Commvault Cloud Reviews

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.

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.

We are doing backups for a customer's 365 tenant details. This is for 365 backup and recovery. The applications that it protects with backups include: all the details on 365, SharePoint, Team, and mailboxes.

Our client does the needed backup within our required window. We have a daily backup at 11:00 every day. We have not felt any pressure or performance issues with our 365 tenant.

The restore has been great. It has been faster than doing restores with the on-premises solution.

Quick backups and restores of data are the most valuable features. It is important that it is an easy solution to integrate with the SAML authentication of the tenant, so we can have the users log into the systems and do their own restores, if needed.

Metallic's backup & granular recovery of data for Office 365 works great. We have tested it many times for production reasons. We have done some tests and have always managed to do the recovery as we wanted and without any issues.

For simpler environments, they have some templates for startups. Possibly for a smaller environment, they need to do more automatic configuration and selections of users who want to do backups. This is mainly for smaller environments. I would like them to have the same system fit for all environments: small and big environments. Currently, we have to do a lot of configuration of the layout, which takes time. This solution is appropriate for enterprise-level enterprise, but I would like it to be easier to use for SMB environments.

Less than half a year.

Up until now, it has been a hundred percent working great. So, it looks stable.

Our customer's environment is not that big, but it looks like it can easily handle a big environment.

We back up a little less than a thousand users, whom we are licensed for, and a lot of them are company employees. 

There are two sysadmins managing the solution. One of them mainly does the monitoring and getting the work on the system.

The technical support was good enough when we needed their help. They were available for assistance and gave us good support. They fixed the issues that we had in the system. 

When we looked specifically for a solution that would hold the backup on their cloud environment, Metallic Cloud was what we wanted. We didn't want to bring the solution into our environment, but we wanted the whole solution. Metallic was exactly what we were looking for. From my point of view, Metallic Cloud was the best solution that we could find.

Previously, the client didn't have backups for the 365 report. People who deleted their emails or files on SharePoint just lost them. So, this solution was quite important, because trying to do backups from an on-premise environment wasn't successful. It took a lot of time because of the low bandwidth over the Internet.

This solution mainly gives us backup functionality that the client wasn't able to do before. It is saving them a lot of bandwidth over the Internet and giving them functionality that they previously didn't have, such as, backups to their 365 tenant. They save 150 to 200 Mbps for nightly backup runs.

Most of the important things were straightforward. It was quite easy. It is a SaaS-based, web-based configuration. It is very simple and easy. You learn by some kind of runbook, step-by-step. That's it.

In a couple of hours, we finished 80% of it. Over the next couple of days, we did a couple of tunings.

We did a PoC at the beginning. We weren't sure that we were going to purchase it because we didn't have experience with this product before. So, it was a testing environment first. When the test environment went well, we just went into production. We went from PoC status into production status. 

After we decided to move to production, we decided what would be our guiding rules for system backups, e.g., what would be the policy that we would have to decide internally. We had a small discussion about what we wanted to back up, what was the policy, who should do the management, and who should get the report. It was some type of late policy implementation after the product was already working in backups because we just moved from PoC to production immediately, which was easy enough.

The first backup is always long and takes a lot of time. After that, the daily incremental backup speed is quite fast.

We had some small issues, but we received good assistance from their support to fix those issues. The issues were mainly report type issues and changing it from HTML to PDF. These were very limited, small issues. I think they were related to small bugs in the versions. The support was helpful. So, we just got support for the issues that we had encountered during our implementation. Otherwise, we did the implementation ourselves.

One and a half people were required for the deployment, one of the system engineers and myself (as CISO of the company). I did most of the configuration, then one of the system guys helped with the SAML configuration of the Azure tenant.

Metallic has reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our client's backup operations. It is reliable. We trust it and don't need to monitor it as much as another backup. This is quite labor-intensive, manual work, so it saves our technician time. It is saving us an hour or two a day.

