Commvault Cloud Reviews

Back in July 2021, we migrated to Office 365. I am in the process of migrating users' mailboxes from on-prem to Office 365 in the cloud. In the initial design, there was no backup solution. Whereas, we back up all mailboxes twice a day onsite. I raised it with Senior Management that we need a backup solution for users' mailboxes. 

Via Metallic, we are backing up Exchange mailboxes in Office 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams. Our presence for OneDrive and SharePoint is very minimal because we are still in the project phase. We have already migrated 100 mailboxes out to the cloud and further migration of another 600 users. We are in the process of scheduling that. 

They gave us the option of where to store data. We chose UK data stores, which is called Storage U.K. South. It is really flexible. The best thing is that Metallic followed the model for Office 365. It is the same model, so we pay only for user mailboxes. We do not pay for shared mailboxes, which is really good. We don't have to buy four terabytes of space or anything. We are paying at a level of 750 users mailboxes to be back up and shared mailbox is free. More than 750 users and the price will reduce. 

The backup runs automatically every eight hours. Therefore, there are three backups in a day. So far, we have never seen where the backups have over run. As far I am concerned, it is very good product, simple to restore and I would highly recommend it. 

From the technical point of view, we have delta backups. Once a mailbox is migrated to Office 365, whatever the size is, it gets a backup fully once. After that, only delta changes get backed up. This is a really good solution because you don't use a lot of bandwidth since you are only changing deltas. There are no restore charges.

So far, for anything that gets backed up, it is good.

Restoring is very fast. In testing, I did a restore for a single item from a mailbox. Within a minute, I had the message back in my mailbox. So, it didn't take hours or days. Obviously, there will be a limit. If we suddenly go into DR and have to restore five terabytes of emails for people, then it will take a couple of days, which would be acceptable. For general usage, where we have to do the odd restore, we have never had issues. It happens within minutes.

It does back up Azure AD. This is a feature that we really haven't used. We have not had any issues with users or a group to run a restore. The option is there and if required the Azure AD Group object can be restored. I am sure if I tick on it, then it will restore that option back into Azure AD. This is an extra bonus that we got for free.

I am a consultant. Therefore, I have assessed the product, recommended it, and implemented it. I then hand it over to the BAU guys for the normal business day-to-day, as I work on projects. They do a Daily check. Unless in the last four weeks something has changed, we get four emails. One for each product: Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams. So, we are getting four backup reports. 

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.  

In the roadmap, they have something around reporting. They are aware that they need to improve it. It might already be there or we haven't set it up. However, in the last four weeks, which was the last time that we checked, we didn't see anything different.

We set up the solution in November 2021. So, by November 2021, we were fully up and running.

The stability is perfect. Whenever I log in, it logs in. When I click on something, it loads up. So, I haven't seen any issues.

Sometimes, some dashboards take a bit of time to load but they have to go back and do queries, which is normal. It is your bandwidth and your Internet. When 700 users are logged onto our site, then our Internet will be a bit slower. When compared with our other products or anything else that I have used, the solution is sleek, fast, and smooth with no issues.

We haven't been involved in any scalability. We just have a simple backup for our four products, and that's it. I am sure it is scalable since I can see in their dashboard that they use Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and do endpoints. However, we do not use any of those products.

The project has been handed over to a BAU (business as usual), which is a team of two server engineers who work with it. One of the engineer's jobs is to check the backups daily. That involves checking the Metallic backups. We set up an daily email, which they receive and can confirm the backup has run. Rather than log into a dashboard, look at figures. or go around looking for information, it is on their fingertips in the morning. It takes one minute and their job is done.

We work through another partner for support. We work through them, and if they can't resolve anything, then it is escalated to Commvault directly.

Metallic support is direct. I have raised one ticket. One of my OneDrive folders was not backing up, so I raised a question. Before even half the day was gone, the problem was resolved.

I would rate them as a nine out of 10. I didn't get a very clear answer on exactly what they did to resolve the issue. I know they took the issue onboard and resolved it in a reasonable time, but it wasn't detailed technically enough for me about what was the actual issue. Why did it not back up those two folders in One Drive?

Positive

We reached out to our partners, COOLSPIRiT, who engaged with Metallic and we setup a Demo. We all liked it because the solution is just simple.

We have Commvault for onsite backups. Commvault is used for on-prem mailbox backups, whereas Metallic is used for cloud backups of Office 365. We moved to Metallic as a SaaS backup solution.

The initial setup was easy.

COOLSPIRiT is our partner, so they set up the session with Metallic.

We had a Metallic consultant. He went through it step by step. I wanted to keep the control, because if I gave him the control, I literally would have put my feet up on the desk. There was not a lot to do. There was just the connectivity with Azure AD. The consultant does this day in, day out, so he just whizzed through it.

We had less than an hour-long session. If I wasn't slow with the mouse, we would have been done in half an hour. He was letting me drive and understand as he was explaining. We didn't even do the full hour session.

The Metallic consultant was nice and friendly. He explained what and why he was doing something. He also explained what our prerequisites are.

The prerequisites are very simple. You just need a O365 global admin account. Later on, it was removed. It is just for the initial Metallic and Azure AD connectivity.

Metallic has reduced the amount of manual work that we require to manage our backup operations. It is set and forget. It is actually one of those things. Usually when you set up a backup system, you need to sometimes work on it, do your daily checks, etc. Now, this solution is just set and forget. You receive a report telling you, "You are backed up."

