What is our primary use case?
My company is the official distributor of Commvault in Indonesia. Our job is to implement it for our customers and I have installed it for a number of customers. They have various environments: Some are on-premises and some have a cloud environment, and some are using both as a hybrid solution, where they back up from on-premises to the cloud.
We have a Commvault instance within our company as well, and we use it for demos and to back up our environment, such as our VMware database, to the local data center. And we also back up to the cloud.
How has it helped my organization?
Commvault is very helpful to our customers and to our company because ransomware is a nightmare for any business. In some cases, our customers have been running their businesses online and they have experienced a ransomware attack. With Commvault they have been able to resolve the problem by restoring the data from Commvault.
Also, Commvault has an internal snapshot feature that we can use. That reduces the time involved by 10 times, compared to not using this feature.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is Commvault's coverage. It has wide coverage to back up every data center environment. The product can back up OpenStack, OpenShift, and competitive solutions don't have this feature. Commvault can handle backing up any virtual workload or enterprise application.
The solution provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations. This is pretty important because our customers have unique architectures. Some only have an on-prem data center, and some only have things on the cloud, while in some cases our customers have both. In the latter case they have data on-premises, but they will also use the cloud for DR. Commvault makes it very simple, with its single management for backup of all environments. This is one of the things that makes it a very useful backup solution. We don't need to go with a different cloud backup solution. We can leverage one solution to back up all the environments.
Another strong feature of Commvault is that we can recover something to another platform. If we backup VMware, we can restore it to, say, Nutanix, or to AWS. This feature helps our customers to move a data center or from on-prem to the cloud. It is a very useful feature.
In addition, Commvault isn't locked in to one storage brand, like Hitachi or Pure Storage. This makes it a very good choice, allowing us to leverage any brand to be used as the backup storage.
What needs improvement?
The user interface is complicated for users, but for an engineer or backup operator, it is useful. Still, sometimes users feel that the management dashboard is complicated because they see all the features in the one dashboard. Sometimes users need a simple dashboard to manage the whole environment.
Commvault has two management dashboards. The first is the CommCell Console, which is Java-based, and the second is Command Center. We don't always find all the features we need in the Command Center and we need to go through the Java console, and sometimes features are only on the Java console. Sometimes we don't see what we need on both consoles. For example, we have to use Command Center to back up Oracle EBS, because it's not on the Java console. It would be useful if we had all the configuration features for setting things up in the Command Center, rather than having to go to the CommCell Console.
Also, sometimes, when restoring across platforms, we need more documentation from Commvault.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the Commvault solution for between three and four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product is stable for backing up any kind of environment. But sometimes there's a problem with the deduplication. Sometimes the deduplication database is offline.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is different between software and an appliance. If we use an appliance it is simple to scale because we just add more nodes to expand the storage, the compute, or the backup performance. If we use software, we may need to do some manual setup. Adding more media agents can be complex, involving more configuration. Also, you don't have high availability with a software environment. You only get that with an appliance.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is very helpful. We just open the customer portal to open a case and the support is pretty good from Commvault.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
It is very easy for us to follow the documentation to integrate Commvault and the storage network. Setting it up is very easy because the product runs on Windows. We just follow the documentation, making it pretty easy. We don't have to use the command line to set it up. It usually takes one and a half to two hours to deploy this product.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Some of our customers say that Commvault is a very expensive solution, but Commvault has many features that the competitors don't have. It is not a good choice for a small or medium business, but it is a good choice for enterprise businesses.
We have a backup storage sizer, so we know the amount of storage needed. If the backup storage is too large, we can resize the policy and size the backup volumes and adjust the licensing scheme.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have used other products like Veritas and Rubrik. Commvault is better than the others because it has fast research and development. There are features available with Commvault that the competitors don't have. But Rubrik is very simple when it comes to management, compared to Commvault.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, Commvault has a strong solution with strong features. The problem with it is the management consoles. We need both of them to operate the product. Also, sometimes the pricing is an issue as it can be very expensive compared to other solutions.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Distributor
In the field of backup applications, there are various solutions. But certainly, Commvault should be ranked at the top of this list. Everything was created “in the house”, they listened to the needs of the clients. What I would emphasize is it is easy to use for users who are not backup administrators and with a single console for all activities.