Commvault Cloud Reviews

We use it for backup and disaster recovery. We protect Windows and Linux servers, Windows 10, SQL, and Office 365.

It has streamlined data recovery, via a SaaS solution, to provide overarching protection. Metallic has also reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our backup operations by about 20 percent. In addition, it provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements because the egress charges are known.

• The SaaS offering is the most valuable feature because it provides endpoint, Office 365, and core server backup.
• The overall ease of use is good. The user experience is very in-tune and they are constantly making improvements as a result of feedback from customers.
• Its performance for both backup and recovery, and security, as an enterprise solution, is good. Integration with Active Directory and the Azure platform make it a complete solution.
• It's very easy to set up the storage across all platforms. This allows us to be dynamic and change on-the-fly.
• Metallic is also very nice because you're not connecting to a VPN to use the endpoint recovery.

There is room for improvement in the Knowledge Base and error reporting. I would like to see best practices in the Knowledge Base, and have the ability to diagnose errors without contacting support.

I have been using Commvault Metallic for three months.

It's stable. I've had some outages over the last week, but overall, it's stable.

It seems very scalable. We have plans to increase our usage of the solution.

Commvault's technical support is responsive.

There are multiple systems in place. We're in the process of replacing them.

As for the process of switching to Metallic, planning goes a long way. It's at an intermediate level between simple and complicated. We did the free trial and it was easy to get going.

We went with Metallic because it's a SaaS offering. It was one of the few solutions that offered SaaS with their own storage.

After doing it, it's straightforward, but it does require a little bit of understanding. It's in the middle between straightforward and complex. We're still in deployment but the initial setup took about one month.

Our implementation strategy is to cover critical applications: Office 365, Windows 10, and both Windows and Linux servers.

I've ran into some issues, which has made the configuration interface for configuring the solution for data protection more complex, but overall, if the instructions work, it's very simple.

The Commvault Success team helped. Other than that, it was just me. Their team was responsive. They pride themselves on making the product work for the client.

In terms of administrators of the system, there is just me in my role of network engineer. The individual users don't log in. We're a small business with under 200 users.

We evaluated Veeam and Rubrik. The pros for Metallic were that the costs were up-front and that it was a SaaS with dedicated cloud storage for endpoint and dedicated cloud storage for Office 365, separating those silos.

The drawback with Metallic is that it takes a bit of work to understand the process for registering clients, but once you have it down, it goes quickly.

Take your time to run the trial and understand what you're getting yourself into.

The move from on-premise to a cloud solution is definitely a change. Be patient with the process and open to understanding the SaaS solution.

We are using it for large data center backups, remote office backups, and cloud backups and restorations across all our environments.

We have implemented Threat Scan, and we have had several catches with it. The activity was not malicious, but it did allow us to know that somebody would do something.

It provides us with whatever we define. We have used some of their other tools in the past to tell us how old our data is and the things that we should be able to archive. It gives us a clear picture of our data when we need it.

Commvault has a platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads. For it to have all those features is very important because it completely supports our environment.

We are very satisfied with how it protects our data from the endpoint and to its final resting destination, whatever that may be. It could be local storage. It could be cloud storage. We are very satisfied with what it does for us.

There are some features that have significantly reduced our RTOs. It has helped reduce RPOs too. The reduction in RTOs and RPOs has been wonderful.

Commvault has helped our organization reduce its threat detection time. It has helped us identify some possibilities of threats. We have a full scope of different tools for threats across our enterprise, but it has helped isolate a possible threat.

Commvault has helped our organization reduce or avoid downtime. There were several cases where we were able to have a short downtime as compared to having a multi-hour downtime. It could turn a multi-hour downtime into less than 15 minutes.

The VM backups and the recovery from cloud infrastructure are valuable.

It is very easy to use for administrators for monitoring, analyzing, and managing our organization’s data environment. The instructions are pretty straightforward. It is very easy to monitor.

They can improve the VMware recovery and VMware backup. There is an improvement area on the VMware infrastructure. They can make available what they call a VSA proxy. They can have an appliance-type setup to deploy VSA backups and help recover quicker. They can have an appliance ready. Instead of having to have a server dedicated to that and installing software on a server, they can just provide an actual appliance for that.

Personally, I have been using it for over 15 years.

I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of stability. We have had a few incidents over the years due to certain revisions of the software. We were hit by some of the known bugs, so we had to go back and patch.

