Commvault Cloud Reviews

Most of our clients have an on-premise environment. They are traditional environments, but they are slowly starting to use the cloud for IT solutions and services. Lately, we've been shifting some workloads to the cloud and using the product there. It's been a slow transition, but we are doing it. We are partners in the Latin American region, so we are trying to find the best fit for every customer and recommend different backup solutions depending on the client. Some are easier to install but lack certain features. 

Commvault has a large customer base in the enterprise segment, so it provides a complete recovery solution for our largest clients. That's the way we use the product. We focus on enterprise solutions in large companies in Columbia and the South American and Latin American region. Commvault has a strong track record protecting the integrity of workloads, and it has many different features needed in the corporate environment. We have various technologies that need to be backed up and protected. In that sense, Commvault is a comprehensive solution.

No other vendor has such a wide range of solutions, including traditional on-premises workloads, cyber cloud members, and cloud links. All of those features are comprehensive enough to be considered for the largest client. 

The ability to manage and recover data across platforms and deployments is what we look for in a solution. Technologies are getting more complex all the time. We're seeing the emergence of different technology, including support for containers and various cloud services. These new technologies pose challenges for the backup environment. 

In the past, we only needed to back up specific databases and certain network tasks. The data is much more extended, and the interactions among different technologies and services are more complicated, so data protection is more complex. So, in this context, it's vital for a product to offer that kind of experience for us. I think that it's what the customers are looking for in this ever-growing and ever-complex environment.

One of the critical strategies to deal with risk is having an air-gapped copy of the data. In that context, tech solutions and object storage solutions help us to cope with that. So in that sense, Commvault is not different from any other solution that already offers those kinds of air-gapped copies. It helps manage a lot of different storage media and mix up all the storage media that we have so the cost of data matches the cost of the storage solution we are using. It makes no sense to store completely cold data in fast media. That is costly. Commvault has a wide range of support for storage solutions. It comes down to planning. You have to plan where you're going to put every inch of data. Then you're going to put it in the best layer possible depending on whether the information is cold or hot.

Commvault's Command Center is one of the best solutions out there. You can rely on Commvault solutions for the most complex and most demanding environments. It can meet the requirements of many Fortune 500 companies. It's great for companies that need a robust solution flexible enough to cope with all kinds of environments and technologies. 

Commvault offers broad coverage by helping us identify unprotected workloads. It helps us get to the point where we have a complete picture of the environment. I think that's a pretty good feature, and it allows us to have a good overview of our protection environment and what workloads are protected and which are not. It's one of the essentials out there for that. 

When it comes to recovery, Commvault is undeniably one of the best technologies out there. It's got all the different granularity levels that a business requires to get your information back to production. For example, we have their commission discovery, individual items recovery, mailbox recovery, databases, and different tables. Some databases can be recovered individually. This level of granularity enables us to get the most value out of the product.

Commvault is complex even if the product has comprehensive solutions and covers pretty much every technology out there. There's no unified way to manage all of the products on one single console. There are different things that you need to look for to have comprehensive management of the whole environment. I think that's not one of Commvault's strong suits. 

Also, even though I think the user interface might improve the manageability of the solution, it can be complex in some cases. You need a lot of experience and different touchpoints to get through environmental management, and it's not a comprehensive or unified solution for that. 

Commvault is also a solution that requires a lot of time. It demands a lot of time from administrators and requires an administrator to manage it almost full-time. But in this case, it's not a hindrance. While it isn't the easiest product to use, it's one of the most likable ones. It offers a lot of different options and the breadth of support that it has. I think it's just a compromise that you make. In this case, you get flexibility, great support, and a high-quality product, but you lose some in terms of administration. 

We've been using Commvault for about five years now. When we started, we were just customers, but now we are Commvault managers and consultants. 

It's a completely stable solution. We haven't had any problems with the software that make implementation a problem or prevent us from using the product effectively.

Commvault's scalability is unmatched. Very few competitors have the scalability that Commvault offers. IBM and Veritas might come close, but there are no other solutions that can grow to accommodate enormous environments. So we have to rethink or mix up different backup solutions and technologies. With Commvault, you can do it for either large environments or medium-sized environments as well.

I rate Commvault support 10 out of 10. The members of the support team are knowledgeable. They know their product well and are eager to help. Overall, it's a great customer experience. It's a deciding factor that makes customers and clients renew their licenses in a few years. You can buy a product, but you're only going to stay with it because of its quality and customer support. The support is outstanding in this case.

We've mainly contacted support to get best practices, implementation recommendations, and suggestions about operating the product. But we haven't faced any challenging problems that we couldn't tackle. The documentation has been pretty solid, too. 

Early in the process, it takes a long time to get things right and make things do what they are supposed to do based on best practices. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to do it, but it's ultimately worth it. If you put in a few more weeks to get the product implemented properly, it's going to pay off down the road. You'll see some cost savings and it will save you some effort in the future. So I think it's best to do an excellent job at first.

The savings we've realized from deploying Commvault could be around $100,000 to $300,000, including storage space, rack space, and energy charges. That's a total cost of ownership analysis.

