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Commvault Cloud vs IBM ProtectTIER comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Commvault Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (3rd), File Archiving (2nd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (3rd), SaaS Backup (1st), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
IBM ProtectTIER
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
82nd
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 7.5%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM ProtectTIER is 0.1%, down from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Cassandra Cinar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides excellent visibility and helps reduce costs and time
We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies. We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations. Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages. Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks. It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs. It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements. The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights. Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action. To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices. Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure. By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA. It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices. Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms. It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities. In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent. It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.
ValereFEUGWANG - PeerSpot reviewer
Protects data in hybrid infrastructures, but it is an expensive product with poor support
The main challenge for our customers is to replicate the virtual environment upon restart, without using any additional solutions such as VMware SLM. I would like the possibility to back up the infrastructure and then replicate it upon on restart, without having to orchestrate the starting of the VM. It would be much better for us. This solution can be made easier to use. Technical support is very frustrating and we are considering other solutions because of it. Stability is something that should be improved. The product is expensive and the licensing should be changed.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of Commvault Cloud include deduplication and compression."
"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)."
"We specialize in Commvault and IntelliSnap. Commvault covers all our customers' backup needs in one system, and they have complete control over their Snapshot backups. Snapshots are important to our customers because of the size of their data sets."
"The solution’s user interface for managing the on-prem environment is good."
"It's very stable."
"We can go from one page to another page, from office backups to VM backups, or applications like secret backups. So everything can be configured or restored from a single pin."
"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."
"The solution's stability is excellent."
"Overall IBM ProtectTIER is a great solution. It is easy to use."
"The command-line interface is good."
"The cataloging is the best feature. It takes millions of frames for the backup. It's incremental, so it takes less time to complete."
"The solution is highly stable."
"The most valuable features are the Self-Service, and the ability to search the data."
"In terms of stability, I've found it to be very stable. I've walked into the server room when it was at 60 degrees Celcius, and it was still running fine."
 

Cons

"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."
"The speed of the Office 365 Backup & Recovery feature is adequate. Microsoft controls the amount of bandwidth that people have when they're using Azure and the O365 environment... If they could work out something with Microsoft to improve the speed, that would help."
"It would be nice to have just one email report come in, then we can filter out failures. If everything is backed up, we really don't need to see the report. If it is in a single report. A simpler customised report would be good."
"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."
"Commvault is a rich system that might scare somebody the first time they see it because it feels so huge."
"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."
"There are two ways to use it and I prefer the web-based one over the app. I wish they were a little bit more matched in what they offer because the features aren't as available in the web-based interface as they are in the app."
"The customer support is not good."
"The configuration wizards are still complex and hard to navigate. These should be easier to manage."
"Setting up the system to work with legacy equipment is a bit complex at times."
"The backup for a large amount of data is slow."
"I would like the possibility to back up the infrastructure and then replicate it upon on restart, without having to orchestrate the starting of the VM."
"IBM ProtectTIER could improve by being more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to other competitors and vendors the pricing is fair."
"Everyone else offers the subscription-based model nowadays, while Commvault Complete Data Protection still has the traditional license model, where you must buy a set of licenses. You pay for one hundred licenses even if you only use fifty virtual machines, so the licensing model needs improvement."
"Commvault licensing is a perpetual license so only the support is being renewed yearly."
"...the battle came down to pricing, as well as some small features, and Commvault was the best in all the criteria."
"The solution is expensive. The subscription is based on a monthly basis. There are additional costs that vary depending on the size of the backup."
"Commvault Backup & Recovery is priced fairly, and its performance-to-cost ratio is also better than fair."
"Our yearly cost is around €20,000... The cost is based on the number of users and the amount of data. They sell it per terabyte."
"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."
"This solution is very expensive."
"The customer can decide how they want to purchase a license. However, the price of the solution is expensive."
"IBM ProtectTIER is an expensive solution."
"We have a capacity-based license, which is managed centrally for all the sites of my company."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
24%
Real Estate/Law Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Commvault?
The tool is affordable. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. Implementation requires additional costs because we need Commvault Professional Services.
What needs improvement with Commvault?
Data center backup must be improved. We also want the product to provide us with a cloud-based backup. If we use Microsoft Exchange Online for email services, we want to know how to get a backup in...
What do you like most about Commvault Complete Data Protection?
IntelliSnap and file system backups are valuable features.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company
Durham Police Department, Re-Store LLC, CenterGrid, pixx.io GmbH, Australian Government Department of Defence, QD, Refresco Gerber
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. IBM ProtectTIER and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.