Every day, if you do a daily check of backups, that could take anywhere from half an hour to an hour. So, it is probably saving us at least five hours a week.

If needed, we have Commvault on-prem backup solution for Exchange. Now, that has gone to the cloud. The good thing is we don't have to pay for bandwidth and hardware. We don't pay for licensing, operating systems, updating those systems, and having a team for it. Comparatively, there is a cost savings. 

We like that there is no extra cost for SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive. It is all mimicking Microsoft's model. Every user has one terabyte of space. When users start using OneDrive, everybody has one terabyte that will be backed up included in the price.

We didn't actually physically evaluate another solution. Our biggest concern was that if we selected something like Veeam, Veritas Backup, or another backup company out there, we would then have had to change our backup systems since we are running Commvault. We wanted something similar to the Commvault product, or something they would recommend in their solution, as we are not ready to change from Commvault and go to another backup vendor's solution.

Close your eyes and just go for it. it just works. I would highly recommend it.

I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10. I love criticising companies to find some fault or try to break the solution. That is what I was trying to do during testing. However, I couldn't pick up anything apart from reporting, where there is room for improvement. I am sure they can come up with something better for the reporting.

We really needed a product where we could extend the Microsoft Office 365 backups and archival process, as well as back up our Office 365 SharePoints and our users' OneDrives. That way we could have a seven-year retention plan and if we need to go back and grab someone's email that they accidentally deleted two years ago, we could. 

We also needed a solution that we didn't have to have onsite storage for, because we had a storage restriction onsite. This product gave me the ability to have everything stored, as a SaaS model. Everything is right there.

We recently had an issue where someone couldn't find an email that they had just recently written. When I went looking inside the backups, I was able to find and restore that email and they were able to continue working. It was very critical for a customer sale, but that email was recovered and it was perfect. Because it was just a single email, it was relatively quick. If I had had to do it another way, it probably would have taken me an hour-and-a-half to two hours longer with our old way of doing it. Before we went with Office 365, we were Exchange on-premises and it would have required me to have pulled out a SAN snapshot to recover the data that way, or go to the tape. Because this is all hosted in the cloud and works in the cloud, I was able to do it in five minutes.

Metallic has helped minimize the time spent on backup tasks, absolutely. It has reduced the time, daily, that I deal with whether the backup is up, and performing backups, by about 50 percent. I have more time to do other things.

I have been able to save on hardware costs at my site due to the low price of the application. I am looking at a reduction in infrastructure costs of at least 25 percent.

The most valuable part of the solution is that it is fire-and-forget. Everything we've programmed into this Metallic SaaS offering is what they claim it to be. It's been just a treat to use it. From starting the trial, to the 15 minutes it took to run my first backup, to the 30-minutes for my first restore of the users' email, it has just been fantastic. It works as advertised.

Since it's built off the regular Commvault product, and I use that Commvault product, the user interface has been very easy for me to get into. It's easy to use and navigate through. I've had no questions on how to find the relevant information, and their documentation has been on-point for helping me find all the hidden features inside their menus.

The Command Center, as far as providing a complete view of data goes, is 100 percent accurate. I found stuff that I didn't know about. I was able to find out that a couple of things are flowing in an odd way and I was able to get those remedied and treated in a way that ended up improving my boss' daily life.

It also provides me with a single platform to move, manage, and recover data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations. It's a single window to see everything I needed to see regarding this level of backup. I really dislike like it when the company purchases multiple products that do similar things and I have to go to different windows to get full insight. This solution gives me the full insight without having to use other products, metrics, or reporting tools.

Since it plugs into my Office 365 tenant, it was literally three clicks. So it supports cloud well. And it's all documented well. They even provided training and onboarding help for that 15-minute process. It was just fantastic.

I would like to see some of the code execute a little bit better when I add new licenses and assign licenses to users. I'd like to see that information update a little quicker. It would also be helpful to be able to run a report on licensing so that I have better visibility into how much licensing I'm using.

I really have no other complaints beyond that. And they were able to get me that information relatively quickly when I submitted a ticket.

I've been using Metallic since day-one of its release in October, 2019.

I would give the stability "five nines." I've not seen it down. I can't say it hasn't been down once, but it's been up the entire time I've used it. There have been no issues. It's snappy and responsive. I'm impressed with the stability of it.

Scaling is amazingly easy. The way they recommend the setup, it is easy to drop a user into one of my security groups and, within 15 minutes, they are in the backup schedule rotation and are being backed up.

I have 75 users enrolled. We may have plans to expand in the future to start taking advantage of their endpoint product through Metallic. We would expand from 75 seats to 200 seats in the Office 365 backup, and would add on another set of 200 seats for their endpoint backup.

Commvault's technical support for the solution is knowledgeable. I haven't been able to stump them. They've been able to answer every single question and help me with any issues I've had. They've just been, bar none, fantastic.

We were using Backup Exec for a lot of stuff and ShadowProtect SPX, a StorageCraft solution. Now that we have this online, it's fantastic. Every product that we use from Commvault, in general, has been fantastic.

We switched to Metallic from our other solutions because they didn't provide the Office 365 backup component we wanted.

We needed a backup solution and I purchased their standard Commvault for our on-premises stuff. When I attended Commvault Go, their customer conference, they debuted Metallic and I said, "That's exactly the product I was looking for, for my 365 backup, and I'm buying it from Commvault." I already knew how their software works and Metallic is same. They're just doing it in a SaaS model for 365, endpoint, and even server backup if you want. I really needed that 365.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's 100 percent accurate on their website. From start to finish: 15 minutes and you're running your first backup.

