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 Commvault.

The product must improve Oracle client configuration. It is difficult to configure clients of Oracle and SaaS. The solution must also improve bare metal restore for Oracle and Active Directory. Active Directory is not fully protected with bare metal restore. The tool must improve the 1-Touch recovery of Oracle and Active Directory. The product must provide features for converting VM to physical and physical to VM.

The product's migration process and stability need improvement.

They should provide more integration with OpenShift for the solution. Also, its support could be better.

The tool should revise its licensing.

The solution's pricing could be better.

I don't have any notes for improvements. The price could always be lower. We'd like to have local support in Germany. The POC is only 30 days, and it really should be 90 days.

I haven't had any challenges with the solution. The pricing could be more flexible in terms of licensing. It would help attract more customers.

This is not a very high standard product.

There is a lack of marketing in our region so there needs to be a focus on improving the solution's reputation. We believe in the solution but competitors like VIN have an edge in the market. The network and service need to cover more regions than just the Middle East. The solution should provide virtual updates on Linux OS via a host address or in utilities instead of via a secret database.

There are some features that need general improvement. With respect to the cloud, they need to offer more integrations. We'd like to see the administration be a bit easier with respect to the command center in the future.

Commvault Complete Data Protection meets market standards, but an area for improvement is its licensing model because everyone else offers the subscription-based model nowadays. At the same time, Commvault still has the traditional license model, where you must buy a set of licenses. For example, you must purchase one hundred licenses if you're backing up one hundred virtual machines. At the same time, other players offer a pay-as-you-go subscription model, which means if you use one hundred this month, you'll pay for one hundred, and if you use thirty next month, you'll pay for thirty. With Commvault Complete Data Protection, on the other hand, you pay for one hundred licenses even if you only use fifty virtual machines, so the licensing model needs improvement.

When you deploy Complete Data Protection for past services, it's more complicated because you cannot directly back up from the previous service host. We have to build a proxy server, like a middleware, to directly access the past database server. It's complex and hard for beginners to figure out.

The interface could be improved because it has two different consoles. The first console is Java, and it is a little complex, but you can do 100% of the operation. But now, there is an alternative console of HTML 5. It is trendy and simple, but you can only do 70% of your operation. The HTML console is perfect for a client or a partner. You have all the information centralized with the Java console, and I believe they plan to transition to the HTML console fully.

So far, the only improvement that has been identified is to keep its documentation updated. They need to integrate configuration screens or videos (free training courses, webinars, demos) so that engineers with little experience can fully exploit the features that are offered or managed within the license that was acquired, and thus have better quality and completely satisfactory experience, in addition to integrating more products derived from the result of the integration of the first product or license.

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.

Initially, I spent quite some time understanding the product and how it functions. While there are newer features on the Command Center, there are still some missing things. I don't use it at all. For Office 365, they have limited functions and features. Commvault could make the product more cost-effective on the public cloud side. We are using this solution to back up whatever is still on-prem. We are not using it to back up what is on the public cloud because we have a native backup solution for that, which is provided by the vendor. As our footprint gets bigger, we will continue to evaluate this, but the last time that we did a cost analysis, the cost was not comparable to the solution that public clouds are offering.

The user interface is complicated for users, but for an engineer or backup operator, it is useful. Still, sometimes users feel that the management dashboard is complicated because they see all the features in the one dashboard. Sometimes users need a simple dashboard to manage the whole environment. Commvault has two management dashboards. The first is the CommCell Console, which is Java-based, and the second is Command Center. We don't always find all the features we need in the Command Center and we need to go through the Java console, and sometimes features are only on the Java console. Sometimes we don't see what we need on both consoles. For example, we have to use Command Center to back up Oracle EBS, because it's not on the Java console. It would be useful if we had all the configuration features for setting things up in the Command Center, rather than having to go to the CommCell Console. Also, sometimes, when restoring across platforms, we need more documentation from Commvault.

