Commvault Cloud Reviews

I work with a variety of backup solutions including Commvault, Avamar, Rubrik, and similar tools. I am part of Tata Consultancy Services where we pitch all these solutions to customers from the backup perspective while the overall solution revolves around how we are transforming the overall IT estate for the customers. This is a subpart of it, but we do deal with the backup solutions as a solution for the customers.

I have been dealing with Commvault Cloud for about four or five years and have been selling solutions around Commvault.

When it comes to recommending Commvault Cloud, it varies from manufacturing to retail. We usually deal with all the enterprise customers with petabyte scale of data in the environment. Wherever we have reliance RTO and RPO requirements from the customers for shipping the backup copies to the cloud, we leverage different components from Commvault. For example, we basically keep the CommServe in one of the cloud environments to have the policy orchestrations and all that. To ensure that whenever required, we can restore from the latest backups using Commvault Cloud onto the public cloud environments while the primary workloads are running on-premise. This is one scenario, but it spans across the industries and across the size of the customers where we leverage all these enterprise solutions, typically for the production workloads. We also leverage the cloud-native solutions from the respective hyperscalers for the non-production workloads to ensure that we are saving on the license costs while achieving the compression and dedupe capabilities from tools such as Commvault.

We find the most valuable features in Commvault Cloud to be from the appliances perspective. I mentioned CommServe, which basically orchestrates the overall backup policies for the customers. The features are primarily from the backup and restore perspective, which is a typical use case that we solution for the customer.

Basically, the public cloud acts as a bigger solution for the on-premise while the on-premise acts as a DR for the public cloud workloads.

I think improvements could be made in Commvault Cloud. Lately what I have seen is that there are AI capabilities that different data protection organizations are coming up with, which basically revolves around tiering of not frequently accessible data to glacier kind of storage, plus bringing in a high level of compression and deduplication capabilities. All those features I believe are there in other customers and they are bringing in new use cases from the AI perspective which I have not recently seen in Commvault.

I have seen that Dell does have such features. We recently pitched a solution to the customers where we talked about data tiering and the other AI use cases, identifying the data by itself and autonomously taking decisions on how to tier the data between the different storage classes that we have. Those kind of capabilities that we have proposed to the customer as far as the partner solutions are concerned.

I would like to see AI capabilities in Commvault Cloud. The rest of the features pretty much align with the other enterprise solutions that we have in the market. It is just the AI capability that is being asked by the customers as well as that I see missing with Commvault.

I have been working in this field for eight years.

I would rate the technical support provided by Commvault from 1 to 10. I do not come from the delivery background but from the solution architect background, so I sell the solution to the customers. At the pre-sale cycle, we have spocks aligned from Commvault with whom we get in touch, and they provide all the required support that we need.

I would assess the flexibility of Commvault Cloud in supporting cloud-based and on-premises deployments by saying that the components more or less remain the same. It depends on how many workloads that we are running onto the cloud. Whether to use production or whether to use Commvault solutions for the production workloads or take them to the non-production. We typically look for how much data storage that we need to protect via Commvault. Whether we are achieving a business case and bringing in cost-saving for the customer if the data size is too high from the non-production workloads as well. We typically go on and propose to the customer to leverage Commvault for the non-production workloads as well. For hybrid cloud customers, we have environments across on-premise and cloud. They have their virtual appliances running on Commvault in public cloud as well as the on-premise workloads. They typically use public cloud as a failover to the on-premise environment while they use on-premise for the workloads that are running on the public cloud.

To evaluate Commvault Cloud disaster recovery performance, we look for features including deduplication and how much data that we are saving and whether the cost saving comes from the actual FET that we get out of Commvault. FET is basically how much data that we need to back up using Commvault solution. Plus we look at how many licenses that we require. Competitors charge for per-VM based licenses. In Commvault we have VM-based licensing as well. I am not too sure with respect to how many licenses that we need for the file storage. These are the evaluation criteria when we are assessing what backup solution to go ahead with.

The product is competitive when it comes to the pricing. It is pretty much in line with the partner solutions.

I usually recommend other solutions instead of Commvault Cloud. We face a variety of customers where the customers already have solutions running in their environment. If not, if a customer wants a different solution, if they are moving from legacy systems to the cloud and there is a need to propose a new solution, then we go ahead with new backup data protection solutions. Otherwise, whatever that is running in the customer's environment and they are pretty much happy with it, we go ahead with the same solution for the customers.

I would rate this review overall as an eight out of ten.

Commvault Cloud's main core use case is backup and recovery for protecting on-premises workloads, databases, the file system, NAS, and on-premises infrastructure. Another primary use case is immutable backups to protect from ransomware attacks, with air-gapped or isolated copies also providing ransomware protection.

I use Commvault Cloud for VMware to protect virtual workloads, virtual machines, and databases, including mission-critical databases such as SQL Server.

I use it for my backup environment to protect workloads.

Commvault Cloud's best feature in terms of protection is that it provides data protection and accomplishes its job effectively. It offers a unified approach to backup across all environments, including on-premises, public cloud, and SaaS applications such as M365 and Salesforce. I also use it for virtual machines and databases.