It is not the cheapest solution. I think the pricing is fair for mid-side customers. It is between all the other options.

Costs are fairly predictable because you pay per user. It is quite easy to do the calculation.

If you have different use cases in the 365 tenant, I am not sure that the product gets the full agility of those licenses. If I want to do backups for just some of the users, I still need to do a backup for the full SharePoint and have a full license for all of the users who use SharePoint. If there could be a higher variety of license type for this that reduces the cost, that would be a nice functionality.

We were looking for a backup solution to do backups for all 365 data as well as SharePoint, Teams data, OneDrive, and mailboxes. We wanted all the data located on our 365 to be robust from one side, but easy enough to manage from the other side, not complicated, and reliable. After we did the PoC with Metallic and found it a suitable solution, we decided to keep working with it.

We mainly decided to use Metallic because Commvault has a good solution on-premises. We know Commvault as a company. They have a good product and we have a good relationship with them. Commvault is in Israel, so we decided to try the cloud product in the environment, and it was good.

We did PoCs with all the options that we evaluated. We mainly checked the supported functionalities and eliminated those that did not support our required functionality. In the end, we had two options and decided to go with Metallic.

I would give Metallic's overall ease of use as an eight out of 10. It is not too complicated. It is quite easy to use for people who are familiar with Commvault. They can understand the language pretty quickly. If you have Commvault on-premises, which we have for the same customer, you can understand the language of the solution pretty quickly.

Know what policies you need and what you want to back up beforehand. If you are planning to do backups of a few users, and not all your users, research the type of applications you need to do backups, e.g., if you need SharePoint, mailboxes, or OneDrive. Each of these applications behaves differently regarding license activities.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect, but it is a really good product. There were only small issues/bugs that I found in the beginning, e.g., small report issues and it was a little bit complicated the first time configuring for SMB users, which is a bit more complicated with limited options. However, since we have experience with other products, it was fast. I don't know another SaaS product doing 365 backups better than Metallic. This solution is the best one that I'm aware of.

Generally, we use the product for backup capabilities as a primary function, and we also use it for disaster recovery.

Previous to this solution, we were on tape. Its restorations were very painful. We've been able to accommodate more use cases for restorations now that we have this product in play.

The backup feature and the live sync are both really good aspects of the product. Live sync is for databases. 

Commvault doesn't store in an immutable state unless it's in archive-form. That's an advantage. We have found several instances that we have backed up a server and it started encrypting data after we started the backup and it was trying to recount the Commvault. It is very sensitive, and is positive as is very sensitive to ransomware, however, you need to understand it's not a ransomware alert; you need to understand the alert in order to figure out if it's ransomware, however, it's a good heads-up.

The solution has been quite stable.

Commvault can actually come in and assist you with aspects of the implementation - and they are quite helpful.

The only problem is that some of what we snap most of is the VMs. We found about 10% of the VMs that we can't snap because they're too interactive. It actually causes the application to crash.

It would be ideal if there was usable file states. Live sync is not live sync. It's not really live, it's live to the back it up, however, it's not keeping it up to date within seconds. We have an environment that is very transaction heavy, and the lowest we can get to is about 15 minutes. However, we need second RPOs. 5 second RPOs, 10 second RPOs.

I've used the solution within the last 12 months. I've used it in total for about three years or so now.

The solution is very stable unless you have to use Symantec Enterprise Protection. That comes into major issues. We've had corruption due to Symantec.

The scalability capabilities depends on which version you get. If you go to hyper-scale, it's infinitely scalable. If you go to an IBM object storage, it's scalable only up until a certain point.

We have approximately 50 people that have access to do restores. Ten of those having the additional responsibility of initiating backups for databases. And we have one engineer and two administrators.

We're considering going to the hyperscale version and then expanding it to have it distributed through three sites.

We've dealt with technical support quite a bit. 90% of the time they're really good. However, the other 10% of the time they disappear when the problem is too hard.