Sometimes Commvault can be costly. On the other hand, you need to consider other use cases, verticals, and segments in the market, not just the price. But I think that those are the disadvantages of the factory features that have some room for improvement. The product is excellent.

The cost of implementing or supporting Commvault can be high. You need to pay attention to the licensing. It's imperative to do careful planning regarding the workflows you will support, and which kinds of solutions or vehicles you're going to deploy because there could be some surprises down the road. 

I think that's one of the main weaknesses of the product: it might be costlier than the competition. Of course, it's not always the case, but sometimes it could be pricier than the competition. That can sometimes be a barrier to implementing the product in certain regions and specific verticals or certain kinds of customers that are very cost-sensitive. Lowering the price is essential for Commvault to gain traction in other segments, and we have traditional companies reducing their prices. It would be good to see them more in an FNB environment, but the costs are too high for some customers.

We were looking for a solution with a breadth of support for heterogeneous workloads, so we considered solutions from different vendors, like IBM and Veritas. We also have a good relationship with IBM, but we thought their solution was somewhat archaic. It didn't have support for the latest technologies and platforms like Commvault.

Using the traditional client-server, those solutions couldn't match the amount of support Commvault offers. It was the perfect match for what we were looking for. One of the key features that led us to Commvault was its elasticity. It gives us the flexibility to run different workloads on the cloud or on-premise and to have them all protected within one technological stack. We're confident in the product because it's a comprehensive solution covering old-fashioned technologies and the newer ones. Every month there is new support for new features and new workloads. We're consistently surprised at the rate of innovation and the support that Commvault is putting into the product.

I rate Commvault nine out of 10. One recommendation I have for people considering Commvault is to explore all of the features the product offers. It has many features that aren't explored because of a lack of time or knowledge. I would invite all prospective customers to evaluate the whole breadth of functionality and suggest that they seek the assistance of a qualified implementation team. Do careful planning before implementing the product.

Isolating and segmenting storage targets from public networks to mitigate lateral moving threats can be difficult with Commvault. It takes thorough and detailed planning. You need to have careful planning before taking on implementation efforts. It's crucial to carefully consider where you're going to deploy and how you're going to divide the various segments of the product into different solutions so that you can comply with your business requirements.

Commvault might be challenging to deploy sometimes, and you need knowledgeable people to operate it. That doesn't mean it's going to be a failure. When the people are prepared and have skilled implementers, the product is a success from every point of view. So you have to be careful.

On balance, it is the most comprehensive solution in the market, with the ability to handle all kinds of applications, databases, and virtual workloads. Commvault's portfolio has a great breadth and depth in terms of quantity and quality of supported solutions. For example, Commvault is now supported on the cloud. The ability to mail snapshots back is one of Commvault, which has protection for all those workloads. Some of the competitors have just started to gain traction in this area, but Commvault has been doing it for several years.

We are using it for taking backup of our virtual servers and some physical servers.

We were searching for a tool to backup our virtual machines when we bought Commvault. I was already using Avamar to backup our desktops and laptops on a daily basis. We are using Commvault to take backup of servers. Both are good, but if I compare Avamar and Commvault, Avamar is better than Commvault. Avamar has hardware, but Commvault is a software-based solution.

Prior to implementation of Commvault, we were doing backups manually; shut down the virtual machines, do backups of entire machines, and then restart the machines. The administrative time has been drastically reduced now.

We used do manual backups of every virtual machine. A machine of 50GB would take around two hours to backup. This is the downtime. We had to shut down the machines and take the backup. But with Commvault, the major benefit is that we never shut down the machines. Every server is online and the backup is also online. So we reduce the downtime and administrative overhead.

The setup is complex. It's not simple to install the machine and start a backup. 

Commvault is software based, unlike hardware-type devices.

We have used Commvault the last three to four years.

It is stable. We don't have any problem regarding the core part of Commvault.

The solution is scalable. It's a software-based solution so we just need a license to expand it.

I have Avamar servers that we have recently updated storage-wise and capacity-wise. So we don't have any immediate requirement to increase the licenses of Commvault.

We have the technical support of Commvault, but in cases where little support is required, we call F1 to help us.

The initial setup was complex. The setup was implemented in one day, but the fine-tuning took longer to work through.

It has three to four parts. The server is one, storage is another, and the agent is another. It's not just a simple thing you have installed in a machine and start to do backups. It is a very new product for us, so we needed installation support from a partner. We are not the IT guys. We are a manufacturing industry, and we have a little knowledge of everything but are not really part of each type of hardware and software. It required an expert who had already implemented elsewhere to help us.

We hired a third party, F1 Technologies, a local support partner who implemented the total solution with us.

Commvault's license fee is per server-based for physical machines. For virtual machines, it's a 10 VM one-pack solution. Avamar is just a license for storage capacity-wise, around 8TB to 16TB. It's not based on how many servers you backup. In a price comparison, definitely Avamar is the winner.

I'd rate Commvault a seven out of ten.