My implementation strategy for this was for the 365, the OneDrive and the SharePoint components. When we brought it online, my goal was to target the 75 most used, customer-facing mailboxes. Within 15 minutes I was able to make sure the product was working and, by the end of that day, I had everyone applied. Compared to other products, that would have taken days.

If you have technical experience it will be straightforward. We walked through their installation script just to confirm I had everything done, because, given how new the product is, they wanted to test their help script. And it was spot-on. They had it perfect. I am fully confident that, even if a person doesn't have great technical knowledge, they would be able to help that person through it.

When I purchased Commvault Metallic, they did have an onboarding process that helped me if I had any questions. It was literally a 15-minute process. I did everything before we even had that phone call, so I got to spend the call asking a few questions. It was really easy. 

I would say we have seen a return on investment, but it's a hard metric to come up with due to DR. We haven't had a DR scenario where it has paid for itself. But I view it like buying car insurance. It's better to have it and not need it, than something happening and needing it and not having it.

We are paying on a yearly basis and it comes out to about $3.80 a user per month.

There are no other costs for the specific features that I have. If I was to use server backups with them, there would be an additional cost per terabyte of storage, based on my storage targets, or an infrastructure cost if I was using it to target on-ground storage stuff. But because I'm using the platform that includes storage for the Office 365 backup exclusively, there is no additional cost.

The other products I was looking at wanted to charge me anywhere between $10 to $15 per person and I would have to do storage on top of that. That means I would be paying by the terabyte if I was putting the storage in the cloud or having to purchase hardware on-premises to do so. With the Office 365 offering from Metallic, at the price point we got it at, it was perfect. They knew exactly what the market needed and they hit their marks.

We really didn't evaluate other vendors because none of them gave me the options that I was looking for and that Metallic was offering: a low price per user, and storage included for the 365 backup. With other products I would have had to purchase cloud storage and pay for additional storage, or the cost per seat was just not something I was willing to pay.

The biggest lesson I've learned is to remind people that they still need to back up Office 365 emails. Just because it's not on their premises, they should still back it up.

Commvault gives you a fantastic 45-day trial. It's worth trying it. They have a really good, long trial period. They will answer any questions you have during that process. I know a lot of people say, "Just try the product." With this one, try the product and you'll see the ease of use.

For deployment and maintenance of the solution, for our size of company, it's just one person, a system administrator who does overall operations support.

We use it for data protection.

We have two consoles: one on the West Coast and another on the East Coast. Our database copy and auxiliary are sent to an outside location for DR, just in case we need to do a system recovery.

Initially, it was on-prem, but we moved it to the public cloud since everything is on the cloud.

Several years ago, we encountered some ransomware. We just had to recover the file with Commvault, which was great.

Commvault provides data protection. Their engine is ransomware-agnostic so ransomware doesn't compromise our backup data. Therefore, we can rely on their data protection to recover and back up our production system.

The virtual server agent (VSA) backup for vCenter is useful and also saves some money. If you use the front-end, which is the agent, then it is a front-end terabyte model, which is very expensive.

Everything is in a single place. I love it. I use the Java GUI console.

Commvault provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations. This is important to us. 

There are a vast number of supported storage vendors out there who can support the Commvault connection, whether you are using public or private cloud. This is something that I really like.

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.

I have been using this solution for seven years, since I joined the company.

The stability is great. The product is very good.

It is very scalable. You can scale out as much as you want to the data platform as well as expand to other network platforms. We have seen some resellers or other vendors who are using Commvault as part of their service provider to back up their clients. In terms of scaling, they can use it to back up private data, public data, etc.

The technical support is great. They are very responsive and right on top of things. Sometimes they go above and beyond to get your answer and solve the problem.

Our 24/7 SLA has never been missed. When you call support, whatever time frame is promised based on the SLA, they deliver on that.

I would rate the technical support as eight or nine out of 10.

Positive

It is a little complex at first when you need to choose the product design, features, and functions. Once you understand those, it is not difficult.

Early on, we were using Commvault Professional Services. Now, I handle the deployment and maintenance myself. I support this solution for our entire company, which is about 2000 users.

If you architect and design it right, then it will save you a lot of time. Right now, I don't need to spend much time on it. I am spending an hour on it per week. It is saving our admin teams around 50% of their time.

Commvault is saving us a lot with its dedupe and compression. This reduces our footprint by 75% to 80%.

Based on the customer's needs, their pricing and model is very confusing sometimes. You need to check with their sales to make sure you are getting the right pricing on whatever you are using. I know that they have simplified a lot regarding the licensing model nowadays, but it is good to always double check and make sure it has everything that you really need.

We pay for the license every year. Initially, it was around $100,000. Now, it is down to $30,000 to $40,000.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Commvault has the capability to go to the tape library directly. I know that there are some solutions out there not capable of doing that. 

Look at your business needs, potential growth, and the vendor from a technical, support, and the cost standpoint. You also need to look at the cost, looking at the license very closely, which is a bit confusing.

Go to their classes and try to attend their training, at least for the fundamentals of building a foundation. Take a few classes to get up to speed. That is probably the best learning path to understanding Commvault.

Commvault has good scalability and functionality that support what is needed.

The product is pretty strong. You just need to know how to use it and implement it correctly.

I would rate this solution as eight out of 10.