Overall, I would rate them eight and a half out of ten. They are pretty decent.

We previously used Spectrum Protect.

There were ongoing configuration problems and they continued to increase as everything was a dependency. You had to have the client and the right version with the firmware updated to the hardware and the hardware to the right version. It was a very, very complicated mess. Once it ran, it ran really well. However, when you had to upgrade, you had to upgrade everything. You couldn't do some iterations.

The initial setup was complex only due to the VAR we used. That we have since moved all away from.

The deployment ended up taking a year and we called in Commvault to actually finish the deployment. We contracted directly with Commvault and got rid of that VAR. Once they were involved, it took less than a week. They really helped speed up the process.

We only need one engineers and maybe two admins to handle maintenance.

We brought on Commvault in the middle of the implementation process. They helped us get rid of the VAR, which was giving us trouble. They were good to work with and we were glad for their help.

The team was very great. They actually provided us an engineer and he engaged remotely for probably 30 hours of that week.

It saved time. It didn't pay for itself, however, it saved time. Where it saved a lot of money was the cost of tapes and maintenance contracts with IBM.

The cost was one of the reasons we went with Commvault, however, that said, I can't give exact pricing.

We looked at Pure Storage. I don't remember what package they had for backups. However, there was one other competitor as well and I don't remember who it was.

In the end, the technology and the cost pushed us towards Commvault.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are typically one version behind the latest. We don't usually have the latest version of the solution.

We're using a private cloud on-premises as a deployment model.

My advise to other companies would be to just do your homework. Make sure it's the right solution for your company. We really didn't think about enterprise architecture. We put it in and then had a change how we operate. So make sure it's the right fit.

Our biggest lesson was the realization was that we need enterprise engineering and the enterprise architecture.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. They have some really good features. They have really good engineering. They have very good support. However, they're missing on some of the innovations that some other companies are coming up with. They either need to create their own innovation or buy it from somebody else and integrate it. 

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

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

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

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

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

My impressions of the backup and granular recovery of features are that they're constantly evolving and we've had such great contact with the engineering and development teams at Commvault while they were building out this product. We've seen the evolution of the product, and it has gone from being a platform as a service to a complete service option. The number of upgrades, updates, and ease-of-use features that they continue to build into it, has dramatically reduced the amount of time we spend looking for objects in the backup repositories.

In terms of the speed of both backup and recovery of Office 365 data, for backup, we have a very large Office 365 footprint. We have over almost 15,000 unique mailboxes, according to their metrics. The backup is at least thrice daily. I find it to be very fast compared to other options in the market right now. Especially that it can back up 15,000 users with no problem.

In terms of the ease of use, the original learning curve was a bit steep, but now I would say the overall ease of use, now that they've started with the latest releases of it is fairly intuitive. If I need to go look at my Exchange, so I go click on Exchange. If I need to look at my One Drive backups, I click on One Drive. It's fairly intuitive and it does a great job of guiding me when I'm not sure of where to go.

I haven't gone down the security road too much. However, I've never had a security concern with the product. The scalability and availability of it are outstanding. It's scaled with us. But as far as security goes, I've never had an issue or a concern, or if I did have a concern they were able to address it immediately.

We also haven't really gone too much into the flexibility in terms of where the data is stored but it's a great feature. We're only using a head-end and we're a complete SaaS offering, but we did explore the local active copies, et cetera. We decided that there was no need for us to keep the data on-premise if they're going to maintain it in Azure or AWS. So for us, it was a very easy decision to keep it in the cloud and not on-premise.

The navigation of it needs improvement in terms of the UX. The product itself, it works as expected. It's all user experience and user interface improvements that could be made and it could be made a little more consumer-friendly. Instead of having one person or a few people that know the system intimately, it gives us the ability for other people that don't have to know the system intimately be able to navigate it.

I have been using this solution for two years. 

It's a SaaS offering. It's deployed in our infrastructure and we have a single VM in our infrastructure that we use for pulling any backups down to our infrastructure that we need.