The unified protection approach helps my team manage different environments effectively. Before Commvault Cloud, I used a separate VM backup tool to protect the VMware environment. For database backup, I had to use the native tool or backup scripts. For the cloud part, I had to use the native AWS or Azure cloud tools. After moving to Commvault Cloud, a single policy or a set of backup policies is applied across virtual machines, databases, workloads, and cloud workloads. I can protect my environments, which reduces manual configuration errors. Regarding visibility, it provides one dashboard to manage and centralize monitoring of all workloads. It is very easy to track backup success or failure. I can see the SLA compliance and storage usage without needing to jump between tools to check or have visibility of it. Regarding the recovery experience, the recovery time has been reduced drastically by using Commvault Cloud. It has simplified cloud management and provides easier manageability to manage retention policies, encryption policies, and compliance rules. This helps reduce operational workloads.

Commvault Cloud has impacted me very positively. It simplifies and unifies data protection across hybrid workloads. Instead of managing multiple backup tools for virtual machines, databases, and SaaS applications, I now have a single platform with consistent policies and centralized visibility. This has really reduced my operational complexity and improved backup reliability. Regarding the cyber resiliency posture, the immutable backups and ransomware recovery workflow give me greater confidence in recovering quicker from potential risks. Commvault Cloud has positively impacted me in several key areas: unified backup management across environments, reduced operational overhead, improved ransomware resiliency, faster recovery times, better visibility for compliance, and easier management of hybrid or cloud workloads.

Commvault Cloud is a very powerful tool, but it can be improved in various ways. Commvault Cloud can be improved by simplifying its interface, reducing configuration complexity, and making more advanced features such as ransomware recovery easier to use. It can be better in the diagnostic part, and the cloud integration part can be smoother.

I have been working in my current field for the last eight to nine years.

I have experienced measurable outcomes and organizational improvements in several areas. In terms of faster recovery time, before Commvault Cloud, full system recovery used to take hours to perform a complete system restore. After Commvault Cloud, this has been reduced to minutes or an hour using automated recovery workflows. The recovery time has improved by sixty to eighty percent, which totally depends on the type of workload, but especially for virtual machines and databases, the recovery timing has been improved significantly.

In terms of time saved in backup operations, there is a reduction in manual backup scripting and monitoring. The centralized backup policy automation has reduced my administrative efforts by twenty to forty percent. The onboarding of new workloads is now faster.

Regarding storage and infrastructure efficiency, I have optimized backup retention and deduplication. There is a thirty to forty percent reduction in data infrastructure overhead, which varies from environment to environment.

Downtime has been reduced because Commvault Cloud provides faster restores during business disruption. Unplanned downtime impact has been reduced due to faster and more reliable recovery workflows.

Regarding cost optimization, I would not characterize it as a direct saving, but it can be called an indirect saving because instead of purchasing multiple backup tools, I can now use one tool to manage or back up all environments. The licensing has been reduced, operational efficiency and operational overhead have been reduced, and there is lower dependency on manual intervention.

Commvault Cloud is quite a mature product that I would advise others considering it to explore.

My advice to others is to start by clearly mapping data protection requirements across all environments, including on-premises and cloud, because the platform is most valuable when used as a unified strategy rather than a point solution. It is also important to invest time upfront in designing policies and planning, especially around retention, ransomware protection, and protecting critical systems such as Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases. This generally helps in avoiding complexity. I would also recommend getting training for Commvault Cloud, as it can help you learn about each feature.

Commvault Cloud is quite interactive, but I think there are some areas which can be improved for future versions, such as clarifying the early scopes and reducing the repetition of several questions, as some questions were repeated multiple times. I would appreciate more scenario-based questions. I would also recommend separating technical evaluation questions from business evaluation questions.

I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

Our main use cases for Commvault Cloud are primarily BFSI and banking.

The most helpful features of Commvault Cloud are its extensive capabilities, as they are in a position to take care of whatever use case presented to it.

Commvault Cloud provides features for managing multi-cloud environments.

Commvault Cloud has deduplication technology as part of its features.

I don't see any issue with storage efficiency or performance of the application; the only issue is it's a costly solution.

It's quite costly, but I would still consider it's worth the investment.

I have been working with Commvault Cloud for approximately three years.

It is not difficult to deploy Commvault Cloud; however, it requires good skills and a competent person to implement it, while Veeam will be completely simpler to deploy.

If a person knows what they are doing, deploying Commvault Cloud can take a few hours to a few days, depending on the use case.

I do not experience difficulties related to stability; the product is good in that regard.

I have not faced any downtimes with Commvault Cloud. The concerns arise more when I want changes or need to do some configuration, and if a bug appears, I reach out, and they are good at assisting.

I would consider that Commvault Cloud is scalable enough for those types of applications, as we are using them for multiple applications.

I am reasonably satisfied with Commvault Cloud's technical support team; however, the primary aspect is the number of people on the ground, which is limited, and the number of people who know Commvault Cloud is lesser compared to Veeam.

If I have an issue, it will indeed take more time to receive a response because they have limited resources, but otherwise, Commvault Cloud has reasonable support, although they will not come on-site and it will be remote support.

