Commvault Cloud Reviews

Overall, Metallic has helped us out tremendously from a backup and restore situation. We just had a pretty major restore that we had to do from Metallic two weeks ago for a file that was basically deleted five days ago, and they needed a copy from seven days prior to that. My whole team walked through the restore in about two to three minutes. We basically figured out which buttons to push, then the restore was done 30 seconds later. That was an eye-opener at that point, because we understand what a great decision we made by going with Metallic.

If you ask me today whether Metallic was appropriate for an enterprise-level environment, then I would say, "Yes." If you asked me a year and a half ago, I would have said, "No." Normally, you would think that a cloud-only backup type solution probably wouldn't work for an enterprise environment. Then, here comes NDOT and we're about as enterprise as it gets when it comes to the state of Nevada. Right now, we are doing all kinds of neat stuff with this solution where normally you would need an on-premises solution. They have me convinced now. We are backing up stuff that I couldn't get MABS or Rapid Recovery to backup, and those are on-prem and cloud, e.g., hybrid solutions. If we wanted to, we could go to hybrid with Metallic, but their cloud solution is so stable right now.

I ran the solution through my CISO. When it comes to server guys, I am probably the security-conscious systems guy on our team. I went to the same training that our CISO did. Between him and me, we love Metallic. We think their security is definitely acceptable at a high level.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature, which keeps the training down. Pretty much anybody in my group right now can do a whole bunch with Metallic compared to what we could do with our previous solution, on-prem Commvault. The ease of use is probably my number one priority. With the amount of systems that our systems team deals with, the ease of use is the most important thing. We were bouncing around all of the time from this system to that system to this system, trying to remember how things work. Whereas, Metallic keeps it simple.

It is just about as flexible as you can get; simple. You can put it anywhere you want. You can put it on-prem or in your cloud. I could see where a team that's looking for more of a follow the bouncy ball type of solution might get a little confused. "Oh, no. What do you mean I might have to do it this way or I can't do it that way?" Sometimes, people just want to be told what to do. For an enterprise environment, like we are at NDOT, everything we do is not standard. It is not industry standard; it is not normal. We have all kinds of one-offs. We do need flexibility in the solutions that we get. I will say that Metallic has been extremely flexible in that sense, where we are able to follow the bouncy ball if we wanted to. Obviously, we didn't. We did it our way and Metallic, as a whole solution, provided that to us with no issues.

Commvault handles our backups across both cloud and data center environments. It manages our short-term backups on-premises, followed by a transfer to disaster recovery for data older than 30 days, ultimately migrating them to long-term storage.

We are seeking a solution for secure and encrypted backups that comply with both our information security policy and the data retention requirements for database archive logs. Additionally, these backups must fulfill all customer service level agreements for all storage under our responsibility, including NAS, SAN, and any other backup methods specified in our service catalog.

Our deployment model is a hybrid of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure. We primarily use AWS as our main cloud provider, with Azure as a secondary option.

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.

We use Commvault Cloud for backup and recovery with Air Gap Protect and Risk Analysis to be more cyber resilient.

We deployed Commvault Cloud as a hybrid model both on the cloud and on-premises, and it will continue to be that way. It was 100 percent on-premises. With the migration, it will be about 90 percent cloud and 10 percent on-premises.

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.

Commvault Backup & Recovery backs up our central business services for the university. At the enterprise level, we have also expanded our environment to back up colleges across the university, including through specialized networks that we call the Campus Cloud. We provide MDMs and backups for these colleges. Many of our schools did not have any backups before, so this was a real gain for them. We were able to do this fairly easily with Commvault Backup & Recovery. We simply had to add disk space for their backups.

I appreciate Commvault's automated policies for ensuring that our data is secure and managed correctly. The reporting, alerting, and management that Commvault does automatically, as well as the provision of a health check report, are very helpful, especially for a team of one who manages all of the backups. In other products, we would have to write our own scripts to monitor many of these things, but Commvault's interface makes it easy to quickly assess what it is doing, what it has done, and what we might be missing.

Commvault provides visibility into all of our organization's data. The command center is very helpful, and we have customized the reporting for different business units, groups, and teams based on their needs. I can easily generate reports for them based on what they need from Commvault. Overall, I think it's pretty easy to use.