It's appropriate for an enterprise-level environment. It's scaled with us from 900 mailboxes to 12,000 mailboxes, plus our scale of the Office 365 platform.

Before the COVID pandemic, we had six users using this solution. They're system administrators, they manage infrastructure and systems.

It has a 100% adoption rate. The product is being used every day. The backups are automated four times a day and we restore them on a need basis. We use the product every day.

Their support is awesome. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate them a fifteen. The entire Commvault team always goes above and beyond every time, for everything.

We were on-prem before with an old version of Exchange, and we used old backup software to back it up.

For us, the initial setup was complex because we were one of the first customers on this solution. However, we've reset it up a couple of times just as a demo for some of our subsidiaries, and the way the set works now is very straightforward, and very clean compared to what it was when we first got to it to 18 months to two years ago.

The configuration interface was fairly straightforward. Aside from the initial, "This is a product that we are building. You are a beta customer. You're one of our first few customers on the platform.", it was fairly straightforward. Now it's very point and click. It's very straightforward, very intuitive, and well automated.

The deployment took one week.

Our implementation strategy was to get it absorbing our email while we're still migrating users to Office 365 from our on-prem solutions. For us, it was a shotgun approach. I was adding more users to our office tenants than anybody had expected. When we were rolling out Commvault we were rolling out Office 365 at the same time, and it was overwhelming Microsoft at the same time. The implementation strategy was to try to run a slow controlled burn and cut people over as needed, but we managed to get Commvault set up. Then every day, myself and the team at Commvault, were checking to make sure that all the users we had just imported into Office 365 were imported into Commvault.

It wouldn't have been possible without the support team and the development team. The implementation that works now is very clean compared to what I went through. They made themselves so available to us when we were doing our implementation that the reason it took so long to implement was because they were waiting for me for the next step.

Metallic provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements. They charge us on a model that we understand. We understand the pricing model a little bit differently. 

We investigated Backup Exec and Backupify. Backupify and Commvault were the top two. They were the two that we had narrowed in on, based on our needs analysis. We chose Commvault simply because of the scalability and expertise in enterprise.

Backupify was a SaaS solution and they had many similar features. But at the time they wanted us to add more service than we were expecting. They were fantastic competitor and they did everything we wanted them to do, just like Commvault. But we went with Commvault specifically because of their enterprise heritage.

We started with a free trial of Commvault. It might've been a POC then we just went from there.

They do a fantastic job with their documentation, so you can follow their documentation and implement it.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. We can't compare it against another staff solution that we're using. So for now it works for us, we're not seeing any issues, and it's better than what we used on-prem. 

I've done almost everything with Commvault, e.g., back and forth centralization for file systems and applications like SQL, Oracle, VMware, and Hyper-V. Commvault does a lot of integration. 

Most of our installations are on-premise, but I remember doing one installation on the cloud.

We always work with the latest version of the solution.

We are not utilizing Commvault as it should be. Most installations are for backup and protecting data. We have it on cloud or on-premise. Most of the customers need only this. So, I haven't given real value other than backup and restore. However, we are working on this with our customers, trying to give them the culture of how to use this data and product with value. For example, using Commvault to migrate your applications. 

You can back up everything from this one backup solution. You can do backups, archives, and replications. You can backup 89 percent of the application.

It can support the backup to and from the cloud. The cloud integration with Commvault is excellent. It can support a lot of cloud vendors, like Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

The endpoint protection for PCs, laptops, and mobile devices is a feature that they have done a lot of hard work with. It can do backups anytime, e.g., when you have a device connected from on-premise, when are you connected through the WAN, and if you didn't do the right setup. This is a good feature.

If you have cloud applications and payment applications, you can migrate from the payment app to the cloud and also migrate from one cloud to another cloud. There is a lot of flexibility on what you can do in Commvault.

