Commvault Cloud Reviews

We're using it mainly to back up operating systems like Windows, Linux, and databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL.

It has simplified disaster recovery and we have used it for migration as well. For migrating from old FX servers to new FX servers, it was not possible to use any new feature from VMware. There was just vMotion and the success rate of migration of the whole disk was less than 50 percent. It was not possible to manage it that way. We used Live Sync and it was able to migrate 150 machines every day during the weekend, without major problems. That saved us a couple of weeks of time, probably 50 percent of the time it would have taken us. Without Live Sync it wouldn't have been possible to manage it.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has definitely enabled our company to accelerate growth because you don't need to leave the Commvault console. With NetBackup or TSM (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) when it comes to customization of scripts for databases, you have to go into the client at the operating system level and modify the scripts. With Commvault you don't have to do that. You don't need to access the operating system, which simplifies the work.

Commvault helps minimize the time spent on backup tasks, creating time for other projects. I'm able to write a workflow in Commvault's internal environment and I can automate any action I did manually before. For example, deployment of remote offices can be fully automated.

It also saves us money on infrastructure because the configuration which will be used for IntelliSnapshotting is very simplified.

Another company I worked for previously was being attacked by a ransomware virus. The company lost its whole Windows infrastructure, so it didn't have Active Directory. Commvault was on Windows as well and the Knowledge Base which ran on Linux was authenticated with AD. Everyone lost their workstations.

The recovery process was that we got the database from Commvault, because part of raising cases includes the ability to upload databases to Commvault. The Windows team found a backup of the main controller and the most important thing was to start communications and for every one to have Active Directory. With Commvault's support, we were also able to develop a process which recovered Volume C, and that was sufficient to fix the images. Within two months they were able to recover the whole infrastructure from scratch. Without Commvault, or with another solution based on Windows, I don't think the recovery would have been possible. 

I had never seen this kind of disaster. Nobody expects to lose everything. You think about losing the primary location or a remote office location, but no one thinks about losing the whole platform.

Among the best features are the BMR (Bare Metal Recovery), Live Sync, and IntelliSnap, which is used for snapshots of hypervisor storage. It's predefined so you only need to enable it and it works. I haven't seen anything like this in other backup tools like Veritas NetBackup or Dell EMC or TSM. We will use snapshotting for all our machines.

Live Sync replicates incremental data to remote locations. If you lose your primary data center, you enable the replicated machines in your DR location so you don't need to restore data.

It's great as a DR solution because it has a lot of capabilities for syncing with a cloud provider. But if you want to keep everything in-house, it's great that way as well because the replication is done by incrementals.

When it comes to the user interface for managing on-prem, cloud, or multi-cloud environments in one place, it's always better to have everything in one. I myself like multiple consoles, a Java console and an admin console. I only work with the Java console. It's great because it's possible to configure everything from there. But operations has that nice console, and having that one console is better than having multiple consoles.

They should move the CommServe outside of Windows machines and the database should be distributed among servers. It's still a single point of failure.

Also, I work a lot with workflows, which means a combination of XML files and commands. It would be helpful if they unified the use of workflows.

I have been using Commvault at my current company for almost two years but I have a total of five years of experience with it. I'm a Commvault engineer. I have built Commvault from scratch using the approach that is best for the client, and then prepared the documentation.

We are using service pack 16 because it is a new deployment so we have to deploy that before we push updates.

I haven't seen a crash of the database. The stability is great.

When I started with Commvault and compared it with NetBackup, I found that Commvault had features that NetBackup didn't have. Currently, we are able to cover 12,000 virtual machines.

Commvault has what it calls a HyperScale Appliance which is a media agent with the disk. This is the best option for storing data. The media agents are in clusters so they share data. It's a nice feature and I haven't seen any other backup company that has integrated this kind of solution. They always use a third-party vendor for this capability. But that involves communication over the network, something which HyperScale skips.

We plan on using IntelliSnaps more and we are testing the cloud backup. We will use the cloud as a hot-DR location. I expect that will happen this year.

From my experience, I have had the best support interactions with Commvault. I always get a response within a couple of hours. If there is a task for Commvault's development side involved in the issue, I get an update every three days that someone is working on it. 

I have yet to find a support engineer at Commvault who has to speak to someone else. They are always able to troubleshoot the issue on the first strike. I can definitely recommend Commvault support.

