBackup, Tivoli, NetWorker (Legato), DataProtector (Omniback) and Veeam. I have found that I can cover all what we need with Commvault. 

The solution also provides us with a complete view of our data. I wrote scripts to report information from the Command Center daily.(A bunch of predefined reports are also available). I report them in HTML and have the status of the last day for the whole environment. Using the interface, I have predefined links to open daily or to send to my supervisors so they can see what's happening. They find it easy.

What I need is deeper CLI documentation for both QCommand and SQL queries.

I have been using Commvault for about 12 years. Starting with Simpana

When you talk about backup it must be stable. If not, we would change the tool.

We are increasing the capacity because we have an increase, on average, of about 20 percent a year. It's really scalable. With Commvault, you have a lot of possibilities. You can use your hardware or you can use dedicated hardware from Commvault. There are a lot of options for how you back up your environment. It's really good in this area.

One of the best points recently with Commvault is that it is a really good support organization. Overall, from one to 10, their tech support is between nine and 10. I used to place calls just to get know-how from the technicians, and sometimes because I really needed it. They always come back with fast and really accurate answers. It's really good.

As described before, we use NetWorker and Veeam and the idea was to consolidate the whole backup environment with ONE enterprise tool.

The initial setup was not complex for me. If you know the tool it's not complex. It could be a little complex for newer people because there are a lot of features. For a beginner, it's really not the best tool. It's not a tool for small business, it's more for medium and big companies.

We deployed Commvault, in this company, about four years ago, so I don't recall exactly how long it took. I think we needed three weekends to deploy and move all the data.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we have a team that takes care of backups. We first planned the whole architecture, what we wanted. Then we voted on the pros and cons of the architecture elements and decided where we were going with it. 

In addition to help from Commvault, we had an external analyst from a third-party who helped us with the initial deployment. Our experience with them was very good. I really appreciated it.

Internally, there are two of us in the organization who share the backup roles.

The implementation took place with our resources, but we have also a contract, with a vendor and also with a technical partner.

Two eyes see more than one! And if you have a problem, ussualy, you are part of it :)

From a licensing point of view, we now have one license which covers backup for the whole organization. And we spend less time administering the whole thing.

The solution's model is cost-efficient, but it depends on your environment. For us it was cost-efficient because we reduced the number of licenses. We came from two backup solutions, covering two types of servers, to now having a global license based on the amount of tera or petabytes we have. We cover all this with our license and that is cheaper than other options.

Overall, we have seen ROI in terms of both time and money. We started saving 40% of our resources and covering more each day.

As I once heard from a car salesman in California: every car has its girlfriend / boyfriend.

Here it is more or less the same, for each case it is necessary to study which is the best backup tool, basing ourselves first on the technical aspect and then on the financial one.

At the time we evaluated other options: NetBackup, HP Data Protector, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

There were two key points when we decided to change. One was the licensing type that was best for us, because the cost could have a big impact on our budget. The other point was internal knowledge of the tools. I cannot say one of these solutions is worse or better than the others. We chose what was better for our environment at that moment. We wanted a solution to cover our whole environment, including at the OS level and the virtual layer, and one with a license that worked with our budget.

Licensing is a key point when you decide to change or to buy new software. The licensing type has an enormous impact on your budget and your decision. If it doesn't work with your budget... And it's the same technically. If the tool is not good for you, then you cannot choose it. On one hand you have the budgets and the licenses, on the other hand, you have the technical needs.

If you don't have know-how regarding this solution, you will need assistance from certain parties, providers or the company itself. That's not only for Commvault, it's for backup tools or any other kind of implementation, in general. You can really make wrong choices at the beginning that are not easy to repair when the whole system is in production.

Commvault has two interfaces, a Java interface and a full HTML interface. People who use the tool must have the know-how, so internally we teach the people who use the tool how to do backups and restores; we focus on these situations. For me, with my know-how, the tool is really simple, both the Java and the HTML. But for newer people, it might be a little bit complicated.

The biggest lessons I have learned using this solution are about the different ways to back up a virtual environment, and the different types of deduplication options there are.

The product is really good for us. I can't say that it would be really good for someone else, it depends on your environment. For us, Commvault is between nine and 10 out of 10.