Positive

The main difference between Commvault Cloud and Veeam is that Commvault Cloud is much more real cross-platform and multi-cloud, designed for a real, exhaustive, real cross-platform, cross-cloud environment, evident in terms of a single pane of window. Veeam is more geared towards different types of use cases, as Veeam has naturally been for virtual environments and has been shaping up quite reasonably for cloud, being much simpler in terms of usability compared to Commvault Cloud.

The concerns arise more when I want changes or need to do some configuration. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Commvault Cloud a nine.

We use Commvault Cloud for backup and recovery with Air Gap Protect and Risk Analysis to be more cyber resilient.

We deployed Commvault Cloud as a hybrid model both on the cloud and on-premises, and it will continue to be that way. It was 100 percent on-premises. With the migration, it will be about 90 percent cloud and 10 percent on-premises.

Commvault Cloud's automated policies provide the notification we need to ensure our data is secure and managed correctly.

Commvault Cloud provides excellent visibility across all of our organization's data.

It is extremely important to our organization that Commvault has a unified platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads.

It has helped our organization improve by simplifying the way we manage our environment. We could not manage the same environment with only half of our current staff. We have yet to find anything in our environment that Commvault does not support.

Commvault Cloud's Risk Analysis helps us identify, categorize, and classify sensitive data enabling us to take the appropriate actions to protect it.

Commvault does a good job helping us limit our exposure and ensure compliance.

Commvault has helped us reduce our data management costs significantly. Compared to Dell Avamar, the costs are vastly different. Commvault is much more cost-effective. We are licensed by capacity, so we don't have to worry about licensing different features. We have all the features that are licensed by capacity. And as far as ongoing support costs and other expenses, they are much lower than what they were with Dell Avamar. Commvault also gives us the flexibility to use any storage we want, while Avamar is tied to the Data Domain, which is not cheap to support.

It has helped us reduce our backup time unless we are using Data Domain. This is because we can perform deduplication and compression on the client layer, which reduces the load on the network. We cannot do this with Data Domain. In fact, if we even attempt to perform a quick progress check before sending data to the Data Domain, the system fails completely. We learned this the hard way. We are using many more advanced features in Commvault Cloud than we ever did in Dell Avamar, simply because we had to license each feature separately in Avamar. As a result, we did not perform many backups in Avamar, such as all database backups (DB2, SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL). These backups were performed outside of Avamar. We are now using Direct Connect agents for all of our databases. This allows us to perform incremental backups, which we could not do with the previous method. As a result, we have reduced our backup times by two-thirds, or even more in some cases. Compared to when we were backing up directly to Data Domain, Commvault is now running our backups ten times faster. This has resulted in a significant reduction in our backup times.

Commvault has helped us reduce the RPO. Even in Data Domain, it has reduced our storage times by about half. It has also helped us reduce the threat detection time.

We reduced the RTO significantly with Commvault.

Commvault has helped us reduce downtime primarily due to the increase in the performance of resources.

At this time backup and recovery features are the most valuable. We haven't gotten into the more advanced features like LiveSync, just because we've been so busy with the migration to Azure.

The ability to manage everything from a single pane of glass is another major advantage. The management is also easy enough that most of our DBAs can manage their own stuff.

Commvault should keep and continue to develop the Java GUI. 

I have been using Commvault Cloud for two years.

I would rate the stability of Commvault Cloud a nine out of ten.

We have not encountered a scalability issue yet, and I do not foresee one in the near future. With proper infrastructure planning, I am unsure of the maximum scalability of Commvault Cloud, but we have scaled it to a significant size without any scalability issues. I believe the biggest limitation is that we are running Commvault on Windows, and Linux support is currently available. We will eventually migrate to Linux, but we are waiting for that side of the product to mature. Once we are on Linux, I believe scalability will no longer be a concern.

Technical support is excellent. We have ESP support, so we go to the top of the list whenever we call. Their response time has been excellent. We've been very happy with the level of knowledge of the support personnel. While we occasionally encounter someone who doesn't know what they're doing, the overall level of knowledge has been impressive. Our turnaround time from opening a call to receiving a call back has been fabulous.

Positive

We previously used Dell Avamar Data Protection Software but it did not have a viable immutable backup copy option, so Air Gap Protect was the reason we switched to Commvault Cloud.

I've been doing this for about 30 years, and I've used a lot of backup packages, but Commvault Cloud for backup & recovery is the most impressive one I've ever used. Its breadth of support, stability, and configurability are years ahead of what I've seen in other products. It's more than just a backup and restore product; it's a cyber resilience product that we find new ways to use all the time, especially with our Azure migration. We're able to move data into Azure using Commvault a hundred times faster than any other method that the DBAs or server admins could find. There are several technical reasons for this. Commvault Backup & Recovery is simply light years ahead of any other backup and recovery solution I've seen.

The deployment was of mixed complexity. The basic functions are straightforward, but the architectural aspects of laying everything out are more flexible, which has its pros and cons. On the one hand, this flexibility is a benefit, but on the other hand, it can lead to a learning curve from an architectural, deployment, and infrastructure standpoint. Once the infrastructure is in place, the rest is easy.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the size of the environment. We have five people on our team currently, one of whom is part-time. I and another team member have extremely deep experience and understanding of the architecture. We deployed and designed the architecture of our tape libraries, physical hardware, and so on. From that point on, four of us migrated 4,000 clients to Commvault Cloud in about six months.