It can probably improve on scalability. We have the typical Windows Server deployment. There can be easier automation when deploying new clients and agents.

I love their tech support. As compared to other products we have used, Commvault's tech support is 100% one of the best. They let you know everything, and there is no mystery. They let you know what is happening in the background. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

In the past, we have had an IBM solution. We have also used Micro Focus Data Protector. I personally also used NetBackup. It was called something else earlier, but it is NetBackup now.

Our deployment model is hybrid. We have a small cloud, but it is largely on-prem. I have been involved in its deployment multiple times in both scenarios. It is straightforward.

In terms of maintenance, it requires standard patching updates or application updates. It does require that periodically.

We do it all in-house. We have a team for deployment. For deployments, we have four people. We also have a dedicated recovery team due to the size of our organization.

It has helped us with our total cost of ownership with some of the newest features such as live recovery. It has caused our RTOs and RTOs to drop, so it has helped with our total cost of ownership.

It is a little too high. I would like to get more of a consumption model or more of a periodic true-up type of model that is more friendly to the ups and downs that you may have in your data instead of locking into multi-year agreements.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise understanding the infrastructure that is needed to support the product. Understand what you need and dig into the details of what you have to purchase. That would be my recommendation.

We have not enabled Commvault’s automated policies. We have also not utilized the risk analysis tool.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for auto backup and tape library.

The product is used for backup purposes. Data backup is important for us. The product helps us secure our data.

The product is user-friendly. We can restore it very quickly. The browse option is also good for browsing files. We can also index files.

The product is expensive.

I have been working with the solution for the last two to three years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

The tool’s stability is good. I rate the stability an eight or nine out of ten.

The tool is perfect. I rate the scalability an eight and a half out of ten. It is scalable according to our needs. We have more than 100 users in our organization. We use the solution 24/7. We use it to its maximum potential.

The technical support is good. We have a team on site 24/7.

Positive

I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten. New users may find the initial setup difficult.

We have a dedicated user for maintaining the solution.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

We are still exploring the features since we are new users. We were using a different solution before Commvault. I joined the organization after we started using Commvault. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We previously had two different backup solutions, one that covered physical machines and another one that covered the virtual machines. We decided to go ahead with an enterprise tool and we chose Commvault to back up both. It's backing up more than 1200 VMs and more than 150 physical machines.

We can follow any backup or restore situation in a granular way: Who did it and which files were restored. If they did a local restore or if somebody restored to another server or another location, we can see it down to a granular level. We can follow each action, including all the administration actions.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has enabled our company to accelerate growth. With the migration from Veeam and NetWorker to Commvault, the whole environment has become easy for us because we have one tool. It has helped to accelerate the growth because it's easy to expand the whole environment. As soon as we have more data to back up, we can easily change the way we back up the data or increase the storage devices for that data.

It is also a single platform to move, manage, and recover our on-premise data. It's not only easy to manage physical and virtual machines, it's easy to manage where you want to put the data and where you want to recover the data. It's clear to everyone inside the organization.

Another benefit is that Commvault minimizes the administration time. Administration that I personally do takes about two hours a day for the whole environment, and that is about a three-to-one reduction.

The solution has also helped us to optimize infrastructure usage by reducing storage space. With the deduplication option, we have reduced the end storage devices we need significantly. We need 70 to 80 percent less storage.

We do regular restore and recovery tests, five to 10 times a month, for files, folders, and whole machines. We haven't had an actual attack or virus situation. In terms of the time it takes to restore data, at the physical layer, it's four or five times faster than it was when we used EMC NetWorker. At the virtual layer, it's about 50 percent faster than Veeam.

I've worked with backup software for the last 25 years. I know NetBackup, Tivoli, NetWorker (Legato), DataProtector (Omniback) and Veeam. I have found that I can cover all what we need with Commvault. 

The solution also provides us with a complete view of our data. I wrote scripts to report information from the Command Center daily.(A bunch of predefined reports are also available). I report them in HTML and have the status of the last day for the whole environment. Using the interface, I have predefined links to open daily or to send to my supervisors so they can see what's happening. They find it easy.

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

I have been using Commvault for about 12 years. Starting with Simpana

When you talk about backup it must be stable. If not, we would change the tool.