It is moderately important to us that Commvault has a platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS workloads because we are just starting to build more into the cloud. As a college, we have always been fine with everything on-premises, so those other initiatives were not really there. But now, cloud initiatives, doing things in the cloud, and building in the cloud are all on the roadmap, but we are not there yet. Therefore, having a product that can accommodate those needs as they arise is beneficial to me, because I do not want to have to go out and look for other software to do it. So knowing that Commvault can do it if and when I need to is a plus because they are always looking at doing more of those things.

Commvault has enabled us to provide much better data protection for all of the applications that serve the university. Prior to adopting Commvault, we had a large gap in our data protection strategy. However, Commvault now automatically detects and backs up every new VM that is created in our vCenter, without the need for any manual requests. This has minimized the gap in our data protection significantly, and I have rarely had a new machine go for more than one day without being backed up.

Commvault has helped reduce the organization's data management costs. When I started on this team with the old product, there were five people on my team and a dedicated manager. Now, there's just me. This has reduced staff, which I don't think is always a good thing, but it has allowed us to reduce costs. There was an increase in cost for storage and infrastructure, but that was needed regardless. Overall, Commvault has not really reduced the organization's total cost of ownership, but it has reduced a lot of the risk for the university. This is because there was a huge gap in what was being backed up before. People didn't rely on the backups when I joined the university 15 years ago. They had a warehouse full of tape, but no one even knew what was on them. One of the features of Commvault that was important to us was its ability to manage tape and vault. This is not really a thing anymore, but it was a big deal for us when we first switched to Commvault. We also appreciated the fact that Commvault still knows about all of our tapes and the data on them, even though we don't use them very often. This means that we can still bring back the data if we need to, and it will still work. Being on Commvault has also allowed us to get off of tape. We're now able to write long-term retentions to the cloud, which is a huge benefit and a win for the product. This is at least true for us, but it may not be true for all organizations.

It has helped us reduce our backup time significantly. I don't have much to compare it to in this environment because it's so different from what we had before. When we started using Commvault, it was a pioneer in the industry. Before that, we were only backing up a handful of production machines. When we brought Commvault on, we started backing up everything. So, Commvault has reduced our backup time because we're now running a much larger environment, but our backup jobs still take less than 14 hours, even with nearly 3000 VMs to back up each night.

We have reduced our organization's RPO tremendously. We can meet our recovery point objectives in 24 hours.

Commvault has helped reduce our organization's RTO.

All universities today have both on-premises and off-premises data. Therefore, Commvault is our go-to service for on-premises and off-premises storage arrays and data recovery. Thus, the best way for us to think of IT as a service today is to consider that whenever we have lost a file or something has crashed, we have been able to retrieve it 100 percent of the time for over ten years now. This is significant for us, and Commvault provides us with data backup as a service.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the easiest, Commvault Backup & Recovery is a ten for monitoring and managing our environment. It is so transparent and easy to use that nobody realizes we are using it, which is a plus.

I love Commvault's automated policies.

The Threat Scan feature works great.

Commvault provides excellent visibility across our organization's data.

The most critical function we have is Commvault's platform which offers recovery on cloud, on-premises, and SaaS workloads.

Commvault's risk analysis is excellent. In all the years we've spent millions of dollars on technology, no one has ever suggested that we don't need Commvault or that they don't like it. It's that good, and it's transparent at the same time. With other systems, people will ask why we're using them and if we can get rid of them or scale back on them. But that never happens with Commvault.

Risk analysis is excellent for helping to limit exposure and ensure compliance. This is one of the first questions that comes up when applying for cybersecurity insurance: do we have the capability, and how well does it work? With Commvault, we can answer this question by showing how Commvault has been tested by cybersecurity insurance companies in the past three years.

Commvault reduced our backup time by 50 percent. Our backup time decreased, while our data volume increased significantly. This improvement is due to a combination of our improved internet connection or switching and Commvault's technology. What used to take 8 hours five years ago now takes only one hour.

Commvault reduced our RPO and our organization's threat detection time.