The implementation was completed in-house.

A backup product does not typically have a direct return on investment. However, its value can be difficult to quantify in terms of dollars. For example, on January 1st we began migrating our 100 petabyte environment with 4,000 clients to Azure. Commvault saved our bacon by enabling us to move the data to Azure 50 to 100 times faster than we could have done on our own. What would have taken us three months, Commvault was able to do in 48 hours. So, while it is difficult to quantify the ROI of our backup product in terms of dollars, it has been invaluable in other ways.

Commvault Cloud is perhaps the best value for our money that I have seen in a backup product.

I would rate Commvault Cloud ten out of ten.

I would not consider expansions, configuration changes, or additions of more advanced features to be maintenance. Daily maintenance consists only of handling job failures, which involves reviewing and resolving them. This is simply a backup, which is unrelated to Commvault. It is the nature of things. No matter what product we use, there will always be failures. However, Commvault itself requires very little maintenance.

I suggest that instead of looking for a backup solution, look for a recovery solution. Backup solutions are common and behind the scenes. No one ever sees them or pays much attention to them. People just assume that their data is being backed up. Restore, on the other hand, is a top priority for management. In a critical situation where the business cannot function, management will come to the backup team demanding recovery immediately. Fortune 500 companies can lose millions of dollars for every hour they are down, and the management's attention will be focused on the recovery team. The faster and more reliably we can recover, the more valuable our recovery solution is. As John Deere says, "It's not how well you recover. It's how fast you recover well." That's the biggest thing to consider when evaluating backup software. If we focus on recovery backup, Commvault Cloud will sell itself.

Commvault handles our backups across both cloud and data center environments. It manages our short-term backups on-premises, followed by a transfer to disaster recovery for data older than 30 days, ultimately migrating them to long-term storage.

We are seeking a solution for secure and encrypted backups that comply with both our information security policy and the data retention requirements for database archive logs. Additionally, these backups must fulfill all customer service level agreements for all storage under our responsibility, including NAS, SAN, and any other backup methods specified in our service catalog.

Our deployment model is a hybrid of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure. We primarily use AWS as our main cloud provider, with Azure as a secondary option.

We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies.

We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations.

Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages.

Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks.

It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs.

It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements.

The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights.

Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action.

To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices.

Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure.

By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA.

It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices.

Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms.

It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities.

In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent.

It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.

The features I find most helpful in Commvault are its ability to perform incremental backups and significantly reduce backup times for our diverse multi-architecture, multi-environment environment. This includes everything from Cisco equipment to IBM equipment, as well as SAN and NAS storage. Commvault allows us to back up these systems quickly and efficiently, and even recover data at equally impressive speeds.

Commvault could benefit from increased automation to streamline processes and enhance predictability. This includes automating routine tasks where appropriate, which would improve efficiency and reduce the need for support tickets. Additionally, when support is required, automating elements of the process and providing faster data access would enable quicker issue identification and resolution, preventing potential SLAs from being breached.

I have been using Commvault Cloud for seven years.

We haven't had problems, so Commvault is a very stable product from our perspective.

Commvault is highly scalable. We've successfully extended its reach by replicating the on-premises environment in the cloud and leveraging additional capacity across other utilized environments. This flexibility aligns well with the subscription licensing model.

We don't send many support tickets because Commvault is very reliable. We mainly handle user inquiries about how to use the product, conduct regular quarterly reviews, and provide dedicated technical account management.

Positive

Our primary backup solution has been Commvault, although different teams have utilized IBM Tivoli and other capabilities like Rubrik in the past. Commvault's stability and cost-effectiveness have solidified its position as our preferred choice.

The initial deployment was straightforward, except for some network connectivity issues related to specific aspects of connectivity, e.g., bandwidth, latency, and routing. Thankfully, there were no significant problems with the tool itself.

Our strategy was to be able to connect globally, from our data centers to our cloud solution.

Our deployment involved six individuals: two working on AWS, two on-premises, and two at the disaster recovery site.

We implemented our solution using Accenture, our third-party managed service provider. This was beneficial because we could leverage our existing relationship and account team, who were familiar with our environment. Their expertise proved invaluable during upgrades and major changes. Furthermore, we obtained the necessary technical skills and support from both Commvault and Accenture.

Preventative measures against outages limit their impact on customers, thereby maintaining near-perfect SLAs. This translates to increased customer satisfaction and minimal business disruption, which essentially constitutes our return on investment.

Using a subscription-based license has been advantageous. We've been able to significantly reduce costs by tailoring our spending to our actual usage. This is a stark contrast to the earlier model with its prohibitively high fixed-price licenses.

After evaluating Rubrik, we compared it to our existing backup solutions: AWS backups used by other teams and the IBM Tivoli TSM environment. The key differences between these options lie in their deployment and recovery capabilities. Some solutions are cloud-based, while others require on-premises infrastructure. Additionally, some have limitations in recovering data from specific environments, making them less suitable for multi-site backup scenarios.

I would rate Commvault Cloud a ten out of ten.