We are increasing the capacity because we have an increase, on average, of about 20 percent a year. It's really scalable. With Commvault, you have a lot of possibilities. You can use your hardware or you can use dedicated hardware from Commvault. There are a lot of options for how you back up your environment. It's really good in this area.

One of the best points recently with Commvault is that it is a really good support organization. Overall, from one to 10, their tech support is between nine and 10. I used to place calls just to get know-how from the technicians, and sometimes because I really needed it. They always come back with fast and really accurate answers. It's really good.

As described before, we use NetWorker and Veeam and the idea was to consolidate the whole backup environment with ONE enterprise tool.

The initial setup was not complex for me. If you know the tool it's not complex. It could be a little complex for newer people because there are a lot of features. For a beginner, it's really not the best tool. It's not a tool for small business, it's more for medium and big companies.

We deployed Commvault, in this company, about four years ago, so I don't recall exactly how long it took. I think we needed three weekends to deploy and move all the data.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we have a team that takes care of backups. We first planned the whole architecture, what we wanted. Then we voted on the pros and cons of the architecture elements and decided where we were going with it. 

In addition to help from Commvault, we had an external analyst from a third-party who helped us with the initial deployment. Our experience with them was very good. I really appreciated it.

Internally, there are two of us in the organization who share the backup roles.

The implementation took place with our resources, but we have also a contract, with a vendor and also with a technical partner.

Two eyes see more than one! And if you have a problem, ussualy, you are part of it :)

From a licensing point of view, we now have one license which covers backup for the whole organization. And we spend less time administering the whole thing.

The solution's model is cost-efficient, but it depends on your environment. For us it was cost-efficient because we reduced the number of licenses. We came from two backup solutions, covering two types of servers, to now having a global license based on the amount of tera or petabytes we have. We cover all this with our license and that is cheaper than other options.

Overall, we have seen ROI in terms of both time and money. We started saving 40% of our resources and covering more each day.

As I once heard from a car salesman in California: every car has its girlfriend / boyfriend.

Here it is more or less the same, for each case it is necessary to study which is the best backup tool, basing ourselves first on the technical aspect and then on the financial one.

At the time we evaluated other options: NetBackup, HP Data Protector, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

There were two key points when we decided to change. One was the licensing type that was best for us, because the cost could have a big impact on our budget. The other point was internal knowledge of the tools. I cannot say one of these solutions is worse or better than the others. We chose what was better for our environment at that moment. We wanted a solution to cover our whole environment, including at the OS level and the virtual layer, and one with a license that worked with our budget.

Licensing is a key point when you decide to change or to buy new software. The licensing type has an enormous impact on your budget and your decision. If it doesn't work with your budget... And it's the same technically. If the tool is not good for you, then you cannot choose it. On one hand you have the budgets and the licenses, on the other hand, you have the technical needs.

If you don't have know-how regarding this solution, you will need assistance from certain parties, providers or the company itself. That's not only for Commvault, it's for backup tools or any other kind of implementation, in general. You can really make wrong choices at the beginning that are not easy to repair when the whole system is in production.

Commvault has two interfaces, a Java interface and a full HTML interface. People who use the tool must have the know-how, so internally we teach the people who use the tool how to do backups and restores; we focus on these situations. For me, with my know-how, the tool is really simple, both the Java and the HTML. But for newer people, it might be a little bit complicated.

The biggest lessons I have learned using this solution are about the different ways to back up a virtual environment, and the different types of deduplication options there are.

The product is really good for us. I can't say that it would be really good for someone else, it depends on your environment. For us, Commvault is between nine and 10 out of 10.

We use Commvault to back up all our enterprise solutions, like MS SQL, Exchange, file servers, and MongoDB, but we don't use Commvault for multi-environment management. There is a primary site and a disaster recovery site that we control offsite with one console.

I know Commvault has another interface for the multi-site, but I've never used it before, so I don't have any experience with that. However, we have a passive primary server at the disaster recovery site, and if we have trouble at the main site, we can use the disaster recovery server. 

Commvault makes it easier to back up new additions to our environment. For example, when we added MongoDB, we found it in Commvault and could start backing it up. 

Right now, we are trying to integrate Kubernetes platforms into our environment, and I'm sure that Commvault can back up those. Commvault keeps up with new technologies, and if you upgrade to the latest stable version, you can find everything you need.