I've been here for 37 years and I've seen all the data challenges there are. The Centers for Disease Control consists of multiple centers that are all under one umbrella of CDC, but each center has its own budget, its own IT, and its own data collection. They were all disparate and they could not be put under one system where we could protect all of them. Everybody had their own protection. Everybody had their own little silos.

Around the time we brought in Commvault, our challenge was to bring those silos together where one larger team could diversify into specific areas. For example, disaster recovery was a whole team of people. That's all they did and they specialized in it. We could develop SMEs in each area of IT, such as disaster recovery, database, and hardware configuration. We had to attempt to bring all these silos together. There's resistance to that to this day, because everybody thinks that they're special and the other people don't matter. Our challenge was centralization at that point. Each area had its own way of backing up and several of them had Commvault already, but it was at that point that we settled on Commvault as our backup solution.

Before Commvault, virus infection was our big problem. If a virus got fished into a system, recovery was disastrous.

Currently, our use case is disaster recovery, pure and simple, including everything from a file restore to a complete system restore.

It is on-premises and also hosted in the cloud. 

We've had problems in the past where a storage person made an error and actually deleted a large chunk of storage, and we recovered it with Commvault. If we had lost that storage, it would have been a catastrophic loss of scientific data. The value of that is incalculable.

In addition, when we're applying for authority to operate, compliance requires that certain things just have to be backed up. That's a requirement of any system that we allow on our network. It has to be recovery-protected in some way, in the event of an error or a tragedy or an attack.

What is most valuable to me are the search features, where you can search through large backup data sets and find what you're looking for. Our data sets are so big that we're over the petabyte mark. To find a specific file for a specific user out of 10,000 users is a challenge. Sometimes the user doesn't know the file path. If we can glean from them a general description of where it might be, the search feature comes in very handy to actually locate it and restore it for them.

If you compare Commvault's user interface for managing on-prem, cloud, or multi-cloud environments in one place with some of the newer stuff that's coming out, it may seem to be a little too complex. But it's so powerful that I don't think the newer stuff competes with it that well.

And Command Center is helpful for reporting to upper management because they want to know the total figures, like how much we are protecting. They want to know the value of what we're doing compared to the cost of it. With Command Center we can tell them, "Look, we're doing this much and we've had this many restores." I have to do monthly reports to upper management on how successful we are at protection.

The solution also supports a broad coverage of workloads, absolutely. We use the VSA backups which means we don't have to have a client on each server. That, in itself, reduces a lot of the complexity. The broad coverage also means that we don't need as many personnel to administer things. It also helps with productivity. We're able to meet our SLAs for restores much better than we would otherwise.

The main area for improvement is that we sometimes experience negative effects from their updates. If they had a larger test area for their updates, that would help. I'm sure that they test, but our environment is probably 1,000 times bigger than their test environment. There are way more complexities in our environment, things that their updates overlook, and that causes a ripple effect of errors.

I've been using Commvault for about 15 years.

As long as everything functions in our environment, Commvault is very stable, but that's not the case. There are always ripples in the environment and sometimes those ripples can cause dramatic effects in Commvault, such as corrupting DDBs.

It's plenty scalable. That's one of the main reasons that we use Commvault. It gives us scalability and versatility across multiple storage platforms.

Their technical support is excellent. Any issues that we've had have been resolved.

At the time we chose Commvault, it was the best, according to our evaluation. There were three main options: NetApp, Commvault, and one other. There wasn't a lot of competition in that area for enterprise-level organizations.

The initial setup was a long time ago and I don't even know if I was involved in it. My lead engineer was involved in it. I was just an overseer at that point and just moving into that position. 

But I do know there have been a lot of complexities in upgrades from one version to the next. Sometimes we skip a version and go from nine to 11, for example, and there is complexity in that, or there has been in the past.

We had direct support from Commvault.

When it comes to ROI, Commvault is like the return on investment with insurance. When you need it, you see it. But if things are going smoothly you don't see it. However, it has to be there. My favorite saying is, "People really don't care about backups. They only care about restores."

One of the most interesting aspects is that the licensing model can be modified. We're paying for our licensing by the client, as opposed to the size of the footprint of the backup, which decreased our cost by about 20 percent.

There are multiple costs involved. We have the hardware, the tape drives, and the storage that our backup targets use. We use non-recommended storage, which is not as robust as what Commvault recommends, but we're able to make it work. That saves a lot of money on storage and its maintenance.

I've looked at other solutions but to scale them requires multiple devices, dedicated appliances. In our environment, everything has to be security-scanned and remediated on a monthly basis. The more devices we have, the more complex it gets to do that.

If you're a smaller-sized entity, Commvault may be a little bit more than what you need. You get what you pay for. Commvault's scalability and granularity are excellent for a large enterprise, but for a smaller one, some of the alternatives are probably more cost-effective. In this context, a large enterprise is one with storage in the petabyte range. That's where Commvault shines.

Our Commvault partner is KELYN Technologies. They're a very professional support service, as an intermediary between us and Commvault, so that we get really professional and timely support. We even bring them in on our proofs of concept. As new technologies develop, we have to prove that we can back them up or support and protect them. Having their engineers available to help us work through those issues is very valuable. Anything that they can't solve, they escalate directly to Commvault for us. That way, we don't have to be in that exchange with Commvault. If we're doing a proof of concept and get to an area where we just don't know how to deal with it, they go off, find out, and come back and say, "Okay, now we know how to deal with it."

And while my staff was mostly pre-trained on Commvault, as new developments and new enhancements come out, KELYN is right on top of them.