If your organization does not have many hosts, I would recommend using Commvault. But if you have more than 50 to 100 hosts, Avamar is the better solution as it's more stable than Commvault. When you buy Commvault, you need to buy hardware separately; servers and storages are a different part. With Avamar, you have a complete solution with hardware and software, so it's better.

We are using it as a backup and recovery solution. 

We have a server on-premises. Our hardware is running on HP devices. We are only using the on-premises solution. In the future, we will use the hybrid or cloud solution. Our management is trying to go for hybrid solutions.

As a company, we faced ransomware attacks twice, and both times, we recovered because of Commvault's backup and recovery solution. 

It helps in protecting our customers' data very easily. Compared to other vendors, Commvault has a lot of features. If something happens, we end up spending a lot of money to recover data, but Commvault protects the data. Considering that, its cost is very low. It has reduced the cost of recovering data. 

It is very easy to isolate and segment storage targets from public networks to mitigate lateral moving threats. 

It helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks. They can spend time on other projects. Previously, we had to manually check every weekend whether the backup is okay or not. Now, things are running automatically. Commvault has a good notification system. Altogether, these features reduce a lot of manhours. They have saved 48 hours weekly.

The recovery features are useful. It is easy to recover data. If something happens, we can easily recover data. We have faced ransomware issues twice, and we recovered because of Commvault. 

It provides consistent recovery processes across platforms. In terms of recovery options for our data and workloads, I would give it a 10 out of 10. We can easily recover files and data in case of any issues.

It is user-friendly and easy to use. If you have a technical background, you can easily identify the features and use them. There is nothing complex. 

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

We have been using the Commvault product for more than three years.

We have been using this solution for more than three years, and there have been no major failures. It has been running day-to-day backups without any issues. We have backup scheduled over the weekends, and we also have daily backups. We are running full backups over the weekends and incremental backups on weekdays. 

Their support team is very friendly, and they can easily understand our situation. They are very fast to respond and knowledgeable. They can understand the issues that we are facing, and it is very easy to work with them. They provide good support. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

We got good training notes from Commvault's side. There are a lot of documents, and if we want to find something, we refer to their documentation, which makes it very easy to use. There are no major issues.

We earlier used Veeam as a backup solution. We were using Veeam's Community Edition. We also used HP data protector previously. We finally tried the Commvault solution.

Commvault people came and gave a presentation to us, and as compared to Veeam, Commvault had many features. It was user-friendly and easy to use, and it also had a lot of features. It had ransomware protection and data recovery. Veeam didn't have protection features. Our management agreed to use Commvault, and they gave their permission.

Initially, it was complex for us to understand things. They gave us training, and since then, we have been using it easily. Now, it is very easy to understand.

We work with a reseller in Sri Lanka.

We have seen an ROI. It is saving a lot of money, but I don't have the number. It is a good solution to recover our data if something happens. We don't need to spend a lot of money. 

It is a bit more than other products, but when you consider the time savings, it is saving money.

We looked at a few other solutions such as Veritas.

Commvault is a good solution, and we would recommend it to others. There are no major issues with Commvault. We have full trust in it when it comes to protection. They have built a good customer reputation when it comes to protection. Our management is also very satisfied with it.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of protection and features.

It's being used as our main backup and recovery product. We use it to back up virtual machine infrastructure, using VMware and/or Nutanix. We use it to back up our SQL, Exchange, and File Systems, where is a mixture of Linux, Windows and Solaris. We also use it to backup NFS and CIFs Shares under NetApp. We also use Commvault for Oracle Backup and/or RMAN Clones.

We migrated everything we had from other vendors to Commvault. About 95 percent of everything in our environment, is being backup by Commvault.

On-Prem, Cloud, Data Centers.

The disaster recovery features of Commvault have improved the way we operate. In the past, we had a very complicated process for testing disaster recovery. That kind of testing is one of the nice features of Commvault. You are completely sure that your data resides in multiple locations at the same time and you can be sure Disaster recovery Data it's there in case you need it. 

HyperScale X also helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks so that they can spend time on other projects. We are a big company and we have at least 80 locations using Commvault. We have admins for it in four or five regions on different continents. Overall, I would estimate HyperScale X has improved our productivity by 30  to 35 percent. We are more productive using Commvault than with other backup software.

It has also helped to reduce storage costs. We chose the solution because it decreases the backup costs for our end-users. We have been able to reduce backup costs by at least 50 percent.

There are a number of features we like HyperScale X:

• The deduplication is pretty good. 
• We also like the ability to generate reports using the Command Center feature. 
• We like how the software upgrade process works. 
• From the start, the disaster recovery for the CommServe has been very robust and flexible and works pretty well. 
• It also provides us with protection from ransomware, by default for Windows, and it can be enabled for Linux as well.
• Replication and Auxiliary Copy features, like dynamic throttling, are helpful.
• There is also the flexibility to create self-service capabilities for end-users and to give them access to restore their managed servers for data.

