Commvault Complete Data Protection Reviews

The solution is used for normal backups, file system level backups, or database backups.

The solution is easy to use and the duplication is quite good.

The reporting is complicated and should be simplified in an upcoming release.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The stability is good for the solution.

In my experience, the solution has been highly scalable.

The technical support has been good.

The setup is complicated and complex. The length of time it will take depends on the environment and how large it is.

It is best to use a consultant to do the deployment.

The solution is not cheap. However, for an enterprise-level solution, the price is comparable to other competitors. It would not be affordable for small to medium size organizations.

I recommend this solution to others. I would advise others wanting to implement this solution to spend some time on the initial setup and once the initial setup is done, then it will be quite easy to use.

I rate Commvault a nine out of ten.

I used it during a POC, and now, it is in production. We opted to go for the N minus one release and not the latest one.

We use it for the backup of servers. It is also used when users need to take a backup of their laptops or mail archiving.

It is easy to use and stable. It delivers what has been promised. When it says it can do something, it can actually do it, as opposed to some of its competitors.

Its dashboard could be improved to provide a summarized version of all the jobs instead of having to go through each one of them. We should easily be able to glance at all issues. If I had not gone with the on-premise version, I would have had regular reports with the cloud version. 

It would be an advantage if they increase the compression rate of the backup. I am keeping it on-prem, so I'll need more disks depending on the policies that I have in the retention period. 

Its price could also be lower. If a good solution can be cheaper, it is always an advantage.

I used this solution for six months.

It is stable. I haven't experienced any issues.

It is scalable. We have approximately 30 users, but we are also backing up the servers that everyone uses.

I have had one call with their technical support, and they were of great assistance. They were really approachable, and they were able to answer the questions.

We have been using NetBackup and Veeam. As compared to NetBackup, Commvault is an improvement. NetBackup licenses are expensive as compared to Commvault. 

It was pretty straightforward. It took one day to do the installation and put all policies. It was really quick. I did the installation, deployed the agents, and started using it for testing. After successful tests, we decided to go with the solution.

I was accompanied by our business partner, but its implementation was pretty straightforward.

Its maintenance is really easy to do because you have everything in the console. It can be managed by one technical person. It doesn't require much. Because it is stable, there is not much to be done. You just need to enter the jobs that have been run and completed successfully. Every now and then, you might also do a restore.

It is cheaper than NetBackup, but its price can be lower. If a good solution can be cheaper, it is always an advantage. Its licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. We plan to keep using this solution.

I would rate Commvault a nine out of ten.

We do a lot of backups daily, and mainly we just keep the operating system images. We do take database and active directory backups as well. We handle all types of backups using this product.

The user interface is very easy to navigate. The interface itself is very simple.

Overall, it is doing the job we need it to do. 

It supports whatever line types and support types and systems we have. It supports all types of backup systems quite easily.

The stability has been very good so far. We haven't had any problems with it.

The product is easy to manage.

The local support could be improved. Right now, it's something about the solution that is lacking.

They should offer better partners that can help us implement the solution in a better way.

It would be ideal if they offered editing or activating options. 

I don't know how good it is with the virtual environment. I have not tried the product with VMware, for example.

I've been using the solution for about six years at this point. It's been a while.

We've never had any issues with stability. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's pretty reliable. 

We are still running with a single server, and it's a per server per instance-based license model. If we need to add our first storage-based model or another division, we cannot support both. It's a licensing model issue. 

The local support is lacking overall. It's something they need to really work on improving.

We have worked with Veritas and IBM in the past, however, that was a very long time ago. I wouldn't be able to compare them to this solution as too much time has passed and much has changed. We used those solutions maybe ten or so years ago now.

The initial setup is not easy or difficult. It's moderate, or somewhere in the middle. I wouldn't describe the implementation as complex, however. 

The deployment too more than expected, as the vendor involved was having some staffing issues. The engineers were changing and we had some technical requirements which we realized at a later stage.

Maintenance isn't required very often, however, we have to ensure it is up-to-date. We also have to ensure whenever anything changes, we have to properly add them to the Commvault - whether they are new servers or new clients. Whenever we change our backup library or the memory storage, we have to reconfigure things. In that regard, there is occasional maintenance, depending on our background changes.

We only need one person to manage the solution. It doesn't take a lot of staff. Typically, they are an administrator and they handle everything that needs to be done as it's required.

We are integrators and therefore we are able to implement the solution ourselves.

The pricing falls somewhere in the middle of what the market offers. It's not overly expensive. The licensing model is quite good. Everything is included under it.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

We're using the latest version of the solution. We always use the latest version.

I'd recommend the solution.

I'd rate it at a seven out of ten.

We are a solution provider and Commvault is one of the backup and recovery solutions that we implement for our customers.

We recommend this product for people who are running the Oracle Virtualization Manager. The support for this from Commvault is better than it is with Veritas.

Our customers complain that this is a difficult product to manage.

We have been using Commvault for one year.

This is a stable product.

I know that we can add nodes to the system, although I don't have much experience with scaling Commvault.

I have experience with several backup and recovery solutions, including product by Veritas.

Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis.

The suitability of this product and my recommendation for using it depend on the environment. Not all backup products are suitable for every environment.

In summary, this is a good product but it would be better if it were easier, and not as complex to use. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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. 

I'm using the backup email feature with the hypervisor backup on VMware. I'm also working with different databases.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution is very stable and offers a good level of performance. 

The product can scale if a company needs it to.

We've noticed that technical support has recently gotten much better.

We've had issues with the solution not restoring certain environments. There also issues we find when we want to restore, for example, a cloud environment.

The product could be more convenient in terms of working with different solutions and having more integration between the different products in the market. It really should integrate better with, for example, VMware or Nutanix or Hyper-V. It would be really, really helpful if that were the case.

I've dealt with the solution for the last three years or so.

The product has been stable. There are no bugs or glitches. So far, it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good.

The product can scale if a company needs it to. It does have the potential to expand as needed.

In our company, we have about 1,300 people using it.

When I started to work with Commvault product, it wasn't very good, however, there has been a huge development in service. Their support is now working fine. They're much more helpful and professional. They've come a long way. We're satisfied with the progress they've made. 

I have also worked with other products, such as NetBackup and Veeam.

The pricing is a place where they all vary. While Commvault is cheaper than Veeam, it's more expensive than NetBackup. 

The initial setup is not overly difficult or complex. It's simple. It's straightforward.

I'm unsure as to how many people are required to maintain the solution. It's not an aspect of the product that falls under my responsibility.

The solution isn't the cheapest. It's also not the most expensive. It's basically somewhere in the middle. However, it's a fine price. It's what you would expect to pay for a full solution. That said, for some environments, it could be considered a bit expensive.

We are resellers.

I would advise those considering the solution, that, if they use it in conjunction with Nutanix, there may be some limitations. You can't back up, for example, on Nutanix and restore things to Veeam or other environments.

That said, we're mostly satisfied with the solution. I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.

Commvault is easy to use, easy to deploy, and easy to update.

I think there is room for improvement with the reports. They are a little poor. There is a lot of room for customization with Commvault, but we have not done that, so the reports do not work the best for us.

We have virtualization, but sometimes some virtual machines are not backed up.

For us, a system ransomware scenario would be a good solution. This would help us not be nervous about our backup solution if we experience a ransomware attack. 

We have been using Commvault for seven years, since 2014. 

Commvault is a very stable product. 

We are using VMware for virtualization every day. The issue with scalability that Commvault has is that any modifications in virtualization that we make have a direct impact on it.

We do not have a problem with scalability, but I think if we had to restore a large scale of information, it would be a problem because of the time we would have to spend restoring all of our virtual machines. However, we could backup as many as a 1,000 virtual machines very easily. 

Commvault's technical support is good. However, because I am French and not a native speaker, I have a hard time understanding tech support specialists that are from India.  

Before Commvault, we used a French solution. It had issues with backups and was very bad. We had to migrate before we encountered a bigger problem. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Commvault helped us with the migration. A two-person team was involved in the deployment from our end, a system engineer and a hardware engineer. 

Commvault is too expensive. 

I would recommend this solution. It is a good solution for cloud backup. 

I both use the solution myself and provide services to my clients using the product. Mainly, I use the product for virtual machine backup, Office 365 backup, file servers, SQL Service, Oracle, et cetera.

The diversity on offer is very, very good. Everything is supported. It's great.

The product has a very close partnership with Microsoft with regards to the current implementation, and always has the latest support - or, rather, the support for the latest iteration of software provided by Microsoft or Oracle. It's excellent in that sense.

The solution has been quite stable. It offers reliable performance.

The solution is very scalable.

The pricing is quite good. We have no complaints in that area.

It would be a bit unfair to say that it's complex, due to the fact that it supports so many different workloads, however, if there's anything that is a bit of a shortcoming, then it's the fact that there's a bit of complexity involved when dealing with the product.

It should be easier to implement for tech people. Right now, it's quite difficult.

I've been working with the solution for 16 years or so. It's been well over a decade. I've got a lot of years under my belt with it.

The stability of the product is quite good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The product can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. There shouldn't be any issues.

We might have about 150 users on the solution currently.

We've been in touch with technical support many times. They're okay. Just good, not great.

Sometimes there are people, personnel, that are not that well educated. Sometimes I know more than the person I'm talking to and they are supposed to be helping me with technical problems. It's just not going to work.

The initial setup can but a bit complex. It can be a bit difficult to implement, even for someone with a good amount of experience.

We have about 10 engineers that can handle the deployment and maintenance aspects of the product.

The pricing is quite reasonable and more than fair. It's not overly expensive.

We are official partners with Commvault. I'm a consultant.