The value, for us, of KELYN comes from the following:

1. We have a reduced licensing cost.
2. We have more granular access to engineers to assist with new technology, new concepts. 
3. And sometimes we'll change our methods due to a new enhancement and they're invaluable in getting those things set up and working correctly.

Our current use case is for storage backup of large Veritas Clusters. We have around 350 TB of storage backup and we use Commvault's HyperScale X with unlimited data backup.

With Commvault, our backup performance is way better, compared to what we had, because we have a disk-to-disk backup.

It also helps to ensure broad coverage with the discovery of unprotected workloads. That is always helpful for us. Our environment is very dynamic. We often have high data-demand spikes.

In terms of time saved, because the backups are automated, our team generally spends 30 to 45 minutes reviewing the logs and any errors, and it saves us two to three hours per week.

The deduplication and compression have helped to reduce my backup costs. This year, I haven't had to purchase any expansion for my backup storage, thanks to Commvault. Otherwise, I would likely have had to spend around $150,000. And next year, I can add one more node to HyperScale X before expanding it. So it has saved 20 percent of my backup budget.

The main solution from Commvault is the HyperScale X backup. Instead of a dedicated appliance, we have a three-node HPE Apollo cluster for backing up. That gives us the best value regarding speed.

Another valuable feature is that, in general, recovery is faster than any other solution we have reviewed. That is especially the case for small, micro files, 2 or 3 KB research files.

The Commvault user interface is very nice and intuitive. It's perfect compared with other products I have used. It's in a completely different world. When running a backup, the display is very clear about the estimated time.

And using Command Center, we know exactly how many backups are running and it gives us clarity on our backup state. It gives us a report and can just send a screenshot of it to the team.

In addition, Commvault gives us a single platform to manage and recover our data. Since we are a research organization, backup is one of the most critical parts of our IT operations and services. Internally, we run it as a managed service, and there is a single console that makes it easy for management to see the performance.

The majority of our file servers are backed up by Commvault. They provide protection against ransomware with their intelligent methods. We haven't experienced a ransomware attack, but I know they have good coverage. They will make sure they recover a backup at any cost.

They need to improve when it comes to large, video file archiving. They're good, but they have not met my expectations as a customer in this area.

Also, HyperScale X does not back up NDMP, or they only use a native file share backup.

I have been using Commvault for three years.

The stability means our team can relax. On average, we used to get six backup failure errors a week, and that has been reduced to two.

The scalability is good and we plan to increase our usage of Commvault in the future.

From the time that our deployment was successfully completed, we have hardly reported any errors.

During deployment we had a couple of issues. Commvault provided us with excellent support to make sure all the issues were fixed. Customer satisfaction is a priority. The local sales and consulting team also extended support to us. They made sure we had a clean installation and a clean operation. Initially, when we had problems, I thought things were not good, but my impression of them changed. I see the real value that they bring, and I appreciate them. I'm a very tough customer, but Commvault's support made sure that I achieved my goals and I respect them. They are patient.

Often, once the sale of a product is done, the salespeople run away. But here, the entire team was involved to make sure they delivered and deployed. After that, they extended support for anything that might require it. They said if anything happens, if there are any issues, here is a number to call to make sure that it is resolved.

After the deployment, both the sales guys and a technical guy came to meet with us to understand our future plans. They listened patiently and they did not try to sell me anything. They just added value. That is the reason they are number one.

They do a quarterly review and explain the latest improvements with Commvault's technical experts. There is also training and certification to help us use the latest features to our benefit.

Positive

Initially, our Commvault was configured for a particular use case. After that, we had a detailed discussion in which they listened to our complete concerns and architecture. From that point, the deployment of HyperScale X was very fast and clean. So when they know the environment, the setup is very good.

For our 350 TB deployment, it took seven days to complete, including networking, installation, updating, and getting a full backup to run. QoS took another few days, making the total time about 10 to 12 days.

Commvault support helped us to deploy the solution. I would especially recommend their professional services.

We look at return of value because as a backup solution, we cannot say it gives us ROI. We have a clear ROV due to the reduced efforts for our team, as well as manpower reductions and fewer failures. And technically, we have a faster backup. We have seen a high return of value, and management is also happy.

The pricing is very competitive. When Commvault knows you are comparing it with the other leading providers, they are ready to compromise on pricing. But you have to make sure you get a long-term commitment on the pricing. Otherwise, when you have a future expansion, they will take advantage of it.

Our company evaluated other solutions, but that process was done by another team. But I read a document that reviewed the evaluation, and they evaluated Veeam as well as Micro Focus Data Protector and NetBackup. They looked at industry reviews and at our specific use case for archiving and backup, and Commvault had the best score.

Pricing is the one area where you have to focus. You need to have a clear plan. HyperScale X is one option and it's nice to use when you have third-party hardware, if you want to have disk-to-disk. 

Make sure you convey your use cases to Commvault's professional services. They will listen to you and they will advise on the options. Also, have an assessment done by Commvault professional services to make sure you have a long-term plan in place. 

Other than the large file archiving that needs improvement, VM is good, cloud backup is good, file server is amazing, and they do a good job when it comes to physical server backup. SQL backup is also good, and Linux back is also amazing.

We are a managed service provider, so we offer backup as a service to our customers.

We do a combination of on-prem, cloud, and hybrid Commvault, so we have a little bit of everything. We do a lot with on-prem, but we have a lot of customers that have been moving to the cloud. We also have a number of customers who are exclusively in the cloud and customers who are talking about exclusively going to the cloud. There has been a definite shift to the cloud and using Commvault in the cloud.