In addition, HyperScale X provides a single platform to move, manage, and recover data across all locations in our environment. The CommServe is the brain of Commvault. It's the server where the index and the cache are stored for the backups that are happening in the environment. All the management is centralized from that CommServe server. You can manage all the clients and all the infrastructure using one interface and one server. For redundancy, you have a disaster recovery CommServe server in standby mode. You can configure a disaster recovery backup to happen every 15 minutes.

Using the Commvault interface, you can customize and generate multiple reports to easily see what is protected and what is not protected in the environment. There is also a third-party feature called Commvault Activate. It's a separate product and you need another license to use it. That product specializes in discovering the environment, and the data in it, that you are not backing up.

You can manage everything from two interfaces. There is a Java console (CommCell), but in the near future that will be fully replaced by the Command Center, the HTML5 interface. The Java interface is not great. The Command Center interface is far better and it looks nicer, but it doesn't have all the powerful features available in the Java console. The place to improve the product is on the management interface level because that's the point where it's not perfect.

Today, to manage the product, you just have to use both interfaces. The Java interface is basically for the admin because it has all the powerful features in it. The HTML5 interface is mainly used by end-users, and by admins when they just need to generate a report or see something graphically to help with the management of Commvault.

One other note. I would rate the ransomware feature at about eight out of 10. There are different processes for enabling ransomware protection on Windows versus Linux systems. In the current version, there is no ransomware for HyperScale X. That feature has been released in CV SP 24.

We have been using Commvault HyperScale 1.5 and HyperScale X for the last three and a half years.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had a major issue in the three-plus years we have had Commvault. 

There were some issues in the first year, until we managed to acquire the skill sets and learned how the product should be used, including the best practices. But overall the environment is pretty stable. 

We perform a disaster recovery test twice a year and the product is robust and resilient.

The solution is pretty scalable. You can grow the environment. We have been using the same CommServe server for the solution for the three years that we have had Commvault, and we have just scaled and scaled the solution. We started with about 3,000 clients and now the number of clients has doubled or tripled.

HyperScale X, which was released one year ago, is more scalable than version 1.5. You can put more nodes in one cluster and, because of that, you can increase your overall storage.

We don't have the Commvault Activate solution. We are thinking about acquiring it in the near future to improve our environment. Our migration from other vendors to Commvault took between one and two years because our environment is so large. Right now we are fine-tuning the product and the processes around it. Perhaps we will use Commvault Activate starting next year. It will be in our scope.

Support for the product is pretty responsive and pretty good compared to the other vendors. Commvault's support is far better than Dell EMC's support.

If you hit an issue or a bug, Commvault support is there. And it's pretty easy to solve something that support cannot handle, if it's a bug that needs to go to the Commvault developers. We have initiated sessions with their developers to solve an issue that was affecting the environment. Because support is responsive, you can solve almost everything.

And if you need a feature that is not available, Commvault developers are responsive there too. They usually integrate such requests within a few months, and after that it's available for use.

Positive

In the past, we used Dell EMC NetWorker and Dell EMC Avamar. The main reasons we switched to Commvault were the storage and backup costs. We wanted to find a cheaper solution. In addition, we wanted a solution that we could manage using a single interface, versus the multiple interfaces that we had with Dell EMC. Third, we wanted something that was simpler to manage and that could perform disaster recovery much better, including disaster recovery testing. We also wanted the ability to upgrade agents and software in a centralized fashion. We have seen an improvement on all of these points with Commvault, as a replacement for Dell EMC.

The initial setup process is pretty complex. I was involved with the product from phase one. There are multiple points where you need to configure the product to have it functioning well in your environment. It's a complex product. There is a lot of stuff to set up from scratch to have things working as expected.

The time for deployment depends on how much infrastructure there is and on how many media agents and VSAs you need to deploy in the environment. For the first deployment we did in our environment, it took us two or three days to finish all the settings. But we were new to Commvault and we needed some time to understand it and to familiarize ourselves with all the options. Today, if we need to deploy a remote, on-prem site, where there is one media agent and one VSA, where the requirement is to back up a small or a medium site, the whole process can be done in a few hours. We work with Commvault's professional services to automate some of the deployment steps using Commvault's workflows.

Initially, we had about six petabytes of data that had to be migrated from one environment to another. It was pretty complicated because we had to disable the backup in one place and enable and configure the backup in another place. The process was also complicated because we had to look at the remaining space, how many workloads we needed to migrate, and how much had been migrated. We had to create procedures and train operations.

Commvault was new to everybody in our environment. Everybody had to become familiar with it and with the new processes and procedures. We had been using another technology for five years. Today, everybody in our operations, in our engineering, and our managers, is familiar with the product. Now, because we know the processes, everything moves much faster than it did in the past.

We have decreased the cost of our backup infrastructure using Commvault, by 30 to 35 percent.

Also, using Commvault HyperScale X has taken us to new ground where we can offer self-service recoveries to our customers and give them access to whatever server they manage. The other plus is the automation that we can create with Commvault's workflows to decrease the time it takes for a site deployment. That also translates into money saved because instead of having one admin resource occupied for a day to deploy a site, we can deploy a site in five minutes.