I would advise companies considering the solution to first check out a trial or a demo and to evaluate if it's the right solution for them. If you have a very diverse data center set up, then it's likely going to be good for you. They have a strong implementation of Office 365 backup capabilities. If a company is using 365, it's going to be quite useful.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten. It's quite robust and already has all of the features we need. Of course, its level of diversity has been great. We're quite satisfied with it overall.

We are the most important communications company in Argentina. We deal with a large variety of customers. We are partners of Commvault and I'm the company founder. Our company provides IT solutions. 

Commvault has a unique administration platform and interfaces, providing backup, archive, reporting and replication features. Commvault has more features than its competitors. Net Backup, for example, doesn't integrate a lot. Commvault has only one platform and this is important for the customer. They don't have a large market share in Argentina but whenever we present it to our customers they like the product and want to do a proof of concept.

The product could be easier to implement, they could create a new console to configure the solution. I'd like to see improvements on the user interface, support, pricing, and integration with other solutions. They could also improve their marketing of the brand.

I've been working with this solution for almost seven years. 

The stability is good. 

The scalability is good. 

The initial setup is easy. Deployment time is dependent on the infrastructure of the customer.

This is a relatively new solution for customers in Argentina, so I go to a lot of effort to know the solution well and to present it to our customers. It's not easy but I think that when the customer becomes familiar with the solution, many want to change to it. The stand out aspect of Commvault is that it supports its clients on a unique platform. Whether it's underlying solutions, cloud solutions, SAP Hana, for example, replication backup, archiving, reporting, all of this is one platform. I would suggest starting with small solutions, to learn the product and see if it's the best option for your needs.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We prefer Commvault because they are backup agents who have a vision about what we can do with applicable backup solutions. I have one solution with five local backups and remote backups between the five. First-line core backup and synthetic full backup for applications. These are our policies and logic to access the files and take over or restore files.

The main differentiator here is that Commvault has many features. You'll have to explore these features to gain knowledge about them, or you wouldn't know it's there.

Commvault's many features can be explored to get more value from more solutions.

The implementation is very difficult and should be improved and made easier. There are many features to explore to create more value from more solutions.

We want to do a course and explore the possibility of obtaining certification. This will help us gain a more comprehensive understanding to create solutions more efficiently. The most important thing for me is to have more courses and more possibilities to receive online certifications.

I have been using Commvault for a few weeks.

Commvault is stable but more difficult to understand without the technical specifications.

The initial setup is complex. I tested Commvault, investigated options, and checked that I had the right conditions to install. It took a lot of effort and two people to install it. It took us about two months to install Commvault.

I used documentation provided by Commvault and visited some forms, but I mainly used documentation from Commvault.

Another IT professional and I installed it in-house. We did it by following the documentation step by step, and some steps were more difficult than others.

I would recommend Commvault to potential users. I'm satisfied with this solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Commvault a ten.

We are using Commvault as our main backup software.

Commvault is very broad in its possibilities to keep the backup environment up and running.

What I like about Commvault is that it's very robust. When an interruption takes place due to an incident, the signaling and notification are very extensive. Usually, there is a good direction towards the solution if there is a problem. Commvault is very self-supporting and the software tries to solve any issues by itself.

There is a bit of an overkill in functionality, especially in the interface, when you decide to deploy all of the software. I'm talking specifically about the Java console, which is the one we are using because it has all of the features that Commvault has in it. With so many features, sometimes you cannot find what you are looking for in the interface and you have to dig into books online to find out how to solve an issue.

The web console is more organized than the Java console, although it lacks some features.

In the next release, I would like to see different options made available for hot versus cold data.

I have been using Commvault for six years.

We have not been in contact directly with Commvault for technical support. We have a partner who takes care of all of the issues if any Commvault intervention is needed.

We are currently working through what we need for disaster recovery in general, and Commvault already has a major place in that. However, there are several things that we do not currently use, so there may be an option to use more of it for that benefit. For example, the product supports archiving capability, which is something that we do not use at this time.

In summary, this is a good backup solution but considering my comments on the GUI, it is not perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We can use it on-premises and in the cloud. 

The retention log feature could be an issue for us and can be improved. The backup schedule can also be better in terms of how you set it up.

I have been using this solution for a year.

It is stable.

It is easy to scale.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took a couple of weeks. The biggest challenge is about the equipment.

Its cost is reasonable, but anybody else can do better benchmarking.

You need to look at the cost as compared to other similar products.

I would rate Commvault an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for all infrastructure. We're using it for the five pillars and for database backups and management.

The visualization backup is the most important aspect for us. It provides snapshot protection. 

The digital application and the compression of the disc at the storage site are great. That's one of the best features of this solution.

Technical support is very helpful.

We've faced problems backing up our virtual machines. A few of them, at least. However, we opened a ticket, and then we found out how to troubleshoot this issue and how to do a snapshot backup. We were able to understand exactly what was the root cause of the issue and a solution was provided to us.

We have already submitted a feature enhancement request to Commvault. They are working on it. That's in relation to the Commvault Metallic and is related to the workflow approval. We requested they implement workflow approval, just in case you want to allow, for example, general users to access the Commvault Metallic and browse what mailboxes they need to check if it is approved by the legal department. We can run them independently, this access without even referring back again to the IT division, however, we requested the workflow has to be based on approved access.

I've been using the solution for a year and a half at this point.

The product is a reliable solution. We have experienced only one case where there was a total shutdown and a total disruption of service. This was a weird case. We were able to sort it out and submitted the case for investigation to understand what the root cause might have been. Later on, we had to upgrade a few things. However, since then, we haven't had any issues whatsoever. I'd describe the solution as quite stable. 

In terms of scalability, it is a skill level solution. You can scale up at any time by adding additional nodes.

Technical support is always good. Most of the time the call comes from the U.S. They don't have local support. They are always providing remote support in the U.S. and India. Most of the calls come from those two countries, however, we find that we get help mainly from the U.S.

The initial deployment was straightforward. We had a proper prerequisites exit sheet. We filled it out properly at the outset and the architecture was very clear. We started with the architecture. We were able to understand all of the components in this hyper-scale design, and we submitted a change request to our infrastructure. We were able to meet all of the requirements on time. We started up the implementation shortly after that.

In the end, it was a straightforward design. There was nothing too complex.

In terms of maintenance, we usually do a health check which is basically a checklist we run through in the morning. The system will still struggle from time to time if there are any recent updates that need to be done. It is a system that does the update by itself, and it shares with you all types of events that need to be taken care of. Therefore, it's pretty automated.

We bought the solution and the agreement was for three years. We simply pay in installments for three years. We'll do the payment at the beginning of every year. 

We're just a customer.

We do recommend the solution. However, a company needs to look again into why they need it. With Commvault, you can deploy on-premise or on the cloud. It is compatible with several cloud vendors. However, the deployment depends on what you need it for. For example, if you need to back up Office 365, then there are two solutions from the providers, from Commvault. Recently they have started talking about Commvault Metallic. They started trying to promote it in other regions. We've done a profound study in the Commvault Metallic for our Office 365 in the past. We compared it with two more products. We compared it to a Barracuda email protection and we compared it also with Veeam.

Any company should do the same and run comparisons. They need to know exactly for what purpose do they need to acquire the solution. If it is for Office 365 then there are two solutions for that. One of them is the Commvault Metallic, and it is a SaaS model. The SaaS model is fully manageable. The user will not even look into infrastructure. It will be fully managed by the Commvault team in the background. There is no need to worry about the storage consumption on Azure if you also choose to go with Microsoft Azure cloud. When you need infrastructural backup, then there is the Commvault hyper-scale solution. That's the only available option and is very powerful.

Overall, I would rate the solution ten out of ten. We've been very happy with it so far.

It's an enterprise backup tool. It is the competitor to Dell and IBM, TSM and Symantec NetBackup, or rather what's called Veritas NetBackup. 

It's an enterprise data protection tool. It's almost in the top three or four solutions out there.  

We have one environment with 500 servers, and another environment with 1,000 servers.

We definitely plan to continue using Commvault. We basically support the customers, their MSP. We use Dell as our own data center MSP product but we are supporting this for other customers.

It's a very good competitor database.

It's very user-friendly. It supports a wide range of workloads. It's quite easy to use, it's very powerful and it's scalable.

It's got the ability to do automation, that's another good thing about it. It's got workflow automation built-in. It enables you to automate certain tasks.

It can create backups, restore, and be used for DR testing. It's got all those features which are better than many other tools out there. It also has good reporting as well. 

It has a very easy-to-use interface that allows you to do everything within a single pane of glass — everything is right there. It's superior to many products in terms of its management interface.

We've run into some issues when attempting to restore very large numbers of files. Of course, that's more of a design issue. For example, if you have, say, 10 million small files with added encryption, and you want to restore them, it can end up taking days to restore them. That is a file-level restoring operation. One option is to go for Image Level backup and restore the entire image, which is much faster. Then you can extract whatever data you want from that image.

IntelliSnap is a storage snapshot application for storage snapshots. The tool is very good but we could not use it because we didn't have compatible storage. That would've helped us a lot because that's one of the very few tools which integrates with lots of storage products out there. It's very flexible, very easy-to-use. We had the VMware vSAN version which is not supported by Commvault IntelliSnap. 

The thing about Commvault is there are a lot of moving parts. You have to design it properly for resources, hardware and software, and licensing because you can install it on any of your Intel servers and then you can use any other storage as the destination. It just comes down to proper lower-level design in sizing.

I have been using Commvault for the past five years.

Commvault is quite stable.

The environment can scale nicely. It's got the ability to scale for multi-node clusters, but you need to ensure that you keep it updated.  

Commvault support is usually very, very responsive and they always help us quickly resolve any problems that we may have — they are excellent.

The initial setup is very easy, actually. We did it within one day.