Our company previously used NetBackup and TSM. One of the reasons we switched to Commvault was that our company was not satisfied with IBM's support. It was challenging. If support is not able to help you manage problems, you can't use the solution.

The plus with Commvault is that it really focuses on automation for deploying machines and discovering databases, etc. A Commvault administrator doesn't need to understand, in-depth, the application he is backing up because he doesn't need access into the application. It's much more focused on snapshotting for the synchronization between locations. The BMR process can be used across the cloud and on-prem solutions, so you can easily move machines from your environment to a cloud environment. And from that cloud environment you can convert to another vendor in the cloud.

That is all built on the BMR process, which is better than any other backup tool I know. Some of them, like TSM, don't even include a native BMR solution. Instead there is a third-party vendor that does it, so it's not fully-integrated.

I like it when everything is in one console and things can be automated via an internal workflow and deployment is fully automated so I don't need to access the operating system or application platform. Those are all benefits of Commvault.

The initial setup was really easy for me because I already had experience with NetBackup and TSM. It wasn't difficult for me to understand Commvault's logic. But, in my opinion, it's very easy to understand because the logic involved is minimal yet it offers a lot of configurable options. Because the process for the installation of agents, such as for databases and applications, is fully automated, you don't need to touch the application at all. That is one of the main reasons I prefer Commvault over other tools, where you always need to touch the client.

A basic implementation of Commvault depends on the size of the company. Installation of the server takes a couple of hours, but that is the same as with other backup tools. But the installation of it on clients and their configurations will take days if you don't want to customize it because Commvault comes with pre-defined groups. The process will take a number of days for a small company.

In terms of staff for deployment and maintenance, it could be just one person involved, depending on the roles of the people in the company. This person has to be able to do a lot of things, so it depends on whether he has these responsibilities and the capabilities.

We have about 100 users of the solution because we have a lot of operations.

The ROI is there, but I don't have figures on it.

Our deployment is primarily on-prem. We are trying to assess the cloud capabilities but it looks like the cloud is more expensive if you want to have the whole infrastructure.

Commvault is more administrator-friendly than other backup tools.

We are using Commvault for cloud support, but that part is at the PoC stage. But it's the same as the on-prem solution. Whether the library is on physical disk or in the cloud, it looks the same in Commvault, so that's not an issue in terms of configuration or use. There are even more cloud vendors than I had heard of and it looks like Commvault supports all of them.

We don't use it, but there is an archive function in Commvault which allows you to move data from primary storage to another type which is much cheaper.

Version 11 of Commvault has been on the market for something like seven years now. They have changed the naming so what they called service packs are now called feature packs. That means they are no longer changing the version number and they do what they call a "platform release." That was changed in SP19. In each new pack they add new features every three months. They also have hotfix releases every week or so.

I'm still surprised that they continue to come out with features that are really nice and that you didn't even think were possible.

We are a systems integrator and we sell Commvault to our customers.

One of our customers has Oracle Cloud and we needed to create a backup for that. Only two solutions can do that, Commvault and Veritas. Our customer compared Commvault and Veritas by doing a PoC of each. We displayed the features of each one and the customer chose Commvault. 

We have another customer with a different environment. They have virtualization and they have a physical infrastructure and many operating systems and environments. They compared different backup solutions like Commvault, Veeam, and Veritas, and Commvault was the only solution that could cover all the operating systems and the whole virtual and physical environment.

Another customer is in the petroleum sector. They have different sites and they need replication between the sites and they also need to back up their main sites and their remote sites. Commvault is one of the best solutions for this scenario.

The number of errors or problems with Commvault, when dealing with backups, is very minimal compared to other backup solutions. It saves a lot of time for system administrators. An administrator using another backup solution will take one, two, or three hours per day just to check if the backup jobs have run. With Commvault, it takes about 10 to 30 minutes, maximum.

The solution saves on infrastructure and protects data. Compared to other solutions, using Commvault saves our customers around 15 to 20 percent. In addition, it reduces storage space because of the deduplication and compression during backup.

• One of the big features is the 10-mega backup for endpoints. Not many backup solutions support that. 
• Commvault has support for backing up operating systems and servers.
• The solution covers Oracle Cloud, on-prem, virtual, and physical.
• The support for cloud is good.

There is room for improvement in terms of data security.