Backing up with Commvault doesn't require much effort. Commvault's reporting features are also excellent and user-friendly. It's easy to find anything we want. The workflow feature is handy, too. For example, we schedule an automated monthly backup and restoration test that we used to do manually. That has been integrated with Commvault's workflows and running automatically every month for four years. 

It runs all the tests and emails us the reports. We take daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots, and I integrate the storage snapshot scripts with the Commvault workflow. The Commvault workflow runs all the scripts and sends us the reports. It also features cloud-side reports and workflows. Commvault has many tools for backing up, restoring, and archiving, but we use another service for our archives. 

Commvault can show us unprotected workloads, servers, and SQL databases. It's a good feature, and I periodically get reports on this. However, it's a low priority because we are waiting for our inside customers to tell us whether they want something backed up or not. They must follow that, but we are using terabyte-based backups. We don't separate the agent— MS SQL or others—and we are only looking at the terabyte trends, so it's predictable for us. 

Our main pain point is that some of our hardware is old. For example, the SSD disks for our application database are slow. It's hard to avoid a slowdown in our environment because the size of our backups is growing every year. If you're growing and don't upgrade the environment, you will see slower backups and restores. You must enhance the environment if you are growing.

I've used Commvault for about 10 years, and we used it at my last company for around six years. 

Commvault's stability is good.

We have no problems scaling Commvault. I don't remember the numbers, but we have a terabyte license size. It's about 400 terabytes, but the backend is in the petabyte range. 

Troubleshooting is easy because Commvault support responds and finds the root cause quickly. When I've contacted support for other solutions, some of them ask you to recreate the scenario. They ask you to increase the debugging level and reproduce the scenario to get the error again. As a result, we waste a lot of time troubleshooting those solutions. With Commvault, we don't need to devote much time to the operational and troubleshooting aspects. 

I've used NetBackup before, and I think it's a good solution. It required more effort than Commvault, but I prefer it over EMC NetWorker. NetWorker was labor-intensive, buggy, and hard to use. We spent a lot of time dealing with EMC support. They have a large, competent support team, but we spent too much time with them. 

NetBackup is better than NetWorker, but it has fewer features than Commvault. NetBackup also has an old-fashioned interface that is harder to use than Commvault's. It's not user-friendly. Commvault is the best of the three.

Setting up Commvault was straightforward. You set up the primary server first, then the media agents, disks, and agents for clients. Each of those steps is easy. It's like a "next, next, finish" Windows installer. You can deploy it in half a day in a smaller environment, and it's maybe one or two days for a large one. 

Of course, it depends on the size of the agents and how many you need for your physical environment. If you have a rigid environment, it's effortless because you only define the vCenters or the Hyper-V management console, and that's it. You can take backups. 

On the other hand, you must install all the agents if you have too many physical environments. Still, Commvault makes it easy because you can install everything from the user interface on the primary server. In total, we have five people, including me, managing Commvault and all our other storage solutions. 

I rate Commvault 10 out of 10. If you're planning on implementing Commvault, I suggest doing a PoC first to try out all the features and to compare them to other products. We did a PoC for backup solutions to test some new features for our enterprise solutions, and some of the products didn't make the cut, so I would recommend a PoC.

It is used as an enterprise backup solution.

We have a very good disaster recovery solution with Commvault. We have a standby CommServe where logs are being deployed every five minutes. If something goes wrong, we are immediately able to recover and enable services on the standby server. We are achieving 99.9 percent SLA with respect to the backups.

It also helps to ensure broad coverage through the discovery of unprotected workloads. We can easily identify them in the Web Console where we can see which of our servers is not protected. And if there is no backup for more than one day, we can get a report, and we have also enabled alerts. Those features are really helpful to us in identifying and addressing issues.

Commvault minimizes the time we spend on backup tasks. I only have to check the health of the CommCells, and the rest of the time I can work on the other tasks.

It's a very good enterprise backup solution with multiple features. We are able to take a backup of multiple databases. We don't need to use scripts to schedule any kind of local backups. We have a direct plugin for Commvault so that we are able to take backups of any of our databases or application systems, like SharePoint. Commvault is also enabling backup for PaaS services that are deployed on the cloud.

Commvault provides encryption mechanisms with the latest standards that our customers are looking for.

The CommCell console is very good and user-friendly. I have experience with NetBackup, HPE DP, and Backup Exec, but I'm really comfortable with Commvault. The console makes it easy to identify exactly what we need to see. For example, there are multiple categories. If a backup needs to be performed on multiple systems, we just configure one client or one group and we can push the agent straightaway. That's a very good feature that helps us to complete tasks on time.