Our primary use case is for Office 365 Backup. We started out as an Exchange Online only company. Then we were looking for some sort of backup solution to augment the existing Microsoft Office 365 archiving features for a price that was more compatible with our company versus what Microsoft was offering for their archiving solution. We also needed the ability to do time and date stamp retrievals. We ended up settling on Commvault at that time. We've been with them, and we've seen it more from being in the Commvault virtualized infrastructure to being the Metallic.io SaaS solution.

We protect mostly Exchange Online, but really we do the whole breadth of Office 365 with them. We were looking at some other solutions, but with them, we're doing our entire Office 365 Microsoft Online platform.

It has helped my organization because we don't have to have tapes. We're not paying for tapes, storage tapes, or storage ourselves. It's definitely a bonus. We're more efficient in all of our backups for Office 365 because it is in a single pane of glass. If we were to integrate Commvault on-premise, we'd be able to use the same pane of glass to manage both on-prem and cloud solutions. It's taken our backup from being a full-time job to being when you need it, set it up. Our users could be empowered to access their own data backups. Which means we can alleviate a lot of the administration from the backup administrator.

It has significantly reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our backup operations. We're going from an on-prem to a non-on-prem, we're all doing nonsolutions. So we really can't compare it against anything else.

The way we look at it is that before, we used to manage a separate backup solution for our on-prem environment. We had to make sure that our logs are flushed after the backup was complete. If the logs weren't flushed then it caused our on-prem Exchange to offline. There's a lot more management involved from that point of view. The other thing is that we would have to purchase the tapes. We have a tape rotation, we would have to ship tapes to an offsite location. If we need to restore, we had to go back to the offsite location, and get the restore. In some cases, exchanging restore on-premise could be a lot harder because it doesn't give you some of the brick level functionality.

We are a part of a global team for data protection. We have multiple regions around the globe that we are supporting 24/7. This is our presence with respect to the data protection environment.

We are backing up around eight petabytes of data in our organization. We have multiple platforms that are being backed up. We have OS servers, and we are also backing up multiple applications such as Exchange. We are using different databases such as Oracle and SQL Server. We also have NAS shares originating from NAS devices.

We have a hybrid environment, and we also have on-prem. We are backing up on-prem, and we also have a cloud for which we are using Azure Backup. Currently, I'm using version 11 and service pack 22. I started with version 7, and I have worked on versions 8, 9, and 10.

We have a global presence, and we are backing up a lot of remote sites. We have integrated a couple of cloud services by using Commvault. For the cloud environment, for a few regions, we have not directly backed up. We have implemented the Commvault solution inside the cloud. So, we are using it as a normal backup application rather than using the native backup solutions in the cloud, but for on-prem, we are completely using Commvault. 

Commvault has a concept of workflows. It has a lot of default workflows, and it also allows you to customize your workflows, which minimizes the manual intervention of the admins. If these workflows were not in place, the admins would spend a lot of time in manual intervention. On average, we save 25% to 30% of workload with the automation of tasks.

Commvault is helpful in reducing storage costs. There is a concept called deduplication, and Commvault has extensive technology and a lot of features when it comes to deduplication. It is one of the backbone features of Commvault that helps in reducing the space consumed on storage devices, which reduces the storage cost. On average, we can reduce up to 80% of the storage costs by implementing the deduplication technology by Commvault. 

Backup and recovery is our primary use case, but we use it to back up all our laptops and help with our computer switch-out process. When somebody receives a new computer, we use Commvault to migrate their data from their old computer to their new one which has eliminated one of the most time-consuming pieces of that process.

We also use Commvault Activate for e-discovery and to help with lawsuits and claims at the end of our projects. It helps provide our outside counsel with the data they need.

We are able to sleep at night knowing that all of our data is protected and we can recover it very quickly. Instead of trying to do a recovery and hoping things are going to work, I'm fairly confident that within just a couple of minutes, we can have any of our machines restored wherever we need it.

We used to have daily RPOs on almost everything, but Commvault has given us the flexibility to create RPOs daily, every four hours, hourly, etc. For the most part, any request a data owner may have for their system, we can accommodate without difficult changes to our overall data protection strategy.

As for RTO, doing recoveries with Commvault for our virtual machines means we can have them running in under five minutes in most cases. Previously, that would have taken hours.