Transitioning from various solutions made implementation quite smooth. However, due to its extended use, we lack a comprehensive baseline for evaluation. We simply don't have enough prior cases to compare Commvault's implementation difficulty against.

Our company has implemented a large-scale global deployment with 5,000 endpoints across multiple data centers, regions, locations, and cloud providers.

We perform standard upgrades on both the Commvault servers and the storage environments NAS and SAN we deploy. These upgrades are determined by the operating system requirements of the Commvault servers. For short-term backups, we utilize on-premise storage, while long-term backups leverage AWS cloud storage.

While customer references are valuable, the ability to tailor our environment to meet our specific needs is equally important. This means defining the backup architecture based on the specific requirements of each application, like SIP shares and databases. Each application has unique needs, so understanding those requirements is crucial for crafting the right architecture to fulfill them.

Commvault Backup & Recovery backs up our central business services for the university. At the enterprise level, we have also expanded our environment to back up colleges across the university, including through specialized networks that we call the Campus Cloud. We provide MDMs and backups for these colleges. Many of our schools did not have any backups before, so this was a real gain for them. We were able to do this fairly easily with Commvault Backup & Recovery. We simply had to add disk space for their backups.

I appreciate Commvault's automated policies for ensuring that our data is secure and managed correctly. The reporting, alerting, and management that Commvault does automatically, as well as the provision of a health check report, are very helpful, especially for a team of one who manages all of the backups. In other products, we would have to write our own scripts to monitor many of these things, but Commvault's interface makes it easy to quickly assess what it is doing, what it has done, and what we might be missing.

Commvault provides visibility into all of our organization's data. The command center is very helpful, and we have customized the reporting for different business units, groups, and teams based on their needs. I can easily generate reports for them based on what they need from Commvault. Overall, I think it's pretty easy to use.

It is moderately important to us that Commvault has a platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS workloads because we are just starting to build more into the cloud. As a college, we have always been fine with everything on-premises, so those other initiatives were not really there. But now, cloud initiatives, doing things in the cloud, and building in the cloud are all on the roadmap, but we are not there yet. Therefore, having a product that can accommodate those needs as they arise is beneficial to me, because I do not want to have to go out and look for other software to do it. So knowing that Commvault can do it if and when I need to is a plus because they are always looking at doing more of those things.

Commvault has enabled us to provide much better data protection for all of the applications that serve the university. Prior to adopting Commvault, we had a large gap in our data protection strategy. However, Commvault now automatically detects and backs up every new VM that is created in our vCenter, without the need for any manual requests. This has minimized the gap in our data protection significantly, and I have rarely had a new machine go for more than one day without being backed up.

Commvault has helped reduce the organization's data management costs. When I started on this team with the old product, there were five people on my team and a dedicated manager. Now, there's just me. This has reduced staff, which I don't think is always a good thing, but it has allowed us to reduce costs. There was an increase in cost for storage and infrastructure, but that was needed regardless. Overall, Commvault has not really reduced the organization's total cost of ownership, but it has reduced a lot of the risk for the university. This is because there was a huge gap in what was being backed up before. People didn't rely on the backups when I joined the university 15 years ago. They had a warehouse full of tape, but no one even knew what was on them. One of the features of Commvault that was important to us was its ability to manage tape and vault. This is not really a thing anymore, but it was a big deal for us when we first switched to Commvault. We also appreciated the fact that Commvault still knows about all of our tapes and the data on them, even though we don't use them very often. This means that we can still bring back the data if we need to, and it will still work. Being on Commvault has also allowed us to get off of tape. We're now able to write long-term retentions to the cloud, which is a huge benefit and a win for the product. This is at least true for us, but it may not be true for all organizations.

It has helped us reduce our backup time significantly. I don't have much to compare it to in this environment because it's so different from what we had before. When we started using Commvault, it was a pioneer in the industry. Before that, we were only backing up a handful of production machines. When we brought Commvault on, we started backing up everything. So, Commvault has reduced our backup time because we're now running a much larger environment, but our backup jobs still take less than 14 hours, even with nearly 3000 VMs to back up each night.

We have reduced our organization's RPO tremendously. We can meet our recovery point objectives in 24 hours.

Commvault has helped reduce our organization's RTO.

The use of hyperscale storage hardware and Commvault software has allowed us to create a large storage pool and achieve significant savings in our back-end storage costs. We have been unable to find any other hardware or software solution that can compare to Commvault in terms of deduplication performance. Our storage team has been particularly impressed with Commvault's ability to back up over 13 petabytes of data and 1 petabyte of core storage while achieving deduplication savings of between 88 to 90 percent. The smaller storage footprint that we have achieved with Commvault has been the biggest gain for us. We also appreciate the ease of use and flexibility of the Commvault interface, which allows us to mix and match storage devices as needed.

The workflow has room for improvement. 

One of my biggest problems has been the lack of specialized training for things like hyperscale for Commvault customers, especially smaller ones like myself. During COVID, Commvault stopped having their conference, which was a major source of education and information for me as a customer. I needed to learn about new functionalities and how they worked, but there weren't many classes available. It seems like Commvault expects customers to take the responsibility of engaging with them, but it's difficult for smaller customers to do so. I've been advocating for smaller customers, and Commvault has listened and started to include us in their roadmap, just like they do for Fortune 500 companies.