We had a professional service engagement with Commvault and they did it in a matter of roughly one day. Implementation and configuration of the policies — it only took one day to set it up and test it.

We needed to have professional assistance from Commvault as it can be a little difficult to deploy. It can be done, but it's always handy to have professional assistance from Commvault factored into your own solution.

Capacity licensing is very good with Commvault.

I would definitely recommend using Commvault. On a scale from one to ten, I would give Commvault a rating of eight.

We are a service and solution provider, and we use Commvault to secure our client's data. Our motto of security is to secure the data and using this is very important. We are providing services to commercial and financial companies, so our data is critical.

We have two options for backing up data. We have a DR site, and we can also back it up on-premises.

This is a very technical solution that I would like to see Commvault offer customer support and marketing development resources in India. To my understanding, there is no marketing development team in India and we face problems when we speak with Commvault about these things.

When we send a query to Commvault, they take a long time to answer our questions. It can be very difficult to contact the Commvault team. Whenever we try to contact them, we are transferred to other distributors.

We have been using Commvault for the past full year.

Commvault is a stable product.

This solution is scalable, and we have more than 5,000 users that are using SAN services.

We don't require technical support or customer support from Commvault, as we have a dedicated team for the product.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment was done in-house.

We have a dedicated Commvault team of 25 members. We have a test area, where Commvault and other products are tested. We have, for example, the Commvault test cases, data center test cases, computer testing, hyper-converged facilities, and more.

In India, this is a very expensive product.

We have not evaluated other options, as we are focusing on Commvault.

When we first started using Commvault, we had many problems. They were on a daily basis and including things like data access and data loads. At this point, we are no longer facing problems.

This is a product that I might recommend, although it depends on the scenario.

I would rate this solution a four out of ten.

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.

I am primarily using Commvault for backing up the physical and virtual servers.

This product has allowed us to recover data when we've had issues.

This product does what it says it's going to do, and generally backs up the data that you want it to back up.

It is a little more complicated than it really needs to be.

Reporting could definitely be improved.

I have been using Commvault, personally, for about three years.

It works, and there are definitely some bugs, but nothing major.

As it gets larger, it gets a lot more complex in terms of the configuration. Generally, the larger it gets, the harder it is to manage. We probably have about 1,000 servers right now that it is backing up.

In general, technical support is okay. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Prior to Commvault, we used Tivoli Storage Manager from IBM. It is a bit lacking in terms of features, compared to Commvault.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward.

The price is a little bit high.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Commvault is to do their research. It's a good product for most use cases, although it's not the best. My main complaint is that it needs better reporting.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are using Commvault to protect some of our workloads in the public cloud. We are using it in AWS SAM and Office 365. 

Scalability, as well as stability, are a couple of important parts of this solution.

This product is overly complex to operate and run.

The price of this solution could be lower.

We have been working with Commvault for about 18 months.

From a stability point of view, it is very good.

It's extremely scalable. It's used across the coalition control team and the cloud team, so there are a couple of dozen administrators. We are running a great deal more than that in the backend systems.

The technical support is pretty good.

We used Spectrum Protect or Tivoli Storage Manager for quite a few years.

The initial setup looked complex so we contracted Commvault to do it.

Commault completed the deployment but even they had issues, particularly with getting Office 365 operating correctly. Their professional services were the ones who deployed it.

One of the issues with backup vendors is that they overprice, or overvalue their products.

We are looking at Metallic as an alternative because Commvault is a good product but it is a bit complex.

Overall, this is a good product and very capable. That said, my advice for anybody who is considering it is to make sure that it fits your purpose. If you can make do with a simpler product then choose a simpler product.

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.

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 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.

It is the primary backup/recovery solution for our VMware platform.

It provides solid backup automation for VMs and automatic backup replication. It also has real-world compression and deduplication.

As a backup solution, it has minimized our task of backing up VMs. It is difficult to give it a time frame, but we are backing up over twice as many VMs than our previous solution with less effort.  

We have not experienced a disaster or attack so far. Commvault allows us to recover VMs rapidly with different levels of recovery.

Its compression/deduplication allows us to store more backups and save storage space. The reporting is great; we are able to obtain critical business reports and infrastructure/usage information very easily.

The backup, recovery, and replication of VM workloads in a single platform has reduced backup windows, augmented platform availability, and recovery times.

The solution’s user interface for managing on-prem, cloud, or multi-cloud environments in one place is not the best. There are discrepancies between Java GUI plus HTML5. While additional improvements are coming soon, the lack of CLI makes administration tedious and time consuming.

The Command Center is decent. It does require major improvements for usability. SP19 will provide many desired features. It would be optimal to have CommServe running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The solution requires constant attention. Commvault is very complex. We are constantly making adjustments and working through hotfixes, updates, and issues. 

There is a steep learning curve. Training is essential.

More than one year.

We did not have the best initial impression regarding stability. Things got better after four months.

The Hyperscale scalability is very good. CV LiveSync is a great tool for protecting Commvault’s database.

There are two full-time engineers doing day-to-day administration of this solution. 

The product is currently in Phase I: VMware. We have plans to increase usage in Phase II: Exchange/Physical/Isilon.

They have very good, knowledgeable engineers.

We previously used IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). TSM does not offer a solid VMware solution nor does it have strong reporting.

This solution has helped us to optimize infrastructure usage. With the solution's deduplication, we are saving storage space. Whereas, on our old solution, we still needed the same storage space. We now have faster backup storage, giving us faster restores and file level restores. This saves time and time is money.

The initial setup was straightforward but that was primarily because of all the planning and a clear architecture design. We were able to run production backups in two weeks

Phase I of our implementation was the VMware platform. We hired a Commvault consultant who followed an approved architectural design.

The solution has enabled us to save on infrastructure costs by being able to manage what were disparate data management solutions in one place.

The solution’s model is cost-efficient. It provides an all-around, exceptional enterprise backup platform.

We work with Commvault and a partner on our environment needs according to capacity, licensing, pricing, components, modules, etc. Additional costs depend on your backup needs.

We evaluated Veeam, but concluded that it was not an enterprise solution.

Commvault is a great backup/recovery solution. Start small, then scale out. Training is very important, as it is a complex solution. 

The solution is very capable as a single platform. It has many features. However, we have not leveraged the capabilities to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise, hybrid, and cloud locations yet.

Commvault offers the best integration of multi-cloud/hybrid environments and is a leader in the market. The solution offers an extensive array of cloud options and features. However, we are leveraging it for on-premise workloads at the present time. 

Biggest lesson learnt: Backup replication requires a solid network infrastructure.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10).

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 to back up some servers and to restore things.

Commvault helps our administrators to minimize the time they spend on the backup tasks and that gives them time for other projects. I don't know how much time it saves them because our Commvault environment was already in place. We don't have very many restore problems and, for backup, it's almost automated, so we don't spend any time at the console.

For me, it just restores and backs up applications, nothing more. But what I find valuable is restoring the complete server. Restoring files is also valuable, but I like restoring the server because you don't have to rebuild a new one.

Also, we are able to manage our on-prem environment from one server, the whole environment from one place, which is great. There is only one place to search.

We get an alarm if a lot of files are deleted, for example. That could look like ransomware, even if it is not.

I have been using Commvault for one-and-a-half years, which is the time I have been working in this company.

It is fairly stable. We have never had trouble with Commvault itself. And if we do have trouble, we can call our Commvault partner and they will solve it.

The scalability is good, although we don't have plans to increase our usage of it.

Commvault's technical support is very good.

I used Avamar a long time ago. 

I don't know much about the pricing and licensing, but I do know it is very expensive.

I would recommend Commvault. We have not had many difficulties with it and I think it is a good product.

We don't use Command Center, only the CommCell Console. In our department, only five people are doing the backups and the restores. We are all system specialists, and we work together to maintain Commvault.

I would rate it at eight out of 10. A 10 is too high and would mean it is super-good. For me, an eight is very high.

We are a partner and a service provider for Commvault in the Middle East. We use it for both backup and recovery, and sometimes for replication. 

It has on-prem solutions and we are also going with Azure.

Commvault is the first software company to release software for Nutanix AHV backup. We have an implementation here, with a government company, where we are taking a backup of the Nutanix virtual machine and their database, and replicating this backup to the DR. That way, if the main site is down or something has become corrupt or something is wrong with the backup, they are able to restore from the DR backup. It is the largest implementation in the Middle East.

The solution provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations, making it very effective. We can replicate the data even when building a new data center for DR. That makes it easier for us because from there we are able to restore using Commvault.

It provides us with a single console where we can back up our software, our databases, and even our desktops and laptops, even if they are connected remotely, at any time and from any place. Whenever the bandwidth is available and whenever the process is available, it will take a backup.

Commvault also supports most of the cloud vendors. We can back up cloud-based applications like Office 365 to on-prem, and we back up our on-prem data to the cloud as well. It can be anywhere, either local or in the cloud.

It helps to minimize the time admins spend on backup tasks. Once it is configured perfectly you can forget about it, in terms of administration. It saves our admins along the lines of 20 weeks per year.

And with Commvault, you don't need multiple applications to back up different kinds of platforms. It can be OpenStack, VMware, Hyper-V, a physical machine, or Oracle. It's a single point for backups.

When it comes to saving on storage we are saving 20 percent. In terms of storage optimization, it is seven times more efficient. You can store 700 TB in about 100 TB of space.

We have helped many clients to recover from ransomware using Commvault. For one of our clients, we were able to get them back into production in one week. That was an environment with 200 servers and 1,400 user backups. Without Commvault it would have taken some months.

One of the most valuable features is the encryption which helps save you from ransomware. Because the data is already encrypted, it cannot be encrypted again.

The restore performance is better than with any other product. That's why Commvault is number-one in industry reviews.

With Command Center, you can view the backup schedules, the running backups, and the data availability.