In Commvault, they used to use only the CommCell Console for backup and configuration. They have been working on a new console for quite some time now. The last time I installed the solution (maybe last week), I used the Web Console, which is excellent. Commvault can be a bit complex, but on the Web Console, they have done very beautiful work. You can do a lot of things easily and simply with the Web Console. It has 90 percent solved the complexity of Commvault. You sometimes need to log into the complex interface, but almost everything can be done from the web interface.

The Command Center is provided from the web interface. You can back up the data for everybody, but also you can give everybody the ability to view and restore their data. For example, if a laptop, machine, or environment is owned by X, then X can look in and see the environment and data that he has backed up. He can see everything that he owns and can manage the environment as he wishes. It gives him an excellent view of his environment and infrastructure. Also, if you are a service provider, you can back up data for multiple companies and give everyone an interface for their environment to manage, backup, and restore data. Commvault has done excellent work in this area. 

I would like them to keep working on the new web interface to migrate out of the old interface because the old interface is a bit complex. It was driving customers away because of the complexity. If they migrate everything (100 percent of the features), this would make the product be perfect.

We have been using the solution for two years.

The stability is excellent. Once you install and configure everything the right way, there is only the infrastructure. If there is a problem with the infrastructure, it will reflect on your backup. If there are no problems with the infrastructure, then there will be no problems. I have been working with Commvault for two years and don't remember opening more than 10 cases for a lot of customers.

It is easily scalable. You may need to add a gateway, proxy, or media server to the environment before adding more data to the environment. 

Something that is not commonly used is that you can use Appian as a backup storage solution in one integrated package. 

I rarely use the technical support because of the stability. The technical support is very good. Once you have a case, depending on the severity, there is an engineer who will connect with you. That's the most important thing when you have a problem. They will connect with you and solve your problem on spot. Commvault has a built-in feature that if it's connected to the Internet with one click you can upload all the logs. Then, the Commvault engineer can see all the logs he needs. Most of the time, it takes one hour for a problem to be solved as they have excellent support.

It's an excellent solution for cloud support. One of the important features that I am selling and trying to convince customers to use is the backup for Office 365, SharePoint, and OneDrive from Microsoft. Microsoft can be in your environment with high availability and everything will be good, but if you delete it by mistake, then for a short period Microsoft can't restore anything. Also, the way Chromebooks integrates with the cloud services is excellent.

I started my experience with HPE Data Protector, which I now hate, because it's now Micro Focus and it's killing me.

I have worked with Dell EMC. Their solution does the work, but there are a lot of the problems with the ESXi.

I have worked with NetBackup. NetBackup is good, but I haven't seen the new feature like they have in Commvault for integration.

I have also worked with Veritas Backup Exec.

With Commvault, if you need basic integration and configuration but no advanced features, then you can do the setup in maximum three to four hours. However, if you need to do everything, you will need everything to be organized for you to work.

For the backup specifically, you have to implement the basic design with every client. It then depends on their needs, environment, and how we can make their life easier. Every time, we have to change something in order to give our customers the best experience.

The solution enables our customers to save on infrastructure costs by being able to manage what were disparate data management solutions in one place. It is one of the most important features: You can do backup for almost everything from one platform. Plus, you can reduce costs by using any cheap storage and still have the deduplication feature. You can present any cheap storage for the backup and not have to worry about the B2B high cost appliances, like HPE, Dell EMC Data Domain, etc. When you can do everything from one place, it's always better. It will reduce cost on the infrastructure and human resources who manage the environment.

It was not very popular because of its previous cost, but they have been working on the pricing, and now anyone can afford to use Commvault. They changed the modeling criteria for their pricing. Previously, there was only the capacity modeling based on your content capacity. In this case, they would give you a license and you would have to pay it. Now, most of the environment is virtualized so you can have the best CPU, VMs, etc. You buy whatever you need and pay for what you need.