I have been using Commvault Backup & Recovery for almost eight years.

I would rate the stability of Commvault Backup & Recovery nine out of ten.

Commvault Backup & Recovery has helped reduce our downtime.

I am impressed with Commvault Backup & Recovery's scalability and my ability to use different storage options.

Commvault technical support is inconsistent. I'm reluctant to criticize, but I've had challenges with them, particularly from the first level to development. This is a common problem with many solutions, including Oracle. Once an issue goes to development, customers are left in the dark about when it will be fixed. I've had to escalate several issues to my Commvault team over the past few years. While I don't have many cases with Commvault support, it needs improvement.

Neutral

We used Atempo Time Navigator before Commvault Backup & Recovery but could not back up virtual machines or perform snapshot backups. This was a major problem, as we had a large environment of virtual machines that were not being backed up. Commvault solved this problem, as it can back up both virtual and physical machines. This was the main reason we chose Commvault, and we have been very happy with it since then. Atempo Time Navigator also had horrible support.

We have seen a return on investment.

Commvault's pricing model and pricing structure were initially confusing, but once we worked more closely with the company, we were able to transition to a subscription license that saved us a lot of money. Commvault had some problems with their costing and pricing initially, but the subscription model is a good one, and the pricing is fair.

We evaluated Dell NetWorker and Veeam Backup & Replication. Because Veeam was not able to back up physical machines at the time, we eliminated it from the evaluation.

I would rate Commvault Backup & Recovery nine out of ten.

We are not currently using Metallic, but we are investigating it with our Commvault team for our renewal in 2025. We are also renewing our hardware at the same time. Therefore, we are considering leveraging the Commvault cloud for additional protection, possibly as a tertiary copy with ransomware protection. We engaged with Commvault this year and conducted a ransomware readiness assessment. So, we are looking at Commvault Cloud as a potential location for an AirGap copy.

Implementing Commvault is just as challenging as other backup and recovery solutions, but it is not significantly more difficult.

I have two sites with storage pools at two different locations. One is a primary data center and the other is a secondary data center. I also have some cloud bucket storage. Commvault is used by me and my assisted admin team of 25 people. We provide backup and recovery services to everyone else.

I perform maintenance on Commvault on a quarterly basis.

I recommend taking a close look at using Commvault's software deduplication to write to a hyperscale storage pool, rather than spending a lot of money on a Data Domain appliance with dedupe in the hardware. We saw real cost savings with this approach. Additionally, the new Commvault Cloud subclient is very beneficial for protecting against ransomware, especially by providing air-gapped copies of data. This allows us to eliminate tape from our environment, which was a major goal for us.

Neutral

All universities today have both on-premises and off-premises data. Therefore, Commvault is our go-to service for on-premises and off-premises storage arrays and data recovery. Thus, the best way for us to think of IT as a service today is to consider that whenever we have lost a file or something has crashed, we have been able to retrieve it 100 percent of the time for over ten years now. This is significant for us, and Commvault provides us with data backup as a service.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the easiest, Commvault Backup & Recovery is a ten for monitoring and managing our environment. It is so transparent and easy to use that nobody realizes we are using it, which is a plus.

I love Commvault's automated policies.

The Threat Scan feature works great.

Commvault provides excellent visibility across our organization's data.

The most critical function we have is Commvault's platform which offers recovery on cloud, on-premises, and SaaS workloads.

Commvault's risk analysis is excellent. In all the years we've spent millions of dollars on technology, no one has ever suggested that we don't need Commvault or that they don't like it. It's that good, and it's transparent at the same time. With other systems, people will ask why we're using them and if we can get rid of them or scale back on them. But that never happens with Commvault.

Risk analysis is excellent for helping to limit exposure and ensure compliance. This is one of the first questions that comes up when applying for cybersecurity insurance: do we have the capability, and how well does it work? With Commvault, we can answer this question by showing how Commvault has been tested by cybersecurity insurance companies in the past three years.

Commvault reduced our backup time by 50 percent. Our backup time decreased, while our data volume increased significantly. This improvement is due to a combination of our improved internet connection or switching and Commvault's technology. What used to take 8 hours five years ago now takes only one hour.

Commvault reduced our RPO and our organization's threat detection time.

Commvault Backup & Recovery's search utility is its most valuable feature. I call it a "search and replace" utility because it allows me to quickly and easily find and restore files without anyone even knowing there was a problem. This is the feature that our IT department uses the most, but it is so transparent that most people don't even realize it is working behind the scenes 24/7.

Commvault is a behind-the-scenes operation that's working flawlessly. So how do I know what Commvault is doing for me every month? I would like more communication informing us on what Commvault is doing in the background.

I have been using Commvault Backup & Recovery for ten years.

Commvault Backup & Recovery is stable.

The technical support is excellent.

Positive

Ten years ago, we were using a rudimentary backup system that I can't even remember the name of. It was not a major project or product, and I think we were using it to create disk backups on-site. Commvault allowed us to move to off-site backups with great visibility and transparency.

The initial deployment was moderate.