It takes a lot of technical expertise to implement. Commvault could increase the training it provides to customers and partners.

Also, with technology changing, it could use more features. Maybe they could include artificial intelligence.

We have been using Commvault since 2015.

The stability is really good. Once you implement it properly you can forget. It's an automated solution. You don't need to troubleshoot anything.

As software, it's scalable. You can add any number of licenses as often as you want. Commvault has options to scale using appliances and software.

Commvault's technical support is really good. I would rate it at nine out of 10.

We have used Veeam. Commvault is more of an enterprise product. In terms of the scope of integration across multi-cloud/hybrid environments, Veeam is a five out of 10, while Commvault is an eight.

The setup is not straightforward. It is a little complex. It really needs expertise, unlike other software.

The deployment time depends on the size of the environment, the number of servers and the storage size. It has taken us anywhere from one week to three months.

As a result of our experience in setting it up, we have created our own plan for doing so. We do a complete environment study of the client by using a solution survey sheet. That gives us complete visibility into the databases they have, the number of servers, the virtualization platform, and the physical machines. According to that, we suggest a plan for the size, if it is on-prem. We have a project management professional to make the process smoother. We have four engineers who implement Commvault and they are also responsible for maintenance.

ROI with Commvault will take about five years. It's cost-efficient when it is used at the enterprise level.

Some years ago, Commvault had a huge price. Now, it is cheaper than Veeam.

It's also available per VM license or per socket or per storage capacity and you can mix licenses. You can have some VM licenses and some socket licenses, for example.

We evaluated NetBackup. Commvault has better encryption technology and restore performance.

Keep on training and select a proper implementation company. That is the most important thing.

Most of our clients are only using Commvault. If they go with Commvault they won't use any other product. It can back up everything: servers, databases, storage snapshots — everything. They don't need other software.

We have full functionality as a complete data warehouse, and I've been tasked to leverage the multiple features and licenses that Commvault has, as they apply to our business. We're using every feature and what we are not using, we plan to be using.

We back up multiple platforms in our environment: Windows, Red Hat, Linux, Oracle. We have hypervisors, a large VMware environment. So it's a pretty enterprise-class environment. 

We use it for custom reporting to better manage our backup environment and there is a lot of discovery in that area too. The better question might be how we're not using it right now. We try to leverage every feature that's out there, as a complete data warehouse.

It's a hybrid. It's an on-prem, but we're in Azure now, too.

We're saving storage space. The built-in deduplication features are really good. It's second to none in my experience with it. You really have a better handle on your deduplication database and block changes. Saving storage space is the biggest thing. We see up to 75 percent compression rates, and even higher, so we're saving on data.

Also, with archiving, we've been able to identify data that we were backing up multiple times and archive it instead and save money there. So overall, we've had a lot of space savings with data that's being compressed through the deduplication features of Commvault.

It has also helped us save on costs. There is money available to further use for fees in Commvault, which means the business is happy with what's going on. Those cost savings are from the fact that we don't have to keep increasing our storage the way we were before we were using Commvault. For me, as an engineer, that means I have training opportunities and I can also identify a service for server refresh because there's money available for infrastructure.

We expect that Commvault will also help our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks so they can spend time on other projects. We have identified how it can. Now we're trying to figure out how to implement that. It will involve using workflows and automated processes for scheduling, alerting, and reporting, and even using support resolution through automatic tickets that can be generated.

We haven't yet used Commvault to recover from a disaster, attack, or to recover data for another reason. We just had a report that said we haven't had disaster recovery backup in the past year. Commvault sent us an alert and, within one day, they assembled a team to discuss what we could do to mitigate that risk. Once the team was assembled and we all got together on the phone, I noticed that the report had been inaccurate for a year. It was great that we didn't have a disaster, but I like the fact that Commvault was willing to address that need, at my immediate request, based on their alerting system. They were ready to assist me in a disaster at a moment's notice.

You have total control of your data. It's scary, but it's good once you understand it. There are a lot of unknowns that happen with your data, things that Commvault is doing, and you really need to be aware of them to maximize its overall performance. I like that you have complete hooks into and total control of your data.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that it doesn't break easily. You can get by with some mistakes. It's pretty intuitive. You're not intimidated that you may do something incorrectly and cause some damage. 

The data is well-protected. It doesn't age off until it's copied. That's a big feature right there. When you reach the end of your retention, it does not expire until the secondary copy is completed. That allows you to hold onto data that otherwise would have aged off by retention. I like that feature. It's hard to just delete or lose data using the Commvault platform.

It's tough to understand if you're really maximizing the features of such a large platform without engaging other services that Commvault offers to help you understand and leverage the data warehouse.

It's a little challenging because of the way Commvault communicates and works with third-party solutions. Right now, we're using Commvault to back up Office 365 mailboxes, so we have to work with Microsoft and Azure. There's a lot of handshaking in the background that the customer can be impacted by. For instance, Commvault can say, "Hey, we can back up a thousand mailboxes in two days, providing Microsoft lets us." "Microsoft letting you" means that Microsoft will throttle you at certain times, and there are also certain restrictions Microsoft has with how fast you're doing something, or how many you're doing. We, as a customer, are impacted from that perspective. Although Microsoft welcomes Commvault, there's always the strain of how these two platforms work together. So it's a little challenging when it crosses different platforms into other environments that Commvault doesn't have total control of.

Also, Commvault likes to be ahead of the game when it comes to merging with other platforms, but sometimes it's before they have the solution truly baked in. Office 365 is an example. I feel that my company might be a litmus test for their solution, because we have such a large environment. Some of the promised solutions that we received from Commvault were more like testing solutions. They weren't really validated, meaning they were possibilities. There have been a lot of hot fixes for the solution that we're using right now, more than we expected. It wasn't a simple, turnkey solution when we decided to use them. They could do a little bit more due diligence before they jump into a space to get some of that market share.

One particular issue we found was when we were trying to open up ports for communication. They had listed a couple of ports that we needed and we found out there were a lot more communication ports that they had already assumed we were aware of or already had in place. As we were doing our deployment, we had a lot of network communication issues when we were trying to communicate between resources on-prem and off-prem, due to different ports that were identified as being blocked.

They have to be willing to admit that, "Hey, we don't have this quite worked out yet, but we're working on it." I got to learn Commvault by implementing this Office 365 solution. That's my go-to for examples. There have been a lot of "gotchas" in performance. Commvault says, "Go to this SP, go to that SP," but you're talking about changing your whole service pack level in your environment, and you just can't do that overnight. You can't move as fast as they want you to move, business-wise, to take advantage of new releases and new features. They have to be more realistic that the customer can't keep up with their pace.

In addition, there are two of us who do all the maintenance, but we definitely make use of Commvault resources. They kind of make you dependent on utilizing their resources, which is not such a bad thing. But sometimes you may want to learn to manage your own environment completely, without engaging the vendor as much. Commvault finds a way to keep themselves engaged with what you're doing. You almost have to reach out to them to say, "How does this work? What's the best way to use this? I don't see any information on how to leverage this feature."

The documentation is lacking. You'll find some general stuff, but it's hard to find actual use cases. You also want to know who has tried a solution out, who is it working for, who can you talk to to get some pros and cons? They could do a little bit better with their documentation and not just have basic guidelines that you have to customize to follow.

I've been using Commvault for a year and a half.

We haven't seen any issues with scalability at all. They tend to have a suggestion for us when we come to them with a problem. Right now we're leveraging the IntelliSnap feature. It's been identified as a better way to back up, given some problems we've been having with some particular data that has been hard to capture within a certain time window. 

It's scalable. We haven't had any complaints at all. It rates pretty highly in scalability.

One of the features I'm working on putting in place is access control: How to grant different levels of authorization. We currently have 51 users and six are primary users. Most of those 51 users log in to run reports. Those users have operational roles, administrative roles, and some are in engineering. We also have a couple of database admins who have read-only access to view metrics.

Support is pretty extensive. There are five different levels of support. We're at the top level and we have also experienced two levels below that. They have a great support system. 

They could use additional subject matter experts, but when you do get the right subject matter expert you have a person who is pretty knowledgeable. We haven't needed many escalations, but they do have a good escalation system. 

They've never been stumped. There's always somebody that has the knowledge and expertise to resolve the issue. And that's generally within a matter of days at the most — and sometimes it's only hours. I've never had an outstanding problem for longer than a week without having the right resources in place to resolve the issue.

We have the highest enterprise-level support contract, so we have a team that engages us on chronic issues. We have a team that engages us on new initiatives and we have a team that we work with on the overall Commvault experience. We also have a dedicated technical account manager and we can bounce anything off of him at a moment's notice.

We went from Veritas NetBackup to Commvault. We switched due to upfront licensing and costs. We have more visibility into what we're actually purchasing. It seemed like, overall, the cost of Commvault was cheaper.

The licensing is more visible. It's more "per-diem." They're not forcing you into certain purchases. You can buy in bulk, per se. You can try things out. Commvault offers a lot of good, temporary licenses where you try something out before you commit to buying it. Once you express interest in purchasing, they'll supply a lot more information for you to make a better decision. I like that, versus the way Veritas works.

Commvault is a cost-efficient solution. Just beware that there's a lot you're going to have to understand before you can get to the point where you're utilizing that cost-efficiency.

To convert over to Commvault from NetBackup took us three days, and part of that was standing up the environment. With Commvault, it's easy to bring new data and new platforms in. It's simply a matter of clicking on the agent, installing it, and then going from there. The fact that it's agent-based made it a little bit easier to adapt to and back up multiple platforms and storage devices.

Generally, it takes about five hours to two days to drop an architected solution and start the implementation process. You need time for whatever issues may arise, so it could take three to five days to get Commvault up and running. 