The most important feature that other backup solutions in the enterprise field are missing is a built-in feature for deduplication. It has a buildt-in deduplication engine and database. Therefore, you don't need another B2B vendor, like Appian, in order to do the deduplication. This is the most important feature that other solutions don't have. Most of them need another solution, like Appian or B2B storage. Also, the integration with storage and the snapshots (taken from the storage) have a lot of variety. 

I'm a fan of Commvault. I have worked with a lot of backup solutions for about eight years. Commvault is the best until now that I have worked with.

Commvault is the best for cloud integration. I tried VMware where you can back up to the cloud, but it's not easy. With CommVault, you can see the cloud environment, cloud machines and virtual machines (such as on-premises virtual machines). With other solutions, there are a few limitations.

I am still working with Veeam. 

There is also another solution, Cohesity. It is a good solution but it still has a lot to do.

Buy Commvault. It is an excellent backup solution. I would recommend the solution.

What is important to Commvault is the flexibility. E.g., if you have a new application that you want to integrate, but it's not supported, they can help you with that. They will start immediately working on it with the development. We have talked with Commvault many times, and this was one of the things that they are proud of. They can give you an integration, even if it's not integrated yet. In addition, Commvault has done a partnership with HPE, which helps with integrations.

I would rate the solution as a 10 (out of 10).

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.

Commvault Complete Data Protection has scale-out hardware. It allows you to build hardware when running out of capacity or performance is degraded. You can scale the entire hardware by adding servers. The data can be distributed across all these nodes and is resilient across single or multiple node failures. In comparison, Dell EMC does not have a scale-up platform for the backup.

With Commvault Complete Data Protection, we have a scale of backup positions because we don't know if our backups or workloads may increase. With Commvault Complete Data Protection, we don't have to worry about running out of capacity or buying other hardware. The solution also has active applications between two sites that the Dell EMC network does not have. With Commvault Complete Data Protection, you can have a high-level backup server down on one site, all your backup catalogues can be replicated to another site, and you can bring the backup server from the second site in just a few seconds.

The Commvault Complete Data Protection interface is straightforward to use.

There could be improvements to the backup failures. The backup is critical because if we lose even one day of backup, it is not good. Backup failures typically happen because all end devices are prone to failures. But when failures occur, we have a long window to fix them. We usually don't need support to fix it, but I engage support if required. I can fix about eighty percent of the failures.

Commvault should implement documentation or knowledge-based articles to assist. Customers can then efficiently utilize them and fix the failures themselves. Calling support takes time, and we don't know if the SLA will be breached while waiting. So vendors should document the failures for visibility, and we can quickly fix them ourselves.

They can also improve the bugs. They have security measures for ransomware, but the bugs should be fixed. In addition, before getting a new product, the area managers always sell their product and treat us with respect and dignity, but when the product is onboarded and live, they do not engage with us in the same way. They only engage with us when there is a problem.

We have been using this solution for eight months. We've moved 65 Microsoft workload backups to Commvault Metallic from Commvault Complete Data Protection. Still, Commvault Metallic is inconsistent because they are working on optimizing it and enhancing it monthly. We haven't had exposure for on-premises, but we'll get it in eight to ten months for Commvault Complete Data Protection.

We were doing a comparative study on Veritas, Commvault and Veeam, the leading enterprise backup solution providers. They have a single panel interface where you can manage both the on-premises workflows and the cloud, and you can migrate between them and vice versa to any storage. In comparison, Dell EMC networks are lacking, and they are still legacy solutions. They don't have the integration of their on-premise workloads to the cloud or send the cloud workloads to on-premises. They also can't manage them through a single interface. Based on this study, Commvault Complete Data Protection is the best.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. The product is really good. Commvault has wonderful security features like backup and recovery features. Other solutions have their methodology for backing up and storing data in the target disk. Commvault is very good; in most cases, they are better than Veeam. There are similarities regarding backup, recording methodology, incorporating cloud workloads and integrating cloud with on-premises but storage matters with these solutions. If you prioritize your hardware, Commvault is a good choice.