We deploy private clouds. We have also done AWS hybrid cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Commvault gives us the ability to manage multiple customers with the same interface. It also gives us the ability to offer enterprise class backup and recovery capabilities as well as DR capabilities to customers who might not otherwise have that accessible to them because maybe they are a small customer or don't have the expertise. What Commvault has allowed us to do is reach a broader audience with the breadth of their product offering.

Commvault absolutely provides a single platform for data management and protection, data security, data compliance, data transformation, and data insights. Customers are moving to the cloud. One feature in particular that we use: When you are using Commvault to backup a virtual environment, then we will use the VMware environment. For example, Commvault allows us to actually migrate on-premise data (backed up using Commvault) and restore a virtual machine into an Amazon or Microsoft Azure environment without doing any kind of conversion ourselves. That is all taken care of behind the scenes by Commvault. That is really a unique feature that allows customers to do their data transformation, their migration from on-premise to the cloud, or a combination of both. That ability is something that Commvault offers that we use quite a bit for this purpose.

One of the things that has become abundantly clear in the cybersecurity threat posture that we have now - you need to really do a good job of backing up your log files. That is something else that Commvault has brought into the world. Additionally, being able to do everything through the Metallic capability has helped us win a few customers. That is a pretty cool feature set that Commvault's brought to bear.

We have a number of co-branded marketing activities going on right now. Recently, we did an executive forum round table. We had our CTO, Ryan Lake, as a part of that. This was in conjunction with Trezza Media. It was about an hour-long conversation, including different CIOs and CTOs from government-level positions. That was really insightful and a good program.

Commvault’s partner program provides deal registration which provides us with support and protection throughout the selling cycle. This is vitally important. The sales cycle on backup and disaster recovery solutions is sometimes a fairly long one, particularly if you are displacing a competitive solution. So, it is critical to know that the registration within Commvault will remain because the sales cycle does take some time to get through.

The backup and restore capabilities are key. The most useful things to us about Commvault, in general, is the breadth of the applications that it can protect as well as the features inside of it, like deduplication and encryption. When people get their data encrypted, Commvault has a way to tell if somebody is being attacked through a cybersecurity threat because their data changes. So, Commvault has what they call honeypot files out there to look to see if anybody is changing these files. Only Commvault knows which files those are, so nobody should be messing with those files. If it changes, then it will alert you to say, "Oh, I potentially have somebody messing with my files." It will alert you to something going on in your environment that probably shouldn't be happening. We deploy that with all our customers so they have this capability as well.

A key aspect of Commvault is having all of these different Cloud Connectors, where you can connect to all these different clouds and applications, managing everything through one pane of glass. We have a number of customers whom we manage through one pane of glass, but then we also have on-prem customers whom we manage that have their installation. We manage that independently because a lot of customers don't yet want all their data 100% through the cloud or managed by a cloud provider. That is why we do a lot of on-prem stuff. Even there, you get a single pane of glass for the entire environment.

Command Center is a great tool because it allows for viewing all of your data in one place. Plus, with the plans, it allows for simple deployments and customers to pick which feature set and capabilities they want. When you have your plans in the Command Center, it really opens up lots of options for customers while keeping everything simplified for us.

One of the biggest things that Commvault does is have the ability to easily restore data. In a disaster recovery scenario, the first thing you have to do is bring up the command and control center of whatever product that you are going to recover with. The initial recovery of Commvault command and control, which they call the CommCell, i.e., CommServe server, is by far the best in the industry. That is where it starts. So if you lose everything, you can start with CommCell. That is the way that they have designed the split indexes of MediaAgent and those types of things. This really sets them apart from any other product out there. 

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.

We've been supporting and using Commvault for about 10 years.

Commvault is extremely stable. There are really not too many things that knock it down.

We have customers with multiple petabytes of data. There is no issue with the scalability at all.

Commvault is the thought-leader in numerous trade organization reviews. They get top awards all the time based on the completeness of the solution and the ability to execute. For our customers, having that weight behind them and knowing that this isn't a company who was just thought up overnight or solving a single issue. They are looking at large enterprise-level issues with the ability to scale to the largest of enterprises as well as the smallest company. We have customers with one or two computers that they need to protect, and we're protecting them with Commvault. We're bringing that entire Commvault platform with the entire weight of Commvault behind it. Being able to offer that to a customer with one or two computers allows us to really use the entire suite of Commvault to help protect all our customers. That is one of the biggest benefits for us, having the entire weight of Commvault behind us as a service offering.

We have a great relationship with support. In addition to interacting with Commvault support, we also have purchased the enterprise support that Commvault offers. That gives us a greater level of insight into what is going on, not only in our environment, but within Commvault's itself. We have a dedicated Technical Account Manager as well as a dedicated Support Account Manager. Those two folks have been instrumental in helping us achieve greater efficiencies within our Commvault environments.

Commvault is fantastic. We have a bi-weekly call with our partner manager where we discuss what is coming up and where Commvault can help, e.g., how can we execute our marketing strategy? It has all kinds of different things that we just don't get from other vendors. The partnership has been great.

With a very large enterprise (hundreds of terabytes of data), you will need to take a little bit more time and make sure that you have the configuration correct, then go from there. 

For small organizations, the initial setup is very simple. Out-of-the-box, you can set it up in 30 minutes or less.