We use Commvault's technical support at times. I would rate it at 10 out of 10. Their support is perfect.

For some customers we do the implementation on-premise, and others use the cloud version. It's very easy and straightforward. The design, implementation, and documentation is very straightforward, especially the Commvault hybrid product.

The deployment time depends on the customer and it depends on the environment. It takes a minimum of two to three days, and the maximum is 10 days. It depends on the size of the environment.

We have straightforward procedures for the implementation. We have a manual. We have procedures for the automation of installation for HA environments, whether it's for a virtual or physical, and for different operating systems.

Commvault's licensing is very flexible.

Right now we are using on-premise and cloud backups. We run 300 to 400 jobs per day.

Compared to other products out there, we have found that Commvault is best suited for our needs. We can easily restore and deploy the data.

Previously, before the introduction of Commvault, we used other software including Rubrik. But with Commvault we can deploy multiple clients at a time and we can back up multiple clients without any issues. Right now, we are using about 1,000 VMs. Before Commvault we used to back up about 200 servers and 100 VMs. Previously, backups took nine hours. With Commvault it takes minutes.

The solution definitely helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and to spend time on other projects. If we need to run backups for dozens of servers, it can be done in one minute because it can be done in a click. We can select the backups by selecting the client computer groups. We can categorize those groups and, based on that categorization, we can run the backups and we can restore the VMs as well. It can be done in minutes. Running backups twice a week, it saves us about 5 to 6 hours each time.

It is also saving us on infrastructure costs and has helped optimize infrastructure usage, like storage space. By using Commvault we have saved about 3 TBs of space.

We have used it to recover data when there was a problem with our database. It took about four hours to bring the data back. But recently, we introduced HA and it has saved us more time. With HA the data can be brought up in one hour. With other solutions it would take 10 to 24 hours.

We do monitor all the backups using the user interface. It is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and easy to create solutions with it. It is very comfortable. We can do multiple operations at a time.

We use Commvault Command Center for backups and restores and for the creation of new clients. We use it for other functionalities as well. In terms of VMware, I can go directly to the Command Center, enter VMware, and I can search it directly. Command Center is very useful and it can be used for more advanced techniques.

The cloud support is good. The on-premises cloud is working for us as is traditional cloud. All the clouds we're using are working with Commvault. We have Office365 and Azure.

I need documentation for Azure backups. One expectation that I have is regarding PDF documentation. When I was trying to browse the documentation, I could not locate that. The documentation should be in PDF format where it can be downloaded easily.

I have been using Commvault for the past five years.

The stability has been good. We haven't had any issues.

Scaling can be done easily.

I am now looking into an orchestrator. High-availability is another future use case for us.

We do not have any issues with support. Everything is fine. Commvault helps in fixing any issues and they help us to deploy the data whenever we need help. And they provide the security as well.

In the first year we raised many issues, but now it is easier for us to manage. We refer to the documentation.

We used to use Rubrik but we found Commvault to be a better solution. It provided time savings, handled more complexity, and provided more security.

With guidance from their team, and based on the documentation, it was easy to install. The deployment took one-and-a-half hours.

There are updates every quarter and they are getting easier to deploy.

We have about seven staff members on my team, IT analysts, who handle the solution, to account for different shifts and meal breaks, etc. Within the company there are 10 clients using it, mostly within IT.

We are very satisfied. It is a very useful product, daily. 

Commvault is constantly developing new use cases based on customers' requirements. They are developing new features on a regular basis. In version 11, 19 new features were added. For example, in previous versions we did not have the Command Center and whenever backups failed we could not restore the data. Now, there are options for restoring the data. These kinds of advanced techniques are introduced from day to day.

We are mainly using it for backing up our VMware environment, some file servers, and some SQL databases. We also use it for some replication.

Before Commvault we had one product for backup, one for replication, and a few consoles. That was hard to manage for the administrator. With Commvault it's just one product, just one license. It does not require a special, separate license for deduplication or other stuff. It's easy to manage everything now.

Commvault provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premises locations. We usually have daily, incremental backups and a full backup weekly. That leads to reduced storage space for our Commvault storage. It's saving us about 30 percent.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has enabled our company to accelerate growth. We have a database and there are some major changes that happen to it at the end of month, or sometimes the developers have done something to change it in a whole different way. Before they apply those changes, we take a backup with Commvault so if something has gone wrong with the update, we can always revert it back.