But to get started, it's just a matter of a few minutes. The fact that you can push out and do all your installs from Command Center is a good feature from Commvault. It's easy to get rolling and get started. To really get it fully leveraged takes some time.

Our company is in its fourth year with Commvault and we're just now getting to the tip of the iceberg with leveraging a lot of its features and the licensing that Commvault offers as a data warehouse.

Training-wise, there's a lot of information out there, a lot of free training. There are tutorials and a lot of YouTube videos and virtual classrooms. They encourage you to learn and leverage their data suite without paying for a lot of training.

Prior to using Commvault's Office 365 feature, we were backing up mailboxes at the database level. Commvault allows us to just point, click, and drag-and-drop for backup and restore. That's a really big ROI. Restores are easier to handle at the message and item level. Things are a lot easier to restore. We can restore in multiple ways, including as a PST file. Commvault has a way of looking at our mailbox data and picking out anything that is PST and backing that up in different ways. There are a lot of built-in APIs to make things a little bit easier.

So we do have a good ROI with our overall mailbox protection and restorability.

It's been a while since we used NetBackup, but I think Commvault is easier. It's really point-and-click. There isn't a lot of background stuff going on or command-line stuff. It's all Windows-based, easy drag-and-drop. With NetBackup there was a lot of stuff going on in the back-end, command-line wise, that you couldn't get a good visual of as you were doing it. 

Working with Windows is a little more explanatory, versus working with command-line, when it comes to installations. With command-line, you have this sense that if you do something incorrectly you might really do something bad. That's a big difference that I like with Commvault versus Veritas NetBackup.

Take advantage of any free training and look at other business cases and how they use Commvault, because it's so customizable. There's no right and wrong way. You have to look at your unique business needs to really maximize the platform.

If you're just going to back up and protect your data, I would recommend something outside of Commvault. If you really want to understand your data, audit your data, really manipulate your data, and save money through your data, then Commvault is the place to go.

I like the interface. It requires some assistance with navigation. It's very intimidating when you first jump in as a newbie. You don't know where to start or what's important. The best approach is to learn each one, one at a time. The problem is that you usually end up favoring one particular feature because that's where the fires are at. It's user-friendly, but it takes some time to get used to.

I'm still learning the Command Center. I think a lot of people are hesitant to transfer over to it because it is a little different than the Java console. I just had a tutorial and demonstration on it last week. I like it. It's easier. It's just that the layout is a lot different. It's not as busy as the Java console, and because it's not as busy you don't know what you're not using, or what you have quick access to. I think that may be what intimidates people with the Command Center, that the layout is really a lot different. But kind of like a desktop, once you get it the way you want it, it's a lot easier to work with. I think those initial challenges deter some people, which is why it's been a slow rollout, and Commvault hasn't just said, "We're going to turn this one off and this one on."

I'm in favor of the Command Center. I'm starting to use it a little bit more. It's a good tool, a good upgrade, but it's going to take a little bit of learning.

The fact that a Commvault is a single platform will enable our organization to accelerate growth and drive innovation. This is my second year with this company, and we're now leveraging the experts within Commvault to show us how to use Commvault, so I think it will. But getting to that stage where you have to align those resources can take a company some time. There are some challenges there. But once you embrace it and leverage it the way they want you to use it, instead of using it how you want to use it, it will make the transition a little easier.

This process is helping in identifying lost data and identifying backup performance. You can really drill into backup performance, throughput, network connections, firewalls, and ports. You can really see where a problem is. Fixing their problems is one thing, but you tend to have to upgrade to fix it. Commvault is really good at listening to what the customer says, to their challenges, and then taking those challenges and making solutions down the line. The problem is you have to upgrade your environment to take advantage of those new bug fixes.

What we're looking to do with Commvault in the next six months is to leverage its ability to protect and backup our stuff within the cloud, within Azure. We also want to leverage it more for identifying data analytics. Because we're in the compliance field and the medical field, we really want to understand our data. Is it deduping right? Is it being backed up correctly? How can we archive it? We're confident that it's protected. We're confident we can restore it. Now we want to understand it.

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're using it mainly to back up operating systems like Windows, Linux, and databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL.

It has simplified disaster recovery and we have used it for migration as well. For migrating from old FX servers to new FX servers, it was not possible to use any new feature from VMware. There was just vMotion and the success rate of migration of the whole disk was less than 50 percent. It was not possible to manage it that way. We used Live Sync and it was able to migrate 150 machines every day during the weekend, without major problems. That saved us a couple of weeks of time, probably 50 percent of the time it would have taken us. Without Live Sync it wouldn't have been possible to manage it.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has definitely enabled our company to accelerate growth because you don't need to leave the Commvault console. With NetBackup or TSM (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) when it comes to customization of scripts for databases, you have to go into the client at the operating system level and modify the scripts. With Commvault you don't have to do that. You don't need to access the operating system, which simplifies the work.

Commvault helps minimize the time spent on backup tasks, creating time for other projects. I'm able to write a workflow in Commvault's internal environment and I can automate any action I did manually before. For example, deployment of remote offices can be fully automated.

It also saves us money on infrastructure because the configuration which will be used for IntelliSnapshotting is very simplified.

Another company I worked for previously was being attacked by a ransomware virus. The company lost its whole Windows infrastructure, so it didn't have Active Directory. Commvault was on Windows as well and the Knowledge Base which ran on Linux was authenticated with AD. Everyone lost their workstations.

The recovery process was that we got the database from Commvault, because part of raising cases includes the ability to upload databases to Commvault. The Windows team found a backup of the main controller and the most important thing was to start communications and for every one to have Active Directory. With Commvault's support, we were also able to develop a process which recovered Volume C, and that was sufficient to fix the images. Within two months they were able to recover the whole infrastructure from scratch. Without Commvault, or with another solution based on Windows, I don't think the recovery would have been possible. 

I had never seen this kind of disaster. Nobody expects to lose everything. You think about losing the primary location or a remote office location, but no one thinks about losing the whole platform.

Among the best features are the BMR (Bare Metal Recovery), Live Sync, and IntelliSnap, which is used for snapshots of hypervisor storage. It's predefined so you only need to enable it and it works. I haven't seen anything like this in other backup tools like Veritas NetBackup or Dell EMC or TSM. We will use snapshotting for all our machines.

Live Sync replicates incremental data to remote locations. If you lose your primary data center, you enable the replicated machines in your DR location so you don't need to restore data.

It's great as a DR solution because it has a lot of capabilities for syncing with a cloud provider. But if you want to keep everything in-house, it's great that way as well because the replication is done by incrementals.

When it comes to the user interface for managing on-prem, cloud, or multi-cloud environments in one place, it's always better to have everything in one. I myself like multiple consoles, a Java console and an admin console. I only work with the Java console. It's great because it's possible to configure everything from there. But operations has that nice console, and having that one console is better than having multiple consoles.

They should move the CommServe outside of Windows machines and the database should be distributed among servers. It's still a single point of failure.

Also, I work a lot with workflows, which means a combination of XML files and commands. It would be helpful if they unified the use of workflows.

I have been using Commvault at my current company for almost two years but I have a total of five years of experience with it. I'm a Commvault engineer. I have built Commvault from scratch using the approach that is best for the client, and then prepared the documentation.

We are using service pack 16 because it is a new deployment so we have to deploy that before we push updates.

I haven't seen a crash of the database. The stability is great.

When I started with Commvault and compared it with NetBackup, I found that Commvault had features that NetBackup didn't have. Currently, we are able to cover 12,000 virtual machines.

Commvault has what it calls a HyperScale Appliance which is a media agent with the disk. This is the best option for storing data. The media agents are in clusters so they share data. It's a nice feature and I haven't seen any other backup company that has integrated this kind of solution. They always use a third-party vendor for this capability. But that involves communication over the network, something which HyperScale skips.

We plan on using IntelliSnaps more and we are testing the cloud backup. We will use the cloud as a hot-DR location. I expect that will happen this year.

From my experience, I have had the best support interactions with Commvault. I always get a response within a couple of hours. If there is a task for Commvault's development side involved in the issue, I get an update every three days that someone is working on it. 

I have yet to find a support engineer at Commvault who has to speak to someone else. They are always able to troubleshoot the issue on the first strike. I can definitely recommend Commvault support.

Our company previously used NetBackup and TSM. One of the reasons we switched to Commvault was that our company was not satisfied with IBM's support. It was challenging. If support is not able to help you manage problems, you can't use the solution.

The plus with Commvault is that it really focuses on automation for deploying machines and discovering databases, etc. A Commvault administrator doesn't need to understand, in-depth, the application he is backing up because he doesn't need access into the application. It's much more focused on snapshotting for the synchronization between locations. The BMR process can be used across the cloud and on-prem solutions, so you can easily move machines from your environment to a cloud environment. And from that cloud environment you can convert to another vendor in the cloud.

That is all built on the BMR process, which is better than any other backup tool I know. Some of them, like TSM, don't even include a native BMR solution. Instead there is a third-party vendor that does it, so it's not fully-integrated.

I like it when everything is in one console and things can be automated via an internal workflow and deployment is fully automated so I don't need to access the operating system or application platform. Those are all benefits of Commvault.

The initial setup was really easy for me because I already had experience with NetBackup and TSM. It wasn't difficult for me to understand Commvault's logic. But, in my opinion, it's very easy to understand because the logic involved is minimal yet it offers a lot of configurable options. Because the process for the installation of agents, such as for databases and applications, is fully automated, you don't need to touch the application at all. That is one of the main reasons I prefer Commvault over other tools, where you always need to touch the client.

A basic implementation of Commvault depends on the size of the company. Installation of the server takes a couple of hours, but that is the same as with other backup tools. But the installation of it on clients and their configurations will take days if you don't want to customize it because Commvault comes with pre-defined groups. The process will take a number of days for a small company.