We start with the requirements for the customer, but then we really hone things down for the deployment. We put things in the right places. We will work with customers to understand what their requirements are, then put together a strategy for deployment that we believe is both the simplest and most effective.

We have seen ROI with Commvault.

Our customers' cost of operations is greatly reduced. The more you simplify, the less manpower things take. The less manpower things take obviously translates immediately to the bottom line. In addition, it gives you a much greater chance of success when you go to do your disaster recovery testing or disaster recovery function in the event something bad does happen.

The solution’s broad coverage of workloads certainly affects IT productivity. When you have a simplified infrastructure, there are a lot less moving parts. Things tend to stay operational longer, reducing downtime types of things. Those are all part of the simplification process.

They have profitability guarantees on registered opportunities. They are not necessarily as high as some of the other partner programs out there, but we stick with Commvault because we believe that they are the best product out there on the market.

The pricing has improved. It is simplified compared to the way that it was a few years ago. It is fairly straightforward and pretty easy to articulate to customers, which is handy. 

Commvault’s key differentiators for its partners is the ability to offer the breadth and depth of its tools. There are other vendors out there who have solutions, and a lot of them do good with certain little aspects of one particular problem in the backup and disaster recovery world. Commvault just doesn't have any weaknesses in their product lineup. So, it is the ability to do everything that really sets Commvault apart.

The amount of labor that it takes to operate a Commvault environment is dramatically lower than their competitors.

You need to understand your entire environment and make sure that you are looking at the entire thing so you can understand the value that Commvault brings. Understand where some of the other products might fall down, in terms of being able to manage your entire environment, and the capabilities that you require.

Take the time to document your requirements and make sure that you get all that information upfront so you know what your goal is in the end. That is where you can go a little haywire with any product, e.g., if you don't really understand what it is that you are trying to accomplish first, then you can get into trouble real quick.

Complexity is one of the things that everybody has in their environment and every production environment has some level of complexity. One of the things that I like to talk about when I talk to our customers about Commvault is that your backup and disaster recovery solution is basically a mirror image of your operating environment. So, if you want to reduce the complexity of your disaster recovery environment, then what you really need to do is think about how to reduce the complexity in your production environment. When you utilize a product like Commvault, you can make Commvault do all kinds of things that will help you backup your existing environment. However, when you translate that into a disaster recovery scenario, you need to basically reverse engineer and put everything back the way that it was. Therefore, complexity is a mirror of your production environment. We try to simplify all of our customer's environments as much as we possibly can, including their production environment, in order to make them more sustainable in a disaster recovery scenario.

Commvault is a thought-leader in intelligent data management. For example: 

1. The breadth of the Commvault suite, where it is backing up and restoring containers. 
2. A lot of people are moving to containerization as a way of doing DevOps, and having a faster time to market for their products. Commvault is able to back VMs up and transition those VMs. 
3. This is along with Cloud Connectors adopting the capability of doing backup and disaster recovery in the cloud. Commvault was at the forefront of that entire movement. 

Those are all unique capabilities that Commvault really spearheaded. I don't think there is any slowing that down. They can really crank out some really cool solutions in a pretty quick timeframe.

I have taken a number of management courses with Commvault University, including the Foundations course and some of the advanced courses. It is very good training. The instructors are very helpful. When we were going through training, one of the things that they suggested was, "Work with the product a little bit before you go to the training course so you know which questions to ask." This is really important because then you can ask the instructor specific questions that directly impact your environment, which are the most useful questions that you can ask.

I would rate Commvault as 10 out of 10.

Commvault is our primary solution for all backup and recovery; for index, for analytics, for everything.

When it comes to the storage that we use for backup and data aging, we were limited, at first, by the amount of storage that we could provide for onsite storage and archiving. Commvault's compression and deduplication within the application is allowing us to almost triple the amount of storage. For example, at one of our primary sites we're only able to store about 60 terabytes of capacity, but we actually back up 1.5 petabytes. We're able to squeeze that into the 66-terabyte license capacity. That is huge and saves us quite a bit of money in storage, and even more money on license capacity.

The solution also helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and to spend time on other projects. Throughout the corporation, we only have a handful of people who deal with the backup and recovery portion of our operations. With the number of requests that come in from time to time, it's nice to know that the single pane of glass, and the application as a whole, allow my engineers to quickly find an issue or resolve an issue that our users are having.

All its features are useful and beneficial, but if I had to pick two it would be the reporting and the support that they offer.

I'm a big fan of the reporting. You can build your own reports; it's very customizable. You can have individual reports going to groups of people or individuals. You can have them go out multiple times a day. It's basically a free-for-all as far as reporting goes. If anybody wants a specific job report every day, you can build it, schedule it, and have it go out and never touched it again. It's pretty nice.

Commvault also provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise locations. I've done it multiple times. I've restored files, virtual machines, databases; everything from one location to another location within the United States. I've moved virtual machines, databases, and files between the two. An easier solution than the normal way of moving a server or application is to run a restore to another location. It runs faster and it's encrypted. It provides us with ease of use, instead of using a third-party tool. And I know that everything, all the permissions, all the user access, remains the same no matter where I restore to.

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 been using Commvault for five years.

It's very stable. To be completely frank, I beat the heck out of it, 24/7 and 365. We're a healthcare laboratory company that never closes. We're an around-the-clock operation in all of our locations. The backup jobs are running, and the reports are running, around the clock. Everything runs constantly but we have had zero downtime.

It scales out pretty easily. There's not much on the Commvault side that scales out; it's more the storage repository that's required. There's not much it can't do. 