Also, because it has alerts enabled, the solution helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks so they can spend time on other projects. We don't monitor the backup system all the time. We only look at it when we get email alerts. If something has failed, then we'll look at what the error is and what's happening. There are daily backup reports configured so that at 10:00 am, every day, I get a backup report. It says what has been backed up and what has not.

In addition, we have had a few crashes of our VM environment and we have had to restore some VMs, as well as some files that have been deleted by users off our file server. We had another solution before, but that was before I started with the company. People say it was pretty crappy and that sometimes, when they were doing recovery, it took about eight to 10 hours for a VM. But with Commvault, the last time I did a recovery of a 500 GB hard disk with a VM, it took about one-and-a-half hours. That is good.

Finally, Commvault has helped by telling me there are outdated tools in the VM environment.

The most important feature is that everything can be controlled using a single console. That is the best feature of Commvault.

The user interface is a bit tough, to be honest, but once you get the hang of it, it's okay. In the beginning it was tough, but now I know what I'm doing. We had free training but after that, just to learn the interface took me four to six months. There are still things to learn because with every service pack there are changes. Service Pack 18 was recently released and there are some features that I haven't even seen yet.

I would like them not to push Command Center. It is good, but I would like them to enable all the features for the Java console. Some things are not in the Java console, like Office 365 agents. In fact, they are there, but one of the engineers had to show me how to configure it. It's not done the same as in the Command Center.

I have been using Commvault since 2018.

It's stable. 

Sometimes the Java console might not respond. It might happen one out of 20 times that the Java console might crash. And then we have to use Task Manager to end it and reopen it. Other than that, the server has never crashed nor has the database ever crashed.

We have actually moved into 365 recently. We had to buy some licenses but they agreed to give us some trial licenses for testing, but it is based on the user base. Commvault is supporting everything that we are doing.

The technical support in the India region is a bit disappointing, but after 6:00 pm it is switched to the U.S and European teams, and they are much better in supporting and understanding the issues and fixing them. Sometimes the Indian team is also good, but we don't usually raise a ticket until after 6:00 pm. If it's a small issue that doesn't cause any harm to the production environment, we will go to the Indian team and some of them are good enough to help us.

Our company switched to Commvault because it had some issues with recovering data and the recovery time was high. Also, the local support team for our old product was not available when we needed them. That's why they were looking for something new and they found Commvault.

The setup was straightforward. We didn't have many complications. When we had to install the agents on the servers, there were some issues with authentication with the SQL database, but that was from the database side. That was sorted and there was nothing much more than the usual administrative stuff.

The initial deployment took about three weeks because we had some complications with database servers. Some of them had to study the user account permissions. After that was sorted out, it was fine.

Our strategy was to install it on critical servers. After the vendor installed the physical servers for Commvault, we had to download about nine to 10 GB of their setup files. After that, they installed and there were some prerequisites to complete such as .NET. After that, it was pretty easy. Once we installed we had some local support. We also had to plan and provide retention periods.

We had support from the local distributor. They were very friendly and they were cooperative and concerned with our requirements. They addressed them properly. Overall it was a good experience. 

And they provided us with the training after the deployment. We played with our environment for two to three months after the deployment, and then they gave us the training. That approach was better because we had an idea about what we were learning. We had questions when we went to the training so it was very good.

Commvault licensing is a perpetual license so only the support is being renewed yearly.

I don't like the solution's Command Center. I don't know why they have pushed it. The old Java console is much better. Maybe it's because I was used to it. One good thing about the Command Center is that it has reduced the steps we have to take. If we had to do 10 steps on the Java console, it's been reduced to four or five steps in Command Center. But I'm confused about whether I'm doing things right because there are some steps missing. For a newcomer, Command Center would be good. But for me, I still prefer the Java console.

Currently, there is only me, as a system administrator, and another guy on the database team who use Commvault. That's all. We don't have many administrators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have seen return of investment.

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

We did evaluate Veeam and Cohesity. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it in the most traditional way: for backup and restore. We don't use it for all the other things that are also possible with it because we are quite a big company. We have all the specific tools we need for specific purposes.

We tested Commvault in the past for archiving, but in those days it was not really stable yet. So we selected other solutions for that.