The pricing is far better than we had in the past. The license for Dell EMC was not too expensive, but the storage, given that Dell EMC is based on data domains, was pretty expensive.

We evaluated Veeam, as well as Dell EMC NetWorker and Avamar. Before we bought, we ran some try-and-buy and some PoCs in our environment, to see how the products handle things. We were convinced that Commvault is better and fits better than the old product, and we acquired Commvault.

The pros of Commvault are that you can manage everything from one console and the disaster recovery scenario functions much better than with Dell EMC NetWorker. Also, Dell EMC Avamar was specialized to back up VMware environments and NetWorker was specialized to do them all. We wanted a solution that could do all the backups that are required in our environment. Veeam was not able to handle all our backup scenarios. Veeam is very good on VMware backups, but you cannot do Oracle backups, SQL backups, or file system backups. We were looking for a solution that could fit all the backup requirements, operating systems, and appliances that we have in our environment. There are very few products that can cover all of them, few of them are: Dell EMC NetWorker and Commvault.

Involve Commvault support from the start, at the implementation level, to be sure that you implement the infrastructure with best practices. What can happen is that, a year after you implement the infrastructure, you notice that your clusters have not been properly set up and it's too late to change anything. Use their support during the implementation. Have some sessions with them to understand the whole infrastructure and the whole process of deploying HyperScale X.

We made a mistake in our first implementation, three years ago (Hyperscale 1.5). The recommended number of nodes per cluster was six, but for some reason we added nine. Because of that, we had some issues. Don't make the same mistake. However, HyperScale X, released in the last year, is a little bit more scalable and more flexible. Clusters can exceed nine nodes and can be extended further (current limitations per cluster are around 5 PB).

If someone is buying Commvault today, they should try to buy HyperScale X. It's the next generation and has some advantages. It can help avoid issues with clusters, moving forward.

Overall, we have been impressed by the features of the solution and by the responsiveness of Commvault's support. We like the product and we feel we made a good decision in acquiring Commvault and working with them. We are pretty happy.

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

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

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

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

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

Permissions can be tricky. There is granularity when trying to get people to write permissions to be able to view, backup, and restore. It is just hard to understand that granularity. I can't even 100% say that it is Commvault. I can say it is not super cut-and-dry right out of the gate. However, I would also say it is great because it is granular.

Getting my guys the right access has a learning curve. Sometimes, it is, "Oh, okay. I think I got it for you." Then, they say, "Oh, nope. I logged in but I can't see this." Then, it is, "Okay, hold on. Give me a second. Let me change that. Okay, it's this one." That learning curve has probably taken a little bit longer than some simpler things. So, Metallic has some granularity, and as a systems administrator, I appreciate that. At the same time, I also realize that I have to learn it.

Seven to eight months ago, the documentation needed improvement, but they have caught up on it now.

I have been using it for a year. My team has been using it for about seven to eight months.

It is a very stable platform.

Right now, we have seven guys on my team and two of us are setting up the backups. The other five of us are strictly doing restores mainly until we get all our backups entirely into the cloud and clean up the groups. I really just need two guys doing that, a junior admin and me. The junior admin has been setting this all up because he will be around for another 15 years. I might as well have him learn it now and be our guru.

For the most part, it does the updates for us. There is a piece that we own down on our network and there is a piece that they own on their network. For the most part, the piece that they own is definitely the bigger of the two. With that being said, our version that we are running on-premises needs an update, which basically means that it is waiting on a server restart. Our servers restart once a month, so I imagine it is scheduled to restart on Sunday. Then, we will get that up-to-date. Metallic pushes it out, then our server installs it. Metallic is mostly on the hook for updates and keeping things up-to-date.

It is 100% scalable.

We were on a hybrid system, which was on-prem and in the cloud as well as local. We had probably 10% of our servers that were backing up locally to themselves. We had about 40% of our big, large servers backing up on-premises. Then, the other percentage was backing up to the cloud.

Once we moved to Commvault, instead of about 80% of my servers backing up to the cloud, we will shortly have them all going to the cloud. Now, I'm not hybrid, but in a simple solution, which is a cloud backup solution. Adding to that is as simple as going to Azure, and saying, "Hey, I need this storage count to be a little bit bigger," as long as I have pre-planned the amount that I would buy from Metallic. In other words, Metallic gives us a price on 100 servers. I know that I have 50, and I am good to scale for another 50. All I have to do at that point is go into my Azure tenant, have it give me some more storage, and at that point now I am scaling.

Now, if I need to, I get a hold of Larry over there in Metallic, and I say, "Hey, buddy. I need to add another 50 servers." Then, he gives me a price quote, and we pay them again. The solution is simple, easy, and scalable. I don't need to buy hardware. I don't have a bunch of engineers down here reassessing our environment. I just got to add some more storage to the cloud, then I start sending more data out to the cloud. I would say, "Scalability is wow." They have done a great job there.

I had a conversation yesterday, between me and my manager, about when we will use Metallic's Office 365 Backup & Recovery. First, we need to get our backups. Between the Metallic solution, the file storage optimization, and now the 365, which are the three things that we have gotten from Commvault over the last year. File storage optimization is next, then 365 is after that. I am going to say sometime in October.

