We are a solution provider and we offer Commvault to our customers.
In my company, we are also using it for backup and recovery.
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.
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.
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.
Commvault is an enterprise-level backup solution that can use multiple agents at various sites. We have many customers, including banks and hospitals.
Commvault is a stable solution for Red Hat Linux.
It takes a lot of steps to implement backups. We have to do a lot of planning to make the solution work properly. It takes some time to create every policy. It's an easy task, but there are many steps. It's not as easy as using Veeam.
I have used Commvault for nine months as a supporting engineer.
I rate Commvault eight out of 10 for stability.
Setting up Commvault is complex and it involves many steps. After you configure the storage, you need to set your client's policies and add a proxy server if necessary.
I prefer selling Commvault to enterprises. It's appropriate for a company that has a headquarters plus four or five offices. It isn't ideal for a small business. The price is okay if you have the budget of a large enterprise. Aside from the license, the only additional cost is cloud fees if you are using cloud infrastructure.
I rate Commvault Backup and Recovery 10 out of 10. I would recommend Commvault if a company has huge backup needs and a sufficient budget. If the price isn't an issue, you shouldn't compromise.
Our primary use case for this solution is for backups and restoration, and we deploy the solution on-premises.
The solution has provided our organization with a better security posture.
The convenience of backing up and restoring simultaneously is very valuable.
We have been using this solution for five years.
The solution is stable.
The solution is scalable, and the entire organization is currently using this solution.
I rate the technical support team as six out of ten.
Neutral
We previously used Veeam.
The initial setup was complex.
Implementation was done in-house with a team of approximately ten people.
I don't recall the exact cost of licensing. However, I rate the prices a ten out of ten.
I rate this solution ten out of ten. It is a great tool which is easy to use, and I am satisfied with the product.
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.
In the field of backup applications, there are various solutions. But certainly, Commvault should be ranked at the top of this list. Everything was created “in the house”, they listened to the needs of the clients. What I would emphasize is it is easy to use for users who are not backup administrators and with a single console for all activities.
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 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.
There is no doubt that Commvault is nice software. However, when you look at TSM (New name is Spectrum Protect) which comes as a FULL license, including all types of agents (SQL/Exchange / Oracle) and is free of charge for 82 years, which include at the software. All vendors are using HASH algorithm for Dedup and LZ for compression.