We use Commvault on everything. We are using it in our own data centers but also in the cloud. We use Azure for most things, but we also are working on testing some things on AWS.

The benefits to our company are the performance and scalability and the willingness of Commvault to connect to talk with us about any requests we have for changing the product, and to do understand what we're looking for. If possible they also implement these things in quite a short amount of time. If a new feature is needed, or it should be doing A instead of B, they're always willing to listen to requests and build them. That's great.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has enabled our company to accelerate growth and drive innovation. We're using it in a traditional way but our resources and services are moving to the cloud. It helps that the way the product works, what we are used to doing in the traditional way on-prem, can be done the same way in the cloud. That makes it easier overall and makes the transition easier.

There are ways the solution helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks, but in some ways, the solution doesn't. But that's more related to our way of working and not related to Commvault. Using it saves us about 40 hours in a month, thanks to its automation features.

In terms of saving on infrastructure costs, in our environment that's not measurable because we have a dedicated platform and dedicated infrastructure for it. But we see the benefits of the deduplication. It's saving petabytes in our environment.

The backup and restore activities are valuable and being able to use it in a hybrid space. You can easily back up on-prem and restore to the cloud and vice-versa. The scalability is also good.

The solution's interface is easy to use. For manageability, it doesn't matter where the resource is coming from or going to. That's the great power of the Control Panel: It's easy to use and does not matter if you manage on-prem or cloud resources.

Commvault works quite well as it is. But we are an MSP, so for us it's fairly hard to customize it for branding it.

There is also room for improvement in the multi-tenancy and security. That's been a hard thing for us and for Commvault as a vendor. Sometimes it's hard to implement new features in multi-tenancy environments. The new features are great, and it's good that they are there, but they are not always usable in an MSP environment.

The solution's breadth and depth of cloud support are good but could be better. Some cloud features that are common-sense, especially on AWS, are not completely integrated yet in the product. They are a work-in-progress. Overall, cloud is moving and innovating also very fast. That also makes it very hard for Commvault to comply with all the new features. Sometimes a cloud provider like Microsoft changes something and a feature is broken in Commvault.

We have been working with Commvault as a backup product for about 12 years now. As an MSP, it's very hard to switch from vendor to vendor. But the solution also works great. We have no real reason to switch to another product at this moment. We are always looking at the competitors, but not all the competitors can comply with all the things that we need.

It is very stable. We have some little issues with it, but when we have issues they're always related to the application we want to back up, not to the product itself. We ask a lot of the product; we use it in a fairly hard way on several things. Sometimes we hit the boundaries of the product and we encounter issues. But in day-to-day business, we don't see any real issues related to the infrastructure or the load we can give it.

It scales very well. If we need more capacity or more power for performance, then we add additional nodes without needing to do a complete redesign of the product or the environment. We can easily add extra power.

We have about 10,000 clients running with approximately 2 petabytes of data being backed up. That will double in the upcoming year to two years. We also have about 1,000 end-users of the product and most of them are doing restore activities.

Their technical support is very good.

But a hard thing for them is understanding how to work with an MSP. They assume, sometimes, that as an MSP, we have access to everything. But that's not the truth and it's not possible. That makes troubleshooting hard for us and for them as well. But they are quite fast in responding and try to help as quickly as possible. Still, most of the cases that we have with customer support need to be escalated directly to development.

We previously used an IBM solution. The main reasons we switched to Commvault were cost and complexity.

The setup of Commvault was complex but that's related to our environment. As an MSP we have very high security guidelines, so that made it hard. But that's not related to Commvault, it's related to our security environment.

Our deployment took almost a year. We had to make sure our design was good before we did anything. Most time of the implementation time was in the design phase. The actual building-up of the solution was quite fast. We were done in a month, starting from scratch.

For deployment and maintenance we need four to five people who are backup system admins.

We did it by ourselves.

We have seen ROI in several respects, but not as fast as we want.

We look at everything on the market. Every year to two years we do a new evaluation of the new techniques and products. We are always comparing it with Veeam, for example. We have Veeam running in several places. We test the two solutions and compare the results with each other.

Out-of-the-box, the manageability is one of the big differences. For end-users, sometimes Commvault is too complex and, while it's getting better and better with the latest versions, it is still not there. The most important thing is what my end-users say to me about using Veeam. It's very straightforward, easy-to-use, and does what it needs to do. Veeam and other competitors are point solutions. They are very good in specific situations and specific environments.