So far, I would give Commvault tech support 10 out of 10. We have dealt with some good and some bad tech supports. Between Microsoft, Dell, and Commvault, those three solutions are at the top of my list when it comes to support.

Anything that we find is usually something that we can fix ourselves. We can get ahold of support, then support takes care of it.

We were using Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS), but there were many problems with it. We turned around, started using Metallic about a year ago. I tested it out. We now have 80% of our servers being backed up to Metallic. We will probably have the rest in the next six to eight weeks. At that point, for the first time in two years, we will have all our servers completely backed up.

When we used to have the on-prem version of Commvault, it was nothing like Metallic. Metallic is a different solution, but it is Commvault. Back in those days, when we had Commvault, it was pretty complex. It was very granular. It had many features, but it was complex. You really only could have one or two guys working on it.

We left Commvault five years ago because the grass is always greener on the other side and cheaper: bigger, better, and stronger. Of course, we came to find out: none of the above. Nothing was true. Basically, we were talked into it by Dell EMC. My old manager, the person whose position I now have, was talked into using Quest Rapid Recovery product by Dell EMC, saying, "Hey, you don't need Commvault. They are one of the biggest backup solutions in the world, and we are an up-and-coming, starting company. We're going to make it cheaper for you. We are just as good. We will show you some cool demos." Those demos looked great. Of course, we went with it. To make a long story short, in the four and a half years that we had Quest Rapid Recovery, we were never compliant on our backups, not once. We were duped.

We are finally back with Commvault, and we now have a 100% compliance backup solution. 

We switched to Metallic because of money. Right now, we are paying less for Metallic than we ever were for Rapid Recovery. I have reclaimed man-hours back for my team. I had one guy for five to six hours a day managing those two other systems, Microsoft Azure Backup and Quest. I lost four to six hours a day for one of my top-level guys by having him troubleshooting that all day long. By going to Metallic, we have freed up man-hours, infrastructure costs, and the time to manage.

I did the first initial setup all by myself. I had it set up in about an hour and a half, then I was backing up a server in about an hour and 45 minutes. It was pretty easy. That was our proof of concept testing. I did that for about three or four months, then I blew it up, broke it, and reimplemented it. 

When we started using this solution, it was seven months into its infancy. By the time we bought it, they had just hit their first year. It has definitely changed around making things a little easier, instead of having to go: here, here, here, here, and there. They have simplified things. They have created nice new little shortcuts. 

The interface now is super easy. You can fumble around in there, then after awhile, you are like, "Okay. That is how this works."

The process of switching to Metallic was really easy. We actually ran Metallic backups during the MABS backup. In other words, we were actually backing up with those solutions as we migrated to Metallic. Of course, we had to age-off. The fact that we did not have to turn off the other backups so Metallic could do its backups made the implementation extremely easy. The cut over was easy. 

We were able to run it in parallel with the other system. It didn't cause any issues. It tells me right there that it's not the same design. Because if it was the same design, then we would've had to turn off the other one which means that we would not get backups for two or three weeks while Metallic catches up. That is not always a good thing to do when you are talking about important systems. Because of Metallic's different way that it backs up, we were able to run it in parallel. The implementation was very simple. It wasn't like we had to go and pull the tablecloth out from underneath the glasses while they were still sitting on the table. It was extremely seamless because of the fact that their backups are done differently than the not-so-good solution we were going with.

I had a couple phone calls with engineers and broke it really good a few times, to the point where it even broke up their stuff there. Once we decided we were going to buy the product and implement it into our environment, they set up a couple of calls with their top level engineers and had us set it up even better than I did in my test environments. They were really good about helping us. So, their assistance and the ease of setup were great.

After it was approved through our infrastructure technical committee, I needed to get a call set up with their engineers for an initial setup of the plans. The first plan to get going the way they recommend. Because when I was testing, I tested from every angle. I broke the heck out of it to know its limitations. We created an initial phone call with their engineers, who helped us set up the first 20 VMs to get backed up under their idea of how they set the system up to work. This was good because I didn't understand this when I was doing my testing. I just did the things I thought that were supposed to be done.

We had a second follow-up call with them. That second follow-up call was for any questions that we had for the month in-between what we were doing with our backups, e.g., checking things out and playing around. They answered a whole bunch of questions for us and helped us set up single sign-on. It was a smooth process. They were willing to help us out, which helped us out tremendously. We basically used their support to help us implement the solution.

Once you set up a bunch of these backups, you will get notified in an email if they are wrong. If you're not adding anything the next day or another server, there is no reason for you to even be in there, unless there is a restore. 

At the moment, we are trying to add 400-plus servers. Therefore, we are going to have a guy in there for half an hour to an hour a day adding a few more servers. When adding a few more servers, you need to be careful. You don't want to rock the boat too much, then all of a sudden you have a big problem. So, it is just a little bit at a time. Right now, we are talking about an hour once or twice a week. Once our servers are sitting up there and this stuff is going, there should be no maintenance. 