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

Sometimes for customers, it is difficult because you can see all the features. Sometimes, it is difficult for them to use or understand it. Once they have had some training from Commvault or us, they are really happy with the solution. I would assess the Command Center as a very useful but sometimes difficult tool. It is multipurpose. It has all the features of logging and monitoring, especially for the actual setup. For us, it is easy because we work daily with it, but for customers who only use it once a week, they sometimes have some difficulties. Command Center is not user-friendly for beginners. This is also the reason why we propose to customers to use the Web Console. I know that some older customers are not yet really aware of this tool. However, from the moment that they start using the tool and search possibilities, they will then go to that Web Console instead of the Command Center. Ransomware is a major problem these days, and whatever improvements they can make to be more secure on this is always good. At this moment, they have a large install base and a very broad package for backup of applications, for OSs and Hyper-V, with a cloud integration. This will be a major part of their growth and change in the future. We would like the ability to restore to and from the cloud to on-prem. While they are already very big in this aspect, this could be an improvement over the next few years.

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 deployment process should be simplified because it is not something that just anybody can do. One of my colleagues in Australia is using Commvault and has told me that the solution does not yet have complete support for integrating with cloud providers. Specifically, it is not integrated with Amazon services. In the future, I would like to see better integration with cloud environments. Commvault is only installed in our Windows environment, on Windows server, and I prefer to use Linux because I find the environment simpler to use. In a Windows environment, it is not easy to use command-line-based products. There are two people on my team that manage Commvault for my customers. It is supposed to be one of the least time-consuming solutions but in reality, it consumes 60% of their time. Compared to other backup solutions, it takes more time to manage and operate. Commvault doesn't support container-based systems and does not offer agentless backup.

Commvault tries to integrate with every new product that's coming out on the market. Sometimes it makes everyone's life easier if it works well. If not, we don't know where the error is coming from, and it has a lot of bugs. Another issue is with the eDiscovery platform, Activate, where they profile data. It has a lot of issues with the indexing. Commvault also has something called a file-level on detection. On the production server, if it finds any anomalies on the files, it sends an alert. It runs every five minutes, so admins can get an email alert. That's very good, but it's a reactive alert, we only get it when there's a backup happening. If they can improve that and make it a proactive alert, to identify and send anomalies to admins, that would really help any companies out there go against malware.

The setup is complex. It's not simple to install the machine and start a backup. Commvault is software based, unlike hardware-type devices.

We do not use Command Center, but we are using CommCell Console. We're navigating and manipulating the entire environment by using CommCell Console, and we are comfortable with it. We didn't find Command Center user-friendly. We found it a bit difficult to use. It decreases the efficiency of the tasks to be performed. It was probably implemented as a centralized application to manage all environments, but it was probably not a good idea. I and my colleagues across the globe are comfortable with using CommCell Console rather than Command Center. Commvault is doing releases very often. The services packs and maintenance releases come quite often. They should slow down a little bit because quite often, when we implement a feature release or a bug-fix release, it causes some issues, and some of the options do not work. It is more expensive than other solutions.

They can improve the security level for Windows. When mapping to the Windows, Commvault can take full control over data volumes so that the attacker can't delete the volume data, but the Windows admin can access the volumes. It would be great to block access at that level.

The most common feedback I get in terms of Commvault is that it can be complex. I always refer my customers back to their own environment. Almost everything that goes into Commvault is a request by a customer. While it can be complex, it can also be very simple. You just need to understand your environment in order to make sure that you really need to turn on that extra feature or thing inside of Commvault. Maybe you don't need those things. It really depends on how simple or complex your environment is, whether you need all of Commvault's features. Though, you have them if you do need them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is a little more complicated than it really needs to be. Reporting could definitely be improved.

This product is overly complex to operate and run. The price of this solution could be lower.

The price should be reduced because it is too expensive for our customers. I would like to see a more user-friendly GUI.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I would like them to keep working on the new web interface to migrate out of the old interface because the old interface is a bit complex. It was driving customers away because of the complexity. If they migrate everything (100 percent of the features), this would make the product be perfect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is room for improvement in terms of data security.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.