We used Eaglesoft, the vendor from whom we purchased Commvault Backup & Recovery, to implement the system. One and a half full-time people for over two months were required for the deployment.

Commvault Backup & Recovery is priced fairly, and its performance-to-cost ratio is also better than fair. I am not here trying to figure out how to get Commvault to reduce their cost by ten percent because I am satisfied.

We evaluated NetApp but it was too expensive and did not make sense for us.

I would rate Commvault Backup & Recovery ten out of ten.

Commvault Backup & Recovery does not require any maintenance.

I suggest conducting a fair evaluation, as it is very difficult to make a pure cost comparison due to the value that Commvault provides. Therefore, consider the full value that Commvault has brought to the table, not just data backup.

Backup and recovery is our primary use case, but we use it to back up all our laptops and help with our computer switch-out process. When somebody receives a new computer, we use Commvault to migrate their data from their old computer to their new one which has eliminated one of the most time-consuming pieces of that process.

We also use Commvault Activate for e-discovery and to help with lawsuits and claims at the end of our projects. It helps provide our outside counsel with the data they need.

We are able to sleep at night knowing that all of our data is protected and we can recover it very quickly. Instead of trying to do a recovery and hoping things are going to work, I'm fairly confident that within just a couple of minutes, we can have any of our machines restored wherever we need it.

We used to have daily RPOs on almost everything, but Commvault has given us the flexibility to create RPOs daily, every four hours, hourly, etc. For the most part, any request a data owner may have for their system, we can accommodate without difficult changes to our overall data protection strategy.

As for RTO, doing recoveries with Commvault for our virtual machines means we can have them running in under five minutes in most cases. Previously, that would have taken hours.

Having everything in one place is one of the biggest advantages, rather than having to go to individual products or different pieces to complete tasks. 

We do offsite backups for all of our servers, but we also do onsite hourly backups for any location with important data. That has benefited us several times when we had a need to recover files but did not want to roll back to the previous day's offsite backup. We were able to just roll back certain data for an hour or two to resolve the issue.

When it comes to monitoring and managing our data environment, it's easy for our admins to use Commvault. Most of the time, through their documentation, our primary admin can find everything he needs. We utilize a value-added reseller to handle our first-line support and when we have to escalate something to them, they're usually able to resolve it without having to involve Commvault.

The fact that Commvault offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads is growing in importance for our company. We use it to protect some SaaS data today and it has set us up for when we are ready for that jump to the cloud. We know data protection is not going to be an issue and Commvault will actually help facilitate that move for us when the time comes.

As a long-time Commvault customer, we still use the Java console heavily because it is how we learned to do everything. The web-based Command Center is coming along and has most of what we need, but it is a learning process to change our knowledge to the new way of doing things.

As Commvault continues to grow SaaS data protection options, there are some that are on my wish list that have not yet made their roadmap. Knowing what is being worked on for future support would be great we can keep that in mind as we are looking at future technologies to adopt.

I've been using Commvault Backup & Recovery since 2006. 

Commvault is very stable and I cannot think of any major downtime we have had in the last decade.

It's scalable, absolutely. I imagine we are small in the world of Commvault. I can't imagine any point that we would get to that Commvault couldn't handle and manage well. But even for significantly larger companies than us, Commvault is going to be one of the best partners to grow with you.

Whenever we do have to talk to Commvault directly, they engage the resources we need pretty quickly. That may be, in part, because we escalate through our VAR and they know that we've attempted all of the basic solutions first.

When we've had issues with some portion of the product, they will bring product managers, developers, or whomever we need on the phone pretty quickly to work with us until it's resolved. Sometimes that means a custom patch because we've discovered something new that somebody hadn't run into yet. But they're good at working with us through that, rolling it into a future update, and keeping us up and running.

Positive

We were using Veritas Backup Exec. It was very inconsistent in completing backups and made our servers very unstable. We used to restart servers on a weekly basis when we were running Backup Exec. Once we centralized those backups off the file servers, we had servers that could run for nearly a year if we wanted them to. Typically, we'd have to reboot them for updates, but they ran rock-solid after we took the backup software off.

Implementation could be complex if you don't use some professional services to help. It's a big tool with a lot of features, and without some additional assistance with the installation, I'm not sure you'll get the full benefits out of it. Still, it's not an overwhelming engagement to undertake.

We brought in our value-added reseller, and their engineering team brought one person onsite for two to three weeks. He sat with us to teach us about the system. It was a much more complex protection method than we were used to, so they had to teach us about the Commvault methodology a little bit first. Then we had to pull large amounts of data—this was years ago, so the internet wasn't nearly as fast as it is today—and we were sending out hard drives, pulling back large amounts of data, and then doing incremental backups to catch up on the differences. It was interesting to tackle different locations with different approaches to get the data into the system, and then catch up after the fact. Our VAR helped with that significantly by planning it all out. We were fully off our old system in two to three months, so it was not a long ramp-up time.

Two people from our side were involved directly, my manager and me. My manager was mostly there to give business-related advice and do business decision-making. I was the admin, and we had one engineer from our VAR.