In terms of staff for deployment and maintenance, it could be just one person involved, depending on the roles of the people in the company. This person has to be able to do a lot of things, so it depends on whether he has these responsibilities and the capabilities.

We have about 100 users of the solution because we have a lot of operations.

The ROI is there, but I don't have figures on it.

Our deployment is primarily on-prem. We are trying to assess the cloud capabilities but it looks like the cloud is more expensive if you want to have the whole infrastructure.

Commvault is more administrator-friendly than other backup tools.

We are using Commvault for cloud support, but that part is at the PoC stage. But it's the same as the on-prem solution. Whether the library is on physical disk or in the cloud, it looks the same in Commvault, so that's not an issue in terms of configuration or use. There are even more cloud vendors than I had heard of and it looks like Commvault supports all of them.

We don't use it, but there is an archive function in Commvault which allows you to move data from primary storage to another type which is much cheaper.

Version 11 of Commvault has been on the market for something like seven years now. They have changed the naming so what they called service packs are now called feature packs. That means they are no longer changing the version number and they do what they call a "platform release." That was changed in SP19. In each new pack they add new features every three months. They also have hotfix releases every week or so.

I'm still surprised that they continue to come out with features that are really nice and that you didn't even think were possible.

We are a partner for Commvault and our role is to implement the solution for our customers. Our customers in Egypt are in the banking and financial sector. They use Commvault to back up their data. We help in sizing the workload of the customer, designing the solution and implementing it. We also support the customer if they face any issues.

We have a hybrid implementation. The first target for the backup is on-premises and the offsite backup is on Azure cloud.

The solution provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations. We completely depend on Commvault for managing our data, from backup to restore to replication.

Commvault saves significant time for administrators. It also saves on infrastructure costs by being able to manage what were disparate data management solutions in one place. It saves us on a monthly basis. It also has embedded deduplication which works well. It saves about 90 percent of the front-end data.

In terms of recovery, it depends on the teams that we restore for. Sometimes we restore for the database team, and other times for the application team when they add a new feature or change something and they need to roll back. Also, sometimes our users are attacked by ransomware or by a virus or trojan, and their data is encrypted or deleted. Commvault has helped us in these scenarios. It has always been successful in restoring the backup. 

Commvault's compatibility matrix is tops. It supports almost any workload and technology our customers have.

It provides fast backup and fast restore. The amount of time it takes depends on the size of the restored data, but Commvault has a good feature through which you can add many streams when restoring. That helps us in restoring rapidly. In my opinion, Commvault is one of the fastest solutions when it comes to restoring. I use competitive solutions, such as Veeam and Rubrik, and Commvault is the fastest among them, in both backup and restore.

It integrates with many cloud providers, like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. Also, all workloads can be integrated with Commvault. If we use a new technology, Commvault integrates with it. Commvault is a data management solution with support for building the DR side of things. With Commvault we can rapidly back up and restore any application we add to our environment.

Commvault software can be implemented on any hardware. This helps when we are competing against another backup solution. It helps win customers.

The Command Center is good. It has a good dashboard and it's very easy to use. It gives us a view of about 85 percent of the environment, because something like tape configuration and monitoring are needed. In the new version they have added good features and they have worked on improving the documentation.

The dashboard provides a good view into any issues so that users can address them. It provides understandable messages when there are errors, telling you where the issue is, and you can research the error code or send it to Commvault for help.

One issue we face is the complexity of the console. That could be improved on. It takes users time to get familiar with Commvault. On average, it takes our customers between one and three months to learn it. The console and the way you configure Commvault have very advanced settings. It takes time to understand how it works. 

After a customer understands it, he can improve and add to the configuration.

I have been using Commvault for around three years.

It's a very stable solution.

It is also scalable.

The efficiency of Commvault's support is something that, it seems, the vendor needs to pay attention to. At times, when we open a support case, it can take two to four days to find a solution and close the case. 

The setup process is complex. The person who implements it has to pay close attention to certain things. The index cache must be in SSD storage, and the same is true for the deduplication database. The sizing of the CommServe must be done well. In terms of agents, and other features, everything must be calculated very well. All these things will affect the performance in the future.

It can take hours or days to implement, depending on the project. The administrative part of the deployment takes about a day, but the integration part can take from three days to a couple of months, depending on the size of the project.

After we do the first implementation, the customer can do future implementations. 

Commvault has advanced its licensing in the last year with its complete licensing solution. The complete license gives us options for all the features. Commvault does not license based on storage or the management components. It can integrate with any storage vendor. That means that when we are out of storage and need more, we can integrate without additional licensing.

In my opinion, Commvault needs to reduce the licensing cost by 20 to 40 percent to make it cost-efficient.

You need to size the CommServe and the agents very well because it will help the performance.

Overall, Commvault is a good solution for midsize and enterprise companies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is room for improvement in terms of data security.

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

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

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

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

Commvault's licensing is very flexible.

Right now we are using on-premise and cloud backups. We run 300 to 400 jobs per day.

Compared to other products out there, we have found that Commvault is best suited for our needs. We can easily restore and deploy the data.

Previously, before the introduction of Commvault, we used other software including Rubrik. But with Commvault we can deploy multiple clients at a time and we can back up multiple clients without any issues. Right now, we are using about 1,000 VMs. Before Commvault we used to back up about 200 servers and 100 VMs. Previously, backups took nine hours. With Commvault it takes minutes.

The solution definitely helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and to spend time on other projects. If we need to run backups for dozens of servers, it can be done in one minute because it can be done in a click. We can select the backups by selecting the client computer groups. We can categorize those groups and, based on that categorization, we can run the backups and we can restore the VMs as well. It can be done in minutes. Running backups twice a week, it saves us about 5 to 6 hours each time.

It is also saving us on infrastructure costs and has helped optimize infrastructure usage, like storage space. By using Commvault we have saved about 3 TBs of space.

We have used it to recover data when there was a problem with our database. It took about four hours to bring the data back. But recently, we introduced HA and it has saved us more time. With HA the data can be brought up in one hour. With other solutions it would take 10 to 24 hours.

We do monitor all the backups using the user interface. It is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and easy to create solutions with it. It is very comfortable. We can do multiple operations at a time.

We use Commvault Command Center for backups and restores and for the creation of new clients. We use it for other functionalities as well. In terms of VMware, I can go directly to the Command Center, enter VMware, and I can search it directly. Command Center is very useful and it can be used for more advanced techniques.

The cloud support is good. The on-premises cloud is working for us as is traditional cloud. All the clouds we're using are working with Commvault. We have Office365 and Azure.

I need documentation for Azure backups. One expectation that I have is regarding PDF documentation. When I was trying to browse the documentation, I could not locate that. The documentation should be in PDF format where it can be downloaded easily.

I have been using Commvault for the past five years.

The stability has been good. We haven't had any issues.

Scaling can be done easily.

I am now looking into an orchestrator. High-availability is another future use case for us.

We do not have any issues with support. Everything is fine. Commvault helps in fixing any issues and they help us to deploy the data whenever we need help. And they provide the security as well.

In the first year we raised many issues, but now it is easier for us to manage. We refer to the documentation.

We used to use Rubrik but we found Commvault to be a better solution. It provided time savings, handled more complexity, and provided more security.

With guidance from their team, and based on the documentation, it was easy to install. The deployment took one-and-a-half hours.

There are updates every quarter and they are getting easier to deploy.

We have about seven staff members on my team, IT analysts, who handle the solution, to account for different shifts and meal breaks, etc. Within the company there are 10 clients using it, mostly within IT.

We are very satisfied. It is a very useful product, daily. 

Commvault is constantly developing new use cases based on customers' requirements. They are developing new features on a regular basis. In version 11, 19 new features were added. For example, in previous versions we did not have the Command Center and whenever backups failed we could not restore the data. Now, there are options for restoring the data. These kinds of advanced techniques are introduced from day to day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have seen return of investment.

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

We did evaluate Veeam and Cohesity. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Commvault for five years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The setup itself took a couple of hours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using Commvault for about two years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it for backup as a service for our tenants. We are service providers. We host Commvault partially on our cloud and we also use some physical servers for a part of the Commvault infrastructure.

We need the solution for our tenants. We need a reliable solution with as many platforms and applications supported as possible and a solution that is multi-tenant. Commvault has helped us to win some customers against our competitors because we have this solution and they don't have anything like it. They don't use Commvault.

It provides us with steady growth in our sales. It's a unique solution. In our region, we are the biggest provider with the Commvault solution. We're not so big compared to Europe or the US, but we are big here.

Commvault has helped us in some unusual cases when we needed to move a tenant's environment to our cloud or to migrate a tenant from one data center to another. Commvault has been the best solution for this. It has helped a lot.

It has also minimized admin tasks a lot because it has a very good number of settings and tools. You need to spend some time configuring it. After that, you click the start button and everything goes okay. Occasionally we have to check that everything is okay and that nothing is broken. But it's excellent in manageability. It saves us a significant amount of time.

In addition, we have managed to save some costs because the solution supports so many platforms and has so many supported applications. So we need one solution and not ten. It has reduced our costs in terms of infrastructure. If we didn't use Commvault, we would spend 50 percent more on several other software solutions similar to Commvault to replace it. And it has significantly reduced our storage. One of the categories that we measured when looking at software to use for our backup as a service was storage efficiency. Commvault was one of the few that has a deduplication engine and our storage is about one-eighth of what it would be.

The multi-tenancy is the most valuable feature for us because it's the only software that is fully multi-tenant and that has all the features we need to provide to all our tenants. It provides us with advanced features for MySQL and Oracle, among other platforms. Many backup solutions have support Oracle backup, but not many have as many features as Commvault for this kind of backup.