We can integrate our multiple CommCells in the single Web Console as well and that helps us easily identify how many servers are getting backed up and how many servers are not being backed up. We can see the SLA and the success rate. And even though our customer is huge, we can give them access and they can easily see the SLA and the success rate of the backups. Commvault also recently launched the Command Center. It is very good, enabling us to deploy server plans. It is very good and user-friendly.

For disaster recovery, there is a feature called Live Sync, and we are also able to export disaster recovery backups to the cloud. If something goes wrong, we are immediately able to recover and continue with business.

In addition, if something goes wrong and a backup fails, we can trace the issue using the log. Each service has a different log that clearly gives us information about the exact reason for the issue and what needs to be done.

We have multiple workloads, including SQL, Oracle, SAP HANA, especially Sybase, as well as file systems, VMs, and Exchange mailboxes. Commvault provides very good support for them. We perform 70 to 80 restores on a monthly basis. Over the past year, I have faced challenges with one or two restores. All the rest were completed successfully. And if we get stuck, we can easily use the logs to identify the issue and to make some changes to the configuration. So we are approaching a 100 percent success rate with respect to restoration.

Commvault has very good procedures for performing backups and restores of SAP HANA databases. As far as I know, no other technology provides an option to perform a restore directly from the backup tool itself. We log in to HANA Studio when we have to perform a restore and Commvault enables this by default. We are able to do the restoration from the Commvault GUI itself.

Commvault also provides workflows. If you want to decommission a client's systems, there is a workflow where we just have to add the client to it and we can easily complete the task. This is useful when we are informed that a customer is moving out. It would be a huge task for the backup team to retain the backups for such-and-such a period of time and to release the license. Running this workflow makes our work very simple and reduces our efforts as well. The multiple workflows really help us in completing tasks quickly.

Overall it has great features that fulfill our customers' expectations.

I have been using Commvault for the past seven years.

The stability is very good. If you don't follow the metrics and best practices recommended by Commvault, or if you mess up the setup, you may face challenges. If you follow the best practices, it's a very good, stable solution.

We can easily expand our licenses and deploy Commvault for our customers, which keeps our business going. From a scalability point of view, I haven't seen many challenges.

We get very good support from Commvault if we run into any kind of production issue. They maintain a very good SLA for critical and high-priority tickets. We are really satisfied with their support.

For example, let's say that something in production is down or multiple customers are impacted. SAP won't join a call and help us in resolving the issue. But if we have a critical CommServe-level issue, and multiple backups may fail, Commvault can easily jump on a call and can help us in addressing this issue. In reality, if something is wrong with a SAP system or if an OS is not functioning, a customer may not be able to do their work. Whereas, without a backup, they can continue their business, but they cannot recover things if something goes wrong. Still, if we raise a high-severity ticket, based on the criticality, Commvault support will definitely jump in. They can help us in one hour, at the most.

Positive

In one of my older projects, deployment of Commvault was simple, but the current one is complex. It's a very big environment. It depends on the environment of the client and the requirements. If you have a shared mechanism and the customer has multiple firewalls at their end, it will be very difficult to integrate multiple customers into one CommCell. But if you have a single project and a dedicated customer in a single domain, it will be very easy.

Compared with other backup technologies, Commvault is a bit more costly, but we are satisfied with the support, the services, and the features that we get with Commvault.

We are using the capacity-based license and have a total of 10 CommCells. In the license file, we can clearly see what kinds of workloads can be backed up.

Veeam is very useful for Windows-related platforms but we chose Commvault because it does not have any kind of platform dependency when it comes to backups. It has multiple features enabling us to backup Oracle RAC, or Exchange DAG, and IBM Lotus Notes, and any type of PaaS services.

Commvault has a clear-cut, three-tier architecture, whereas others follow a two-tier architecture, other than NetBackup, I believe. With Commvault, every backup load will be taken care of by the MediaAgent, and administrative tasks will be taken care of by the CS. Evn the CommServe size also not be huge when compared with other solutions.

With respect to security, in particular regarding ransomware, Commvault has built-in features that we enabled to protect our environment. As for storage targets, every storage array has its own built-in mechanism for encrypting or securing the data. It is very difficult for a third party to enter and to make any kind of use of the storage arrays.