I was the day-to-day admin for about eight years, but I have now handed that over to one of my admins. He does most of the work under the guidance of our value-added reseller. If we're adding new features or functionality from Commvault, the reseller will guide us through it, but we do the work. That way, we make sure we're well-trained on it.

Our Commvault is a combination where we're primarily on-prem, but there is one service in the cloud that we use that will not allow on-prem data protection partners. We use Commvault Metallic for that one SaaS application.

Our environment for the backups is mostly centralized in one data center, and it's backing up about 40 locations. Our admin who works on Commvault spends about 10 percent of his time on it protecting about 1,200 laptops and 150 servers.

It's not difficult to maintain Commvault. When our admin needs to do an update, he might dedicate a half day to do so, because it's fairly easy to roll out updates to everything and monitor how that's going. It's very easy to maintain once everything is set the way you want it.

The reseller we are working with is Eagle Technologies and it is worth a call to them if you're considering a partnership with Commvault.

We have never run the numbers, but I know intuitively that what we spend is well offset by the time we save on restores and admin time. It's money well spent.

It's valuable to us because we are confident that we can get the data back when we need it. There are definitely business savings from not having to struggle to return services to normal. Whenever somebody comes to us and needs data, we always have it for them.

Commvault has greatly reduced our downtime. If we have a server that has an issue, we're not opposed to rolling back to a previous backup point after a couple of minutes of discussion about our options. Usually, the decision is to just restore that virtual machine, and we'll have you back up and running in five to 10 minutes.

The pricing is fairly in line with the other products we've compared it with recently. We do spend more on it than we did in our Backup Exec days, but it's competitive with the other best-in-class data protection platforms. There are other systems that are less expensive that just do basic backup, but when you're talking about full data management, Commvault is hard to beat. Remember that low price doesn't mean low cost, a cheaper product may end up costing you valuable person hours or slower recovery times.

The licensing model changes can sometimes be confusing. Our value-added reseller does a great job of explaining the changes to us and preparing us for what's good and bad and what we need to be aware of during those changes. If we were dealing directly with Commvault, it might be a little more confusing than it needed to be.

We looked into several other solutions (Avamar, Backup Exec, Syncsort) back when originally choosing Commvault and they were a clear leader in the market, especially given some of the unique data protection needs we had. As we have kept an eye on the new up-and-comers in the space, Commvault always feels like they're steps ahead of the competition.

Commvault has helped us reduce our threat detection time to some degree, although we have other tools more specifically focused on security. We have been alerted at times when something has been acting strangely on a file server and we were able to start investigating quickly. Instead of an employee having to tell us that something doesn't look right, our hourly backups have triggered and said, "Hey, something is different here. You need to take a look at it."

My advice is: don't let how big it is scare you off. Commvault is definitely one of the biggest players out there, but you can get in and get started in a small way. Even if you don't bite off everything to begin with, you can get started and have a much better solution than you may have today.

We are using Commvault Cloud to back up a VM. We mainly use VM backup. We have kept our storage backups so that in case of a disaster or test environment, we should be able to recover within fifteen to twenty minutes. This is our benchmark.

Commvault Cloud has helped in reducing the cost for hardware as we are just using standard storage to store the backup instead of requiring special hardware equipment. It allows for server-level hardware backup, which helps in managing storage backups efficiently.

The most valuable features of Commvault Cloud include deduplication and compression. Deduplication and compression are critical for us because they provide good compression, which is essential in data management. The time to recover from the disk is a critical requirement. The ransomware protection feature was one of the key considerations for choosing Commvault Cloud.

In terms of improvement, the cost factor is a significant area for enhancement, especially during the annual renewal. Competitive products have emerged with less cost, making the pricing a challenging factor. The implementation of field-level restore where you can restore a particular table or field without having to restore the entire backup is something I would like to have.

I have been using Commvault Cloud for almost three years.

So far, we are all right with the stability of Commvault Cloud.

We have some questions regarding scalability with the current storage setup, particularly with the Synology basic storage we are using, which causes continuous issues. We are evaluating backup storage solutions due to underlying hardware issues.

I do not have any negative feedback regarding Commvault's technical support. They have been clear and helpful in addressing our concerns.

Positive

We previously used Aksel backup, but we faced challenges with VM level backups and required protection against ransomware, which Commvault Cloud provided. The ArcServe backup software did not have these features, and as a result, we switched to Commvault Cloud.

I was not involved technically in the initial setup. I was involved in the evaluation process, and subsequently, my team handled the implementation and deployment with our partners. The setup took approximately three to four months and involved minor implementation challenges.

The deployment involved our team and partners. From our side, we had two people handling it, and from the partner's side, one or two guys were involved, making it a team of around four to five people.

The major ROI was using simple storage instead of expensive high-end storage for backup. It is more compliance-related, and we utilize cloud backups for redundancy and compliance purposes. We have not seen significant ROI from the backup solution as a whole.

Pricing is a significant factor for our company as the annual renewal is challenging. There are competitive products in the market that have lower costs, which adds to the challenge of the pricing factor.

We evaluated Veeam backup as an alternative. Commvault Cloud provided better pricing at the time, along with ransomware protection and deduplication. Additionally, at our time of evaluation, Veeam did not support mixed backups, which was a consideration for us.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.