On the other hand, Commvault is a product that can manage a lot of things, and most competitors don't have the scalability and the large support-matrix for as many products, versions, and applications. Commvault allows us to use one product for almost everything. It's better than the competitors. We want to have everything in a single console, if possible, and that's what Commvault does for us.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Commvault is to take your time. Especially in complex environments, the design stage takes a lot of time, but you need to do it well. Otherwise, you will have trouble in your implementation. We learned that the hard way. We wanted it built fast but, when the design was ready, we needed to rebuild several times.

Commvault is our primary solution for all backup and recovery; for index, for analytics, for everything.

When it comes to the storage that we use for backup and data aging, we were limited, at first, by the amount of storage that we could provide for onsite storage and archiving. Commvault's compression and deduplication within the application is allowing us to almost triple the amount of storage. For example, at one of our primary sites we're only able to store about 60 terabytes of capacity, but we actually back up 1.5 petabytes. We're able to squeeze that into the 66-terabyte license capacity. That is huge and saves us quite a bit of money in storage, and even more money on license capacity.

The solution also helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and to spend time on other projects. Throughout the corporation, we only have a handful of people who deal with the backup and recovery portion of our operations. With the number of requests that come in from time to time, it's nice to know that the single pane of glass, and the application as a whole, allow my engineers to quickly find an issue or resolve an issue that our users are having.

All its features are useful and beneficial, but if I had to pick two it would be the reporting and the support that they offer.

I'm a big fan of the reporting. You can build your own reports; it's very customizable. You can have individual reports going to groups of people or individuals. You can have them go out multiple times a day. It's basically a free-for-all as far as reporting goes. If anybody wants a specific job report every day, you can build it, schedule it, and have it go out and never touched it again. It's pretty nice.

Commvault also provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise locations. I've done it multiple times. I've restored files, virtual machines, databases; everything from one location to another location within the United States. I've moved virtual machines, databases, and files between the two. An easier solution than the normal way of moving a server or application is to run a restore to another location. It runs faster and it's encrypted. It provides us with ease of use, instead of using a third-party tool. And I know that everything, all the permissions, all the user access, remains the same no matter where I restore to.

Their single pane of glass solution is daunting at first. It's not the easiest interface but, as with anything that you use, eventually you'll get better and better at it. I've worked closely with their user experience team to improve their web-based command tool. 

We try not to use the CommCell tool that is provided, because it's a little old and a little too powerful to give everyone access to it. So we've started using their Command Center tool. At first, it was hard to find things with that, but you end up finding them. Command Center definitely gives us a complete view of our data. But finding some of the granular, very small items that we sometimes have to find, such as auxiliary copies for tapes, I still find that it's easier to navigate and, sometimes, only possible to find them using the CommCell tool. Maybe that's just an area that hasn't been added to the Command Center yet.

Since I only use the backup and recovery, I'm not using Activate or Orchestrate. And I am strictly on-prem so I'm not using any of the Metallic or Hedvig solutions. I can only speak for backup and recovery. I would like to see a little bit more access into the CommCell areas via the Command Center. That would be my only small request.

In 2019 there was a flaw with their Active Directory plan which didn't actually allow you to recover the full Active Directory properly. I brought that to their attention and they made the change and fixed it. That was the only area that needed to be fixed.

I have been using Commvault for five years.

It's very stable. To be completely frank, I beat the heck out of it, 24/7 and 365. We're a healthcare laboratory company that never closes. We're an around-the-clock operation in all of our locations. The backup jobs are running, and the reports are running, around the clock. Everything runs constantly but we have had zero downtime.

It scales out pretty easily. There's not much on the Commvault side that scales out; it's more the storage repository that's required. There's not much it can't do. 

One thing that I have been requesting is a Linux-based virtual server agent. You have to stick with Windows for the actual CommServe. We'd like to move to a Linux-based OS to release some licensing. I'm sure, eventually, that will come. We have a few Macs in our environment with Commvault on them. We don't often use the Edge client that they provide because the laptops and desktops we have use what is called DFS or file redirection. The files that they have saved are saved on the server instead of their laptop. Since we deal with PI and PHI, we can't have any of that stuff on a laptop. We have 10 Edge backup licenses and we have it on