Storage cost completely depends on the retention the customer is looking for. If they have, say, a 1 TB system and they're looking for more than two months' retention, there will be a lot of storage utilization. But we do get a very good duplication ratio, close to 90 percent for file system backups, which helps us to minimize the cost.

Overall, if your infra is very good, once you configure Commvault there are no challenges. It will function well. If something is wrong with the network, obviously, any backup technology will end up with issues. But Commvault is very good.

Commvault's primary use case centers around comprehensive data management and protection, particularly in cloud environments. Organizations leverage Commvault for its robust capabilities in backup and recovery, safeguarding data across both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructures. 

The solution excels in facilitating the efficient management of data in hybrid and multi-cloud setups, enabling seamless movement, copying, and overall control of information stored on platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Commvault plays a pivotal role in disaster recovery planning, ensuring swift data retrieval and business continuity in the face of unexpected events. 

Additionally, the platform often extends its functionality to include archiving solutions, aiding organizations in meeting compliance requirements and optimizing long-term data storage. With a focus on security and compliance, Commvault provides features to protect data and align with regulatory standards. 

Moreover, it may contribute to cloud cost optimization by offering insights into data usage and implementing strategies for cost-effective storage. It's essential to consult the latest documentation or contact Commvault directly for the most current information on their cloud solutions as of 2024.

Commvault Cloud has proven instrumental in enhancing organizational operations through its robust data management and protection features. By providing efficient backup and recovery solutions, it ensures the safeguarding of critical data, reducing the risk of data loss due to various unforeseen events. 

The platform's adept handling of hybrid and multi-cloud environments enables organizations to streamline data management across diverse infrastructures, optimizing resources and harnessing the benefits of various cloud platforms seamlessly. 

Commvault Cloud's disaster recovery capabilities contribute significantly to minimizing downtime, facilitating quick system and data restoration in the face of disruptions. Moreover, the solution aids in implementing effective data archiving strategies, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and reducing the likelihood of compliance-related issues. 

The integration of enhanced security measures further fortifies data protection, mitigating risks associated with unauthorized access or breaches. Commvault Cloud's potential to optimize cloud costs by providing insights into data usage and recommending cost-effective storage strategies contributes to overall operational efficiency. 

While the success of implementation hinges on factors such as planning and training, ongoing assessments and communication with Commvault support are crucial for addressing any challenges and ensuring continued alignment with organizational needs.

Commvault Cloud offers a suite of features, each contributing distinct value to organizations based on their unique needs. 

The backbone of its utility lies in robust backup and recovery capabilities, ensuring data resilience and swift recovery in the face of unforeseen events. The ability to seamlessly manage data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments stands out as a pivotal feature, allowing for flexibility, resource optimization, and scalability as organizations navigate diverse cloud infrastructures. 

Disaster Recovery features further enhance business continuity by minimizing downtime and facilitating rapid system and data restoration. The effectiveness of Commvault Cloud extends to archiving and compliance functionalities, crucial for industries with stringent regulatory requirements, mitigating the risk of compliance-related issues. 

Security measures, including encryption and threat detection, contribute significantly to data protection, safeguarding against unauthorized access and cyber threats. Additionally, the platform's Cloud Cost Optimization features provide insights into data usage, aiding in the implementation of cost-effective storage strategies and contributing to overall operational efficiency. 

The value of these features ultimately depends on an organization's specific goals, industry context, and IT infrastructure, emphasizing the need for regular assessments to ensure ongoing alignment with evolving business requirements.

Commvault Cloud, while offering a robust suite of features, could potentially benefit from improvements in certain areas. One area for consideration is user interface and user experience enhancements, aiming to streamline navigation and make the platform more intuitive for users with varying levels of technical expertise. 

Improved documentation and user training resources could also contribute to a smoother onboarding process and more effective utilization of the platform's capabilities. Additionally, ongoing efforts to optimize resource utilization and minimize any potential impact on system performance would be valuable. As for potential features in the next release, integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence for more intelligent data management and analytics could provide valuable insights for organizations. 

Enhanced automation capabilities, including more sophisticated policy-driven automation for data workflows, could further streamline processes and reduce manual intervention. Integration with additional cloud services and platforms, keeping pace with the evolving cloud landscape, would broaden the platform's compatibility and usefulness. 

Lastly, advanced security features, including continuous monitoring, threat intelligence integration, and proactive threat response capabilities, would fortify the product's defense against evolving cyber threats. 