I have made this very clear to my team. I don't need a guy in there, like we did with Rapid Recovery, chasing down errors. There are no errors. It is backing up. It will tell you when it is not. Then, when it's not backing up, we will tackle that. 

I just don't see a lot of maintenance on this solution. Management of it really has nothing to do with anything unless you are fixing or reimplementing something. For the most part, once you set it, then it is a set-and-forget SaaS solution.

We have a seven-man team. I am the supervisor with six guys underneath me, who are all veteran IT professionals. One of those gentlemen, a $100,000 a year guy, was on Rapid Recovery for four to six hours a day, every day for the four years that we had it. He was just maintaining it, fixing problems and backup errors. When we went to MABS, it was the same problem. He was now managing both of these things, because we were dual-headed at that point. Once we got into Metallic, I had one of our junior-level admins, at that point, take this project on. He moved 80% of our servers into the cloud and basically checks an email once or twice a week, looking at the backups for about 20 minutes a day.

The labor has gone down exponentially. It is insane. We are talking about a $100,000 solution that we paid for Rapid Recovery a year, plus the $100,000 a year salary for having one of my guys managing it every day. Whereas, we are paying Metallic an X amount of dollars right now and spend about five or 10 minutes every other day just to verify that the backups are good. We don't have to fix anything.

We are basically getting rid of hardware that we were paying for Rapid Recovery. We are actually leveraging some of Rapid Recovery's hardware for MABS, so we cut down on MABS and Rapid Recovery. Now, the hardware that we would need to renew warranties and get support for is no longer necessary.

I used the free trial to test it. That was our proof of concept. I had the servers up and running by the middle of the day. I think I started it some time around breakfast. It took a couple of hours. It was really simple.

Hands down, Metallic provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements. You are getting what you pay for. If they are charging you X amount of dollars at that point, that is what you are going to pay. So far, I have not seen any hidden costs or any kind of gotchas. It is pretty cut-and-dry. They will let you know, "Hey, you are going to use our storage and it will cost you this much. You are going to use your storage, then we are going to charge you this much to backup." What they told us they were going to charge us is exactly what they are charging us now for the next two and a half years.

We also evaluated NEC, which is another big solution out there, like Nike or Converse. NEC has their own data centers. The government uses them. They are big and their solution is robust. We tested it, and it worked well too. However, the bottom line was a huge sticker price shock. We went with Metallic because of cost. 

Since I have been in this NDOT environment for eight years, we have used Commvault, Rapid Recovery, MABS, and now we are back to Commvault Metallic. Of those four products, with Commvault being the first and now the last, those have been the two more stable products. The first one that we used was Commvault on-premises, with MediaAgent and physical servers on-prem, which was extremely stable. Then, we went to Rapid Recovery and that wasn't stable. Neither was MABS. Now, we are back to Metallic and it is stable again. Most solutions I have used from Metallic, from the on-prem now to the cloud, have been extremely stable when it comes to backup.

Definitely take advantage of the support team in your initial rollout because Commvault is not a follow the bouncy ball type of solution. It is definitely granular, configurable, and scalable. With the initial deployment, it is important to get that right because everything is going to start working off of that initial deployment. It is a good idea to take advantage of their support tier in that initial deployment and not try to set it up 100% on your own. I did, and It worked. However, once we got a hold of the engineers for the production rollout, they started answering some of my questions. If I would have known the answers that they gave me back when I rolled it out, the rollout would have been much easier and not as hard as it was. It could have been even better. 

Get a little knowledge from these guys. Have them help you roll it out. It takes half an hour. That is all it took us. We had the engineer on the phone for half an hour. He had us setup and backups going, with the vision that Metallic was built for, not the vision that I had thought it was for. My biggest recommendation is to take advantage of their support during the initial deployment. From there, you can be as creative as you want. It is always good to get that help in the beginning.

There have been discussions about doing the solution’s Endpoint Backup & Recovery. It really just comes down to the fact that we would need more push from the business. Right now, the business understands that most of their data is stored in the cloud as-is. So, backing up into a computer is not necessary, as the data that they are putting on that computer is in the cloud. I don't see us using it any time soon.

Right now, Metallic is used a lot. For the most part, it is now the entire backup of our 400-plus servers. It will be used even more with the 365 implementation, Active Directory backup implementation, and disaster recovery. One of the good things about going to Metallic in this cloud solution, where all of my servers now live in the cloud, is I have a DR solution now, as opposed to having to move it down to another place or building in Las Vegas. Now that we are central with our backups to the cloud, we can focus on a DR solution. It definitely is very important to our infrastructure. As a server team, backups are number one. Metallic has now become one of our fallbacks on solutions for all kinds of stuff.

Spend it if you got it. The biggest lesson that I learned from using Metallic is sometimes going with cheaper isn't always better. That is why we left Commvault. While Metallic might be a little more expensive than Quest or MABS, with that extra dollar you are paying, you are going to get your money's worth.

I would rate them as 10 out of 10. I can't really complain. Right now, they look like a knight in shining armor. What do you normally do with a knight in shining armor? You put a medal on him.