One thing that I have been requesting is a Linux-based virtual server agent. You have to stick with Windows for the actual CommServe. We'd like to move to a Linux-based OS to release some licensing. I'm sure, eventually, that will come. We have a few Macs in our environment with Commvault on them. We don't often use the Edge client that they provide because the laptops and desktops we have use what is called DFS or file redirection. The files that they have saved are saved on the server instead of their laptop. Since we deal with PI and PHI, we can't have any of that stuff on a laptop. We have 10 Edge backup licenses and we have it on four or five of them, and one of them is a Mac.

Everybody in our company is affected by Commvault. We have about 7,500 employees and everybody uses a product or an application or a database or a server that is involved with Commvault.

For deployment and maintenance of Commvault we have just five people. That includes me as a data center manager and the other four are server engineers.

Commvault's support is a 10 out of 10. I've learned so much from the support. They're very fast and they're very flexible. If they can't figure out a solution right away, they offer a work-around pretty quickly and they always want you involved with the solution. They even offer custom solutions for things that their applications don't do. If you run into a service pack limitation or a limitation with the product itself, they'll actually add the solution they come up with as a feature in their application.

We needed to pick a global solution. I had been reading about Simpana, which is Commvault now, for a while and I had the opportunity to jump right into it and learn about it while deploying it. I had never used it. Everything, on paper, was exactly what we needed as far as it enabling a very granular setup goes, without it being a one-size-fits-all-application. That's what I liked about it: being able to customize and mold each location to use Commvault.

I had other requirements but they were requirements that I didn't know that I had until after I had found that I could do them in Commvault.

The setup is extremely easy. The first time I did it I was a little worried that I didn't do it properly because it was so easy. The overall configuration is a little bit more difficult, but that's roadmap-based configuration, so you have to think very far down the road when putting this together. You can't be thinking, "Oh, I only need this for a couple of months." It's a 10-year plan.

The setup itself took a couple of hours.

Since I had never used Commvault before, we had implementation support from Commvault. They walked me through it. They asked questions and I gave them answers and then they showed me what they were doing. What they showed me made sense. From there, the configuration started, which was mostly on my part. A lot of it was pretty straightforward. There are things that are difficult in a domain environment, things that take a little bit of configuration, such as setting up additional users and passwords for service accounts. But overall, it's a very streamlined process.

I think Commvault's model is now cost-efficient. When we first started with Commvault, I thought it was overpriced. I thought, "That's a lot of money for a piece of software." But as I used it, and developed a trust in and knowledge of the application, I definitely was made aware, very quickly, of how it was worth every penny. Over the years, it has actually become cheaper, due to the fact that I've become smarter about how to use it better. With that knowledge, you learn how to save money with the application.

I've used other solutions in the past, such as vRanger, Symantec Endpoint Protection, Metalogix for Exchange, as well as Data Domain. For data recovery, the others are definitely not as streamlined. I've had quite a few situations where I've had to recover large amounts of data but I don't have a comparison of the recovery times of Commvault versus the others because, in the last five years, all I've used is Commvault. All my large or business-critical restorations have been with Commvault. But judging by what I've done in the past, Commvault is far easier and far more consistent than any other application I've used.

In terms of advice, the biggest thing I would like to say is don't look at it as a dinosaur. A lot of people associate Commvault with being old and antiquated, and not having all the bells and whistles. If you look past that, you'll see that it's more far more capable than anything else that's on the market. You have to get through the complexity of the application and from there you have to trust that it will do what you want it to do.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Commvault is don't be afraid to call support.

We do a lot of backups daily, and mainly we just keep the operating system images. We do take database and active directory backups as well. We handle all types of backups using this product.

The user interface is very easy to navigate. The interface itself is very simple.

Overall, it is doing the job we need it to do. 

It supports whatever line types and support types and systems we have. It supports all types of backup systems quite easily.

The stability has been very good so far. We haven't had any problems with it.

The product is easy to manage.

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.

I've been using the solution for about six years at this point. It's been a while.

We've never had any issues with stability. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's pretty reliable. 

We are still running with a single server, and it's a per server per instance-based license model. If we need to add our first storage-based model or another division, we cannot support both. It's a licensing model issue. 

The local support is lacking overall. It's something they need to really work on improving.

We have worked with Veritas and IBM in the past, however, that was a very long time ago. I wouldn't be able to compare them to this solution as too much time has passed and much has changed. We used those solutions maybe ten or so years ago now.

The initial setup is not easy or difficult. It's moderate, or somewhere in the middle. I wouldn't describe the implementation as complex, however. 

The deployment too more than expected, as the vendor involved was having some staffing issues. The engineers were changing and we had some technical requirements which we realized at a later stage.

Maintenance isn't required very often, however, we have to ensure it is up-to-date. We also have to ensure whenever anything changes, we have to properly add them to the Commvault - whether they are new servers or new clients. Whenever we change our backup library or the memory storage, we have to reconfigure things. In that regard, there is occasional maintenance, depending on our background changes.

We only need one person to manage the solution. It doesn't take a lot of staff. Typically, they are an administrator and they handle everything that needs to be done as it's required.

We are integrators and therefore we are able to implement the solution ourselves.

The pricing falls somewhere in the middle of what the market offers. It's not overly expensive. The licensing model is quite good. Everything is included under it.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

We're using the latest version of the solution. We always use the latest version.

I'd recommend the solution.

I'd rate it at a seven out of ten.