Regular feedback mechanisms from users and staying attuned to industry trends would help guide the development of features that align closely with the evolving needs of organizations in the dynamic landscape of data management and cloud services.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

We use it to backup and protect our virtual environments. We do Active Directory, SQL, file server, and some application levels backups. We do Office 365 and SharePoint backups too.

We back up everything locally first, then store it in the cloud.

It provides us a single solution to recover data. We haven't had a lot of restore requests. There have been a couple of them where we had to restore a full server and the work involved was very minimal. We were able to run a quick restore job. We did not really run into any challenges doing this. Every once in a while, we receive requests for files or emails that people have lost and those files are in SharePoint or OneDrive. We have the ability to restore it within 30 days directly from the portal. But if it's beyond the 30 days, we use Commvault to restore data and that has worked absolutely fine.

It has helped us drive innovation and accelerate growth. From a growth perspective, this storage solution has clearly helped us. The option for us to save the data in the cloud is very valuable for the organization.

The solution has helped our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and other projects. We have an administrator who manages the system. I'm more of an architect. Compared to the previous product where the administrator had to go around and look for a lot of information before he could find out whether the backup had competed successfully and the reporting structure was not that great, the reporting structure now with Commvault is where he can get daily emails from the jobs which have been completed. If there are any issues with jobs, he can directly drill-down to the details and find out why the job failed or why it did not run on time since there may be other dependencies that won't allow the job to run.

All the features used right now have been very valuable. The biggest advantage for us right now is the ability to back up our Office 365 mailboxes along with all our SharePoint and OneDrive data. Because all our users mostly store all their data in these locations, it is important for us that we back up all these services.

It provides us a good holistic view of everything that we have backed up so far. It also provides us all the recovery points. If we look at an an object that has been backed up, we can tell how many retention copies it has, how far we can go, and recover any data, if needed.

I have written a lot of different reviews about the product and every time I have mentioned the user interface is not user-friendly, e.g., the admin portal is not user-friendly. It definitely takes a lot of understanding to get familiar with the portal. However, once you are completely familiar with it, then it is pretty easy to manage. It's not something that you can jump in right away and start, knowing what exactly is going on. There are a lot of places that you need to look around to understand how the backups are configured.

The administration of the solution could be simplified. This would really make the administrator's life easier.

We've been using Commvault since early 2017. We are in our third year right now.

It has been pretty stable. We have not run into a situation where our systems were compromised. However, we have run into system corruption issues and were back in business within about two hours.

Right now, we only have one primary administrator for this product. We have a couple of backups in case this person or another is on vacation. We have other people who have been provided good knowledge transfer on how this product works. This way, if either of them is unavailable, there is somebody who can do the job.

It is definitely scalable. We are able to scale as we need, whether we need to add any compute, storage, or additional licenses for user accounts. All of that is very flexible when it comes to scalability. If we want to add more users to our Office 365 backup, we can quickly get new licenses from the vendor with a quick turnaround time. As soon as we get that, we are able to add those users' data to our backups. We generally have a buffer. However, sometimes if there are a lot of new hires, then we need to go in and secure new licenses.

We are using more space than what we were previous using, mainly because we did not have a lot of flexibility with the previous product that we were using. So, there was not much room for us to store the data for a long duration. At the same time, we did not have enough on premise storage capacity to leave the data around for a long time. Therefore, data growth has been significant over the past years because we have been able to store data. So, we are leaving the data on-premise for 30 days, then we moving it to the cloud. Most of the data is now in the cloud, but even on-premise we are now able to back up a lot of systems that we were not able to back up earlier. We have seen significant storage growth on long-term systems, because we are now backing those up and the data is there.

It is only my team managing the system. We back up all the data that the end user has. If they need help restoring their data, then one of my team members will go in and restore the data. The user has no direct interaction with the product.

It is pretty extensively used right now. It is backing up all the data that we have right now. We are looking into some additional features, so we might not start looking at those until later this year. Commvault has come out with some new features and we want to look into those. For the first two years, it was a stabilization period for us to get the product implemented, ensure everything was stabilized, all the important data was being protected, and data was being stored in necessary places. We also looked at all the trending over the last two years to ensure we had enough capacity in all the areas to maintain the server and storage space. Now, we are at the stage where we are pretty comfortable on how we can scale this product when needed. We are looking into additional features that Commvault has, and we will start looking into these towards the end of the year.