The user interface for managing multiple environments in one place is okay for our engineers. It has all the needed features, all the needed settings, available in both the old console and the new web console. I think our tenants are also happy with all the available features from the Commvault consoles.

There is room for improvement in its user interface and web console, called Command Center. They are improving it every year so if they continue in that direction, I think it will be a very reliable console.

As a company, we have been using Commvault since 2015. Personally, I have used Commvault for six or seven years.

The stability is okay. It's stable. We haven't had many problems with the solution. If you know the solution and know what you are doing, the stability will be okay. But you must have a deeper knowledge of the solution. For this, they have good Education Services on their site, and they will help you a lot. If you do it yourself you will make mistakes and encounter some problems with configuration. It will be much slower and more painful for you. Or you can use help from Commvault Education or Commvault Services.

We have scaled out since our initial configuration. Our initial configuration was around 300 TB and now it's around 1.5 PB, if we measure it by backup size. If we measure it by servers, initially it was around 10 servers and now it's around 50. We have around 60 tenants. Some of them are smaller and some of them bigger.

Commvault's technical support is very good. I have experience with other software products and their support so I can compare Commvault with the others. Commvault support is very good. We have had about 160 tickets and almost 99 percent of these tickets were resolved very efficiently and very quickly.

We have a second solution just for our virtualization platform.

We searched for a solution for other areas of protection, such as agent protection or protecting applications and virtualized cloud platforms that our previous solution could not handle. Our previous solution, EMC Avamar, was more restricted in terms of applications and platforms that it could protect.

In both my current and my previous company, I was the one responsible for the initial setup and it is straightforward. But the next step is the initial configuration and that is difficult for a less experienced person. Now, I can say that I could set it up and configure it much more quickly.

From deployment to production, in my current company, took two to three weeks.

Our initial setup was one CommServe, so it was a simple deployment, without disaster recovery clusterization. In addition there were two MediaAgents. We are extensively using a firewall proxy setup as well. The setup has grown over the years and now, the infrastructure of Commvault is around 50 servers.

We're planning to deploy another one in another installation. The current one will be preserved as it is, and we will deploy a new one with some improvements from our side and perhaps with a different overall design.

Because it was my second installation of Commvault, I did it mostly myself. After the installation, I had some questions about the initial configuration and they were resolved by Commvault's standard support. I opened an incident with Commvault and they helped me with this very quickly.

Its efficiency has returned our investments over the course of about two years. Mostly it was an investment in infrastructure.

Our cost is around $20,000 per month. The previous year, it was around $30,000 per month. It now costs less because Commvault changed the licensing type for providers. It's not that we are using Commvault less, but it's just due to a licensing change.

We evaluated EMC Avamar, Data Domain. And the second one was Symantec NetBackup, at that time, which is now Veritas NetBackup. Veritas NetBackup was the closest competitor when we decided on Commvault.

Commvault was slightly better in price and the licensing was simpler for us than on other platforms. Commvault was also better in terms of data deduplication. It's more efficient with storage.

It's good software and you can create software that is diverse. It has just about every application platform and cloud platform you could need in one solution. You don't need several software programs to admin and to back up many solutions. It provides software efficiency. You can do what you need to do with one solution, not ten.

Use the Educational Services or Professional Services, if you don't have experience with this software. It will be a better experience if you have some background in the software. When I talk with people in my industry about Commvault, they complain that it is difficult, it's big, it's complicated, etc.. I say to them that we have no problems with it. Everything is fine. That is mostly because we read a lot about it through the documentation and watched some educational tutorials before we implemented it. And support is great. Support can help you to resolve questions, not only when something is not working, but also with configuration issues.

Commvault's breadth and depth of cloud support is okay. They continue to introduce new features and new ways to administrate, configure, and use cloud platforms. There may be some platforms that are better in certain areas, but Commvault is not bad and it's not excellent. It's good, it's in the middle. I can't say Commvault's cloud support has a major effect on our operations, but it has some effect. We have cases when Commvault is the only solution to move data from a given cloud to a private cloud or from a private cloud to on-premises. So for migration it's a great solution. But for cloud backup, we don't have a lot of tenants who use Amazon in our region. They mostly use private or regional providers, not global.

Everything is okay in Commvault and they're improving it by themselves. Every update brings new or updated features, which is great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Commvault since 2015.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using this solution to backup our public and private cloud data. It is very compatible with all backup types and environments. It backs up our databases, as well as other systems such as email and files.

We are using a KVM system in our cloud, and this solution works very well with it.

With Commvault, we provided trusted environment to our customer and increased our incomes with new customers.

The Commvault Console is very good, as it is capable of archive and backup in the same system.

This solution is very successful at cross-platform replication. 

Virtual machines backup window in GUI is not user friendly. Some improvements should be done to better user experience.

We have been using this solution for about three years.

This is a very stable product, and in fact, one of the reasons that we choose this solution.

This is a scalable product.

We have been using it more frequently in the past three months, and we have ten companies as clients who are using it for their backups. I do not know how many users they have. We are planning to increase usage.

We have been using technical support, and the response time is very acceptable. We have had no problem with support for this solution.

We previously used Acronis as our backup solution in this company, but it is not a stable product. It fails as we need to restore a backup, and we needed a stable product. We also needed support for many different platforms. I had worked with this solution at my previous company six years ago and was familiar with it, which is why we choose it.

The initial setup of this solution is not complex, and it was not hard for me.

The deployment takes between two and three hours.

We deployed this solution in-house, with our experience. We have a backup team of five people who are in charge of deployment and maintenance, although the team consists of three main people. They are backup administrators and backup experts.

We did not evaluate other options before we switched to Commvault from Acronis.

This is a product that I recommend because it is stable and has good support. However, it still has some limitations and can be improved.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

The price could perhaps be lower as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for backing up the .NES file system. I backup VMware and Windows cloud servers. It's deployed on-prem.

The back of virtual machines needs improvement. I know they're working on it. They're always doing new things but I think they still have a little bit more to do.

In the next release, I would like to see disaster recovery options for the cloud. It was always off the scope because they're not really meant to be a disaster recovery solution but now they're getting there. From what I see, that there's no reason why they can't do disaster recovery, they have everything they need for it. They're beginning to do things but I'd like to see them delve more into that.

It's very stable. 

It's scalable. 

The other customers that had some issues with technical support but I, personally, have not had issues with them. I get good support.

I didn't install Commvault. It's not complex, but it demands optimization to do. An integrator did the implementation. It didn't look too complex, but there some things you need to take into consideration and there were configuration issues, fine-tuning, and things like that. 

The deployment took around two days. 

One thing is the pricing. I think they're expensive. They're very good, but they're pretty expensive. It's a complex system that you have to sit on a little bit. You have to work on it. You have to be very aware of any backup program but here specifically, because it does so much, you have to always be conscious of what's happening.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for Commvault is to archive our files. It allows us to move images from temporary storage to permanent storage. Commvault moves everything from the source to the destination, with categorization of the image archive.

Archiving and storage are very good.

It's the leader in backup and archiving.

The solution needs higher availability.

Its competitor, Veeam, includes backup and replication in the same product. I don't know if Commvault has it or not, but they should if they don't.

Also, they should have a module for reporting and supervising, like Veeam. 

The solution is stable.

The pricing for the solution used to be very expensive, but over the last year or so it's been lowered. 

We use the on-premises deployment model.

Commvault is an industry leader. Also, the price is competitive with other solutions, like Veeam. In Morocco, all customers chose Veeam because it's very simple and also their price is not expensive. Now that Commvault has adjusted pricing, they are another solution that people should consider.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

We provide our clients with this solution. Most of my customers use Commvault as a backup solution only.

This solution solves a lot of issues for the customers. Other solutions, such as EMC, offer an entire set of software products as part of the solution, whereas Commvault offers everything in one software application. This makes it very easy to replace competing backup solutions.

Secondly, the solution does not restrict our customers in terms of backup infrastructure. They can go and buy appliances from different partners, such as NetApp. Competing solutions are more strict with respect to the backup infrastructure, and customers don't like it. With an enterprise-level customer, you can imagine how the backup infrastructure costs grow.

The most valuable feature is the backup functionality. This solution is very good for server application backup, backing up laptops, desktops, file shares, etc. The architecture is well suited for it.

The highlight of the solution is the licensing. This is a one-window solution where you don't need to purchase different products. If you compare this to Veritas, they have different solutions such as Backup Exec, and NetBackup for servers. In Commvault, it's single product management.

The backup appliance makes it very easy for the customer to plan for future growth.

The database architecture of Commvault does not require you to have a particular database for different kinds of workloads. For example, the server, desktop, and laptop use a single, global application database. You don't have to create a different database and don't need to expand your backup infrastructure altogether.

From the perspective of the enterprise cloud archiving software, it does not resolve all of the data solutions that the customers are expecting. It works, but it is not up to the mark. They still need some time to improve the archiving and offer it within the single console management. We do not pitch the Commvault archiving solution to our customers. If they ask for it due to reasons of legality or compliance then we can supply it, but we prefer not to offer the Commvault archiving solution.

We did a POC with one of our customers who is archiving more than fifty thousand email accounts, all over the world, on a daily basis, and Commvault failed miserably. It was not able to provide that kind of performance. It can be good for up to three hundred user mailboxes, but not more than that.

The stability of this product, as a whole, needs to be improved to compete with archiving solutions such as Enterprise Vault.

Support for this product needs to be improved because I have seen a couple of cases where it is taking more than the required time to solve issues.

The documentation is not up to the mark. They need to improve their support documentation because it is a little bit weak.

They need to expand more into private, hybrid, and public cloud systems. They need to be even more open than they are now with respect to integrating with public cloud systems. Cloud is the platform that system integrators are now selling, so it is important to have that support.

Between two and three years.