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.

We used Commvault HyperScale X to increase the security of datasets, to be sure that all data and all backups that we have are secure, and that we have them in another place, such as disaster recovery. The idea is to always have a third copy somewhere else. The initial idea was to have a third copy of that backup sets to be in the state government data center. However, before they finish, I left Ministry, and they have not finished that job.

Generally, the idea is to have a possibility, for all backup data, after some time, to be saved in another place. For now, everything is still inside the Ministry. 

Commvault HyperScale X has increased the way our organization functions by adding more security to the backup sets. In case the primary location is disabled, or there is some problem with the primary location, the second one will continue to work. The idea is to always have a working backup.

The most valuable feature of Commvault HyperScale X is the automatic nature of its operation. We don't need to worry about sets of documents. It worked automatically, we don't need to think about it. When you set the solution up in a good way, you don't need to worry.

The price of Commvault HyperScale X could improve.

I have been using Commvault HyperScale X for approximately one year.

Commvault HyperScale X is highly stable.

The scalability of Commvault HyperScale X is good. It is simple to add more systems or server storage.

We have approximately 400 endpoint users and 40 terabytes of data being used. 

We had to use the support and they were responsive and quick. They fixed the problem, not immediately, but the timeframe was dependent on the ticket type. They were always there to help. They did regular call checks until everything was resolved. 

We used many different solutions previously. When we had some large issues in 2015, I decided to buy a professional corporate solution for all the systems. We did test some other solutions, but with Commvault HyperScale X, we received what we needed and much more. Additionally, Commvault HyperScale X was easy to maintain and use.

The solution was easy for us to implement because we have been working with Commvault for many years, and we know what to do. The initial setup alone will that approximately two weeks. The longer portion is buying the hardware and setting it up.

I rate the initial setup of Commvault HyperScale X a three out of five.

We did the implementation of Commvault HyperScale X with a local partner. They installed it and did the setup. For us, it was easy to add new features to the Commvault HyperScale X backup.

The company that has the solution is managing the solution.

We have seen a large return on investment by using Commvault HyperScale X.

The price of Commvault HyperScale X is a lot higher than competitors. As a government institution, we have annual costs. We made a budget for one year in advance. It was difficult to calculate the other solution's costs because each solution has another way of licensing. The solution is expensive but it is very good and we know the good quality we will be receiving.

There were not any additional costs. The new storage, software, and support were inside the price.

We did evaluate other solutions before choosing Commvault HyperScale X.

The solution has changed since I have used it but what I know is the solution offers companies the possibility to have their own backup storage.

I rate Commvault HyperScale X a ten out of ten.

The solution is used as a backup for Office 365 workloads.

Pricing and functionality can be improved. The way to configure is not as simple as the configuration itself, nor is adding users within the backup scope.

I have been using Metallic for more than three years. I am an end user. I am using the solution's latest version of the solution in my organization.

The solution's stability is excellent.

The solution is scalable. 

Also, it is used by 380 users.

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.

The customer support is not good. There should be fast responsiveness and more proficiency when solving the issues or when helping solve any issues. I rate customer support a six out of ten.

Neutral

Some configurations could have been simpler, and the recommendations could have been more precise in allowing only certain users to be included in the backup scope. We could use group membership. Based on the user's group membership, they would be included in the backup scope. It's pretty simple, so if a user belongs to Group A, they will be included in the backup scope, and if not, then they won't be.

The deployment took two days, and one engineer was required for it. If you refer to maintenance as the procedures to test the restore and the options or directions, there's something else.

The solution is expensive. The subscription is based on a monthly basis. There are additional costs that vary depending on the size of the backup.

What we had before was that each user needs to be licensed. We purchase the required number of licenses and are priced accordingly per license. This pricing is independent of the backup data. Now, Metallic has changed, and the pricing is either per user or per license, in addition to the amount of backed-up data.

It supports SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and other services.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use the solution for mail archiving and sync application features. We can back up the virtual environment with its help.

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

We have been using the solution for five years.

I rate the solution's stability as an eight.

We have four solution users in our organization. I rate its scalability a nine.

The solution's technical support team resolves the queries efficiently. However, it takes time to respond.

Positive

I have used IBM Spectrum Protect before. I have attended training sessions and implemented them as well.

The solution's initial setup process is complicated. One needs to know the product in-depth for easy deployment. It takes a couple of hours but depends on the type of environment. Also, one executive with good knowledge can conduct its maintenance process efficiently.

The solution's cost is reasonable. I rate its pricing a nine.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as an eight.

We use the solution for backup and recovery.

The solution's most valuable features are compression and duplication ratio.

The solution's pricing could be better.

I have been using the solution since 2020.

It is a stable solution. I rate its stability as an eight.

It is a scalable solution, and I rate its scalability as an eight. Currently, we have three solution users in our organization.

The solution's initial setup was complex. Our team contacted the vendor for assistance. They logged in remotely with us and solved the issue.

We implemented the solution with the help of our in-house team.

The solution is highly-priced.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as a nine.