Tech support has been good. I haven't had a lot of interactions.

Every once in a while when we have to make any architectural changes to the deployment, my administrators reach out and consult with me. We sometimes engage with the support team or Professional Services team. Their responses have been pretty good so far. We have never had a situation where we were kept waiting for days to get an answer or solution.

I used Commvault from 2011 to 2012 at one of my previous organization, but it was only for a short period of time that I worked with it. I then had to move onto other things. That experience helped me when we deployed the newer version of Commvault. At the time, it was Commvault Simpana, and now, it's only Commvault. That experience helped us to understand its requirements and how we could set it up.

We were using Dell EMC Data Protection Rapid Recovery. It wasn't flexible nor scalable. It did not meet all our requirements. It wasn't able to back up physical and cloud environments. It could not store data in the cloud, so we had to look at options to store and protect our data. We were unable to back up our Office 365 and SharePoint data. With Commvault, it has made it seamless for us to store data in the cloud, not only protect it. 

We can set up proper retention policies now. So, if we need to store any data, for example, over a year, seven years, or 10 years, we can accordingly store it. We can then apply policy to that storage, which after that retention period, we will not have to go in and do a manual cleanup.

The deployment took about a month. The planning was another month or two.

We wanted to ensure that we were able to protect all our systems and data not protected up until then. At the same time, the strategy was that we did not want to incur a lot of significant costs on just deploying the solution itself. Plus, we did not want a lot of administrative overhead while maintaining the servers and application environment. We did not want that routine daily administration activity. We wanted to set up the environment and not worry about it until something went wrong.

We had assistance from the vendor, so they did assist with the setup. The system was completely new for some of my team members who had never worked with it before, so it did take them a lot of time to get familiar with it. Those administrators are able to manage the system very well now compared to what they were able to do in their first year when they had to frequently go back to the vendor and ask them, "How do we do this? How can we do that?"

We worked directly with the vendor. The vendor's Professional Services team was able to assist us with the deployment.

After deploying the Commvault solution, we are saving four to five hours a week.

We have been able to save on infrastructure costs by not storing long-term data onto systems. Instead, we have been able to store them on cheaper cloud systems. There is a lot of savings there if you consider all the cost involved to store data on an on-premise server storage system, plus the maintenance, and the support which goes behind maintaining that system. 

I have seen return of investment.

There is a bit of cost involved with signing up the entire solution. It's not a cheap solution.

We did evaluate Veeam and Cohesity. 

At the time, Cohesity was not mature, as they were fairly new to the business. We had a few meetings with them, and after our discussions, we found that the solution might not meet all our requirements. E.g., the physical server backup was one important feature that was not supported at the time. 

Veeam is a platform that I have extensively worked with in all my previous roles at other companies. So, we do have a Veeam implementation that is used by a different team in our organization. They manage all their backups through Veeam. Our plan was not to use the same solution in all environments. We wanted to use different solutions within the entire organization for exposure to multiple data protection solutions. Also, Veeam did not support physical machine backups and only supported virtual machine backups.

In my previous deployment, there were no cloud features. The cloud was not popular and everything was on-prem. Even when we moved to Commvault, Veeam lacked a lot of features, which is why Commvault seems to be the best choice for us.

We already had our cloud solution in place. After understanding that Commvault does work with that cloud provider and it would help us store our data, we did not have any further concerns about cloud vendor selection. The cloud environment and Commvault environment were set up around the same time. We moved to the cloud at the end of 2016, and then, in early 2017, we moved to Commvault. So, everything worked out well.

Go through an assessment first before selecting the product. Every business is different and has different requirements. Do a complete assessment with the data protection partner, whether it's Commvault, Veeam, Cohesity, or someone else. Go through a proof of concept, if possible. Mind your business requirements, RPO, and RTO. Look at your budget too. This should help you to make the right decision.

The biggest lesson would be to have a proper data protection strategy for the organization. There were a lot of things that we had to implement after implementing the product. It's better if you completely understand your business requirements, then implement this product.

I would give it a rating of an eight (out of 10) because it does not have an easy deployment. The deployment is not something that just anybody can go in and deploy. It needs a good level of understanding for deployment. Once you deploy, you need to be familiar with how to administer the product, how to set up all the reporting, etc. Just navigating the admin interface is not really that easy.