The backup performance and management are ok. However, when something is not working, it is probably fifty percent due to product immaturity.

The scalability of this solution is fine. It is much more scalable and flexible than everything else in the market. It is the one thing that they are good at. There is no doubt that they have simplified the licensing and purchasing model.

One of our enterprise-level customers for this solution is a very large telecom. They have lots of users. There are different databases and applications including Oracle, their ERP solution, Financial Suite, Greenplum, their CRM, filesharing services, and others. They also have a heterogeneous environment that includes Linux, Unix, Solaris, and Windows. There is also virtualization using VMware and Oracle virtual machines. Commvault is the only software that they have for performing backups, so they are one hundred percent reliant on it.

I do not have direct contact with technical support, so to be fair, my opinion is based on everything that I hear from the implementation team. In this context, I feel that the support for this solution, overall, needs improvement.

The documentation is weak, and they need to improve their support portal. They should be aware of the known issues in the market and address them. In general, their support needs improving.

Our large telecom client switched to the Commvault solution because of both cost and complexity. This product provides them with a simplified, unified solution. What they used previously was a set of several solutions. There were different backup solutions for the different platforms, desktops were backed up separately, there was different hardware to store it, and there was another tool for regulatory compliance. Each task used a different software application, and by implementing Commvault it brought everything into one solution and solved all of their problems.

The initial setup is straightforward. However, issues do not start at the initial setup stage. Once the environment is set up and you are going to take the backup job, pushing the enterprise policies, then problems can arise. It may be because of the backend infrastructure or the network, or something else. Whatever the issue, it is at this point where our customers sometimes need better support.

When it comes to the implementation and deployment, from day one until the backup process begins, it should not take more than one week. This is for a new system.

The deployment time for our enterprise-level, telecom customer was longer than average, in part because they already had an existing backup solution and they had to migrate to Commvault. It needed to be planned and implemented gradually, which required some cutoff dates. From start to finish, including streamlining the documentation and handing over everything, it took approximately one month.

We normally handle the implementation of this solution for our customers. If we are having a problem, or the transition is not smooth, then we involve Commvault to assist with the implementation.

I do not have direct experience working with the Commvault support, but I have heard that they are fair. 

Without stating numbers that are confidential, I can say my understanding is that our clients have seen ROI.

The licensing is very simple, and one of the advantages of this solution. They have a subscription-based license, as well as a perpetual option, but that is all they have. It is easy to understand. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

The licensing fees depend on the size of the solution and the kinds of workloads. There are hardware costs, software costs, licensing, subscription, and support costs. Support contracts can be for one, two, or five years. All of this needs to be considered.

Overall, this solution provides value for the money. In my experience, compared to solutions like Veritas and Veeam, while they do have their technical pluses and minuses, Commvault can save you on average 40% initially, and then 20 to 25% annually.

We are partners with several different vendors, and I evaluate solutions based upon the customer's needs. These include solutions from Veritas, Commvault, and others. Before I reach out to them, I know what their hardware costs will be, and how much it will cost to maintain each solution. I also know what the costs are to maintaining their existing solution, and can compare this for them. This is how I can show them, for example, that their ROI will be realized within a couple of years.

I have been using backup technology for more than fifteen years.

Commvault claims that they are doing all kind of things with archiving and compliance, but I have discussed this with my implementation team and they have not been receiving good feedback. There are a lot of issues in managing it.

When it comes to a backup solution, however, I do not suggest anything other than Commvault. It gives me room so that I can meet the customer's requirements both in terms of budget and performance, and they are happy with it.

For anybody who is implementing this solution, I would suggest only doing a POC if absolutely necessary. It drags out the implementation, so it should be minimized if it is done at all. 

In summary, this is a unified product that is simple to use. It is a good backup solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's for the file system backup, reel backup, and databases.

We have been using the solution for four years.

We have a physical server with actual machines, applications, and databases running on it. We do a daily backup on these.

In the VM, we have Live Recovery, Live Mount, and Live Sync.

We are happy with the stability.

We are happy with the scalability. We have 30 to 40 physical servers with 100 VMs. With this product, it is not about users, but about the amount of nodes utilized.

We will probably increase by two or three nodes in six months, depending on the requirements of our project.

We are very happy now with the technical support, as it is Indian. We previously had difficulty with the support being foreign.

We did not previously use another solution.

The implementation should be done by a certified Commvault engineer to avoid issues in the future.

We are waiting for the new version to come out.

For the past five years, I was part of a big team as a solution architect that was designing Commvault as a solution for different connector projects and enterprise sectors within the region: the Middle East, North Africa, and so on.

Commvault is unique in the backup and recovery category. It has many features. If you are using the Commvault as a backup, you don't need any additional software to have an archiving solution. While with other products, you do. We use Commvault for backup, recovery, and archiving.

From the cost perspective, it minimized the costs which reflected on the investment of the storage, even the investment on the network side. The algorithm and the technology that Commvault is using will be reflected in other parts of the IT components, like network, storage, etc. 

Global deduplication and the indexing of the data object are the most valuable features. It saves costs on the product side by doing compression and deduplication. It will help you and make it easier to reach the data that you need within the minimum downtime when it's required. 

The setup is not that straightforward or easy. Even the documentation is not generic or public like other products. You have to be a partner or you have to have a specific account and download it from the vendor themselves. 

More than five years.

It is very stable. The product setup went well. It was deployed without any problems.

It is scalable. Commvault has recently changed the licensing. The licensing methodology makes things much easier and easy to scale up and scale out. Usually, the rate of technology they are accomplishing with other partnerships with vendors like Fujitsu is using the scale appliances which are massively scalable. 

We have more than 11 customers over here, and in total, there are around 400 users. Some of them are in the financial sector and the government sector.

The amount of people we require for maintenance depends on the project. If it's a medium project, then it's around five. 

Their technical support are very good. You can chat with the support engineers that are available 24/7 and can provide you with anything you need. I haven't had any major incidents that I've really needed them for.

We used Veritas. We switched because if I wanted to use a backup and recovery feature plus an archiving feature I would need to buy more software. With Commvault, I only need one license. It was not a centralized solution like Commvault is. 

The initial setup was complex. The company itself and technology do not have a market share here in the region. Compared to other software or solutions which have most of the market share in the Middle East, it might be that people could use on the other software or other solution better. From the Commvault perspective, the way to install this solution is totally different than others. The mentality of how the solution should work is totally different than other competitors. In the Middle East, we don't have many technical people to work on it. 

The time it takes to deploy will depend from sector to sector. If it is an enterprise with more than 1,000 users it can take around three weeks. If it's mid-range like SAP accounts it could take one week. Taking into account the features that you want to enable will not take that much time.

We integrated it ourselves. 

It is not expensive. The prices are competitive. Other vendors are now adjusting their prices to compete with Commvault. Compared to other competitors and vendors the pricing is fair. 

The advice that I would give someone considering this solution is that you need to have the right people and the right team to implement Commvault. Other than that it's a good tool. From the backup and recovery processes aspect, there's a feature currently they are working with us to enhance it. It does what it says it'll do. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because there is a little complexity of the overall product. 

We have it in our data center, and it's primarily used for our servers. We take backups of the data to protect ourselves. If by mistake we delete some data from the primary storage, we can restore the data from the backup.

For the last six months, we have been providing a graphical user interface for our customers for Commvault so they can, themselves, restore files and folders.

They are evolving. Any time we encounter a problem, an issue, we have a good relation with the development of Commvault, and they work tightly with us together to solve the problem. The fix then becomes available in the new service pack.

It's an enterprise product. It's a stable product. We have good support. Almost all databases are in the scope. I can't really say anything bad about it. It’s a good, stable product.

You need quite a lot of human resources to maintain a Commvault environment, to keep it operational. Also, it would be nice to if there were an easier way set up some Commvault components.

I don't know exactly when they came out with the new HTML interface because, until then, the interface was a based on Java. The HTML interface is a remarkable improvement. However, there are still some features that are not available in that interface that are available in the Java console, but I'm sure that will come with time.

Another issue that comes to mind, that we have to pay attention to is, when a new service pack or hotfix comes out, it can happen that something that was working before does not work anymore. We really have to test it in our lab, before we are 100 percent sure we can introduce it in production and be 100 percent sure that everything still works that was working before.

Stability is okay.

The new HyperScale solution from Commvault is a scale-out solution. We are not using it yet. One month ago, we did a book with the scale-out solution, so we do not have much experience with it. I expect a lot from it.

I'm not on the operational team, but what I hear from colleagues is that they are quite happy with the support. We have a good relationship with them.

Commvault is certainly a vendor that you have to take into consideration if you are looking into a backup solution. It’s worthwhile to have a look at it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are cost and, perhaps, new features that Commvault maybe doesn't have, like backups to public clouds, for instance. But the primary factor is the cost.

I would rate Commvault at eight out of 10 due to the stability, our relationship with the development team, and the quality of their backup of their solution.

Earlier, the legacy was you needed to backup and, when you needed to do an archive, you needed to do an archive job again. With Commvault it is a single job, which does both backup and archive, so it does not touch the data twice.

Backup and archive with a single window, with a single backup job. You only need to type "c".

Actually Commvault is good software. I just wanted to compare the features, which are there in EMC NetWorker, which are not available in Commvault. We have things using Networker, I just wanted to see what is the advantage over Commvault.

Commvault is very stable.

It is scalable, and it can grow up the environment.

No, it was in manual backup earlier, now it is an automated.

It was pretty simple and straightforward.

Symantec, Veritas. We chose this one because it was the first which had all available storage types, deep storage, cloud storage, and it has a global database system.

• Single pane of management
• Policy driven backup

Cloud integration.

Training.

No.

No.

Good.

Complex.

Invest the time and resources to learn and develop your policies.

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.