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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 (2nd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (2nd), File Archiving (1st), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (4th), SaaS Backup (2nd), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
IBM ProtectTIER
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
86th
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 7.3%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM ProtectTIER is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Matt Reller - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides extremely fast backup, is easy to manage, and is flexible
Commvault Cloud's automated policies provide the notification we need to ensure our data is secure and managed correctly. Commvault Cloud provides excellent visibility across all of our organization's data. It is extremely important to our organization that Commvault has a unified platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads. It has helped our organization improve by simplifying the way we manage our environment. We could not manage the same environment with only half of our current staff. We have yet to find anything in our environment that Commvault does not support. Commvault Cloud's Risk Analysis helps us identify, categorize, and classify sensitive data enabling us to take the appropriate actions to protect it. Commvault does a good job helping us limit our exposure and ensure compliance. Commvault has helped us reduce our data management costs significantly. Compared to Dell Avamar, the costs are vastly different. Commvault is much more cost-effective. We are licensed by capacity, so we don't have to worry about licensing different features. We have all the features that are licensed by capacity. And as far as ongoing support costs and other expenses, they are much lower than what they were with Dell Avamar. Commvault also gives us the flexibility to use any storage we want, while Avamar is tied to the Data Domain, which is not cheap to support. It has helped us reduce our backup time unless we are using Data Domain. This is because we can perform deduplication and compression on the client layer, which reduces the load on the network. We cannot do this with Data Domain. In fact, if we even attempt to perform a quick progress check before sending data to the Data Domain, the system fails completely. We learned this the hard way. We are using many more advanced features in Commvault Cloud than we ever did in Dell Avamar, simply because we had to license each feature separately in Avamar. As a result, we did not perform many backups in Avamar, such as all database backups (DB2, SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL). These backups were performed outside of Avamar. We are now using Direct Connect agents for all of our databases. This allows us to perform incremental backups, which we could not do with the previous method. As a result, we have reduced our backup times by two-thirds, or even more in some cases. Compared to when we were backing up directly to Data Domain, Commvault is now running our backups ten times faster. This has resulted in a significant reduction in our backup times. Commvault has helped us reduce the RPO. Even in Data Domain, it has reduced our storage times by about half. It has also helped us reduce the threat detection time. We reduced the RTO significantly with Commvault. Commvault has helped us reduce downtime primarily due to the increase in the performance of resources.
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

"It's the leader in backup and archiving."
"The solution also provides me with a complete view of our data. I write scripts to report information from the Command Center daily. I report it in HTML and have the status of the last day for the whole environment."
"The email archiving feature is very smooth and better than others."
"It integrates redundant storage and preserves jams in a storage area, providing up to 70% compression rate."
"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 most valuable feature is the deduplication ratio. It saves most of our space and reduces the network traffic."
"Scalability, as well as stability, are a couple of important parts of this solution."
"The recovery features are useful. It is easy to recover data. If something happens, we can easily recover data. We have faced ransomware issues twice, and we recovered because of Commvault."
"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."
"The cataloging is the best feature. It takes millions of frames for the backup. It's incremental, so it takes less time to complete."
"Overall IBM ProtectTIER is a great solution. It is easy to use."
"The most valuable features are the Self-Service, and the ability to search the data."
"The command-line interface is good."
"The solution is highly stable."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Bare-metal restore needs some work. It's not intuitive and seems to have been an afterthought."
"Sometimes, we have a performance issue with the backup speed. So, that has to be rectified and improved."
"This is not a very high standard product."
"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 would like to see more customizable reports. I have reports going right now, but the daily report, for example, shows something like 40 jobs that ran when there are just a few endpoints on there. I'd like to just know if the endpoint was successfully backed up, not how many times. More customizable reports would be nice to have."
"The stability of the tool could be improved."
"The backup for a large amount of data is slow."
"The configuration wizards are still complex and hard to navigate. These should be easier to manage."
"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."
"Setting up the system to work with legacy equipment is a bit complex at times."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Commvault licensing is a perpetual license so only the support is being renewed yearly."
"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."
"Commvault is more expensive than Veeam, which is the reason that we are changing to Veeam for cloud environments."
"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."
"The license for Commvault HyperScale X is paid annually."
"It would not be affordable for small to medium size organizations."
"The price is a little bit high."
"Licensing could be better explained. Sometimes, it's unclear what features are available in different licensing models."
"We have a capacity-based license, which is managed centrally for all the sites of my company."
"IBM ProtectTIER is an expensive solution."
"This solution is very expensive."
"The customer can decide how they want to purchase a license. However, the price of the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
27%
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.
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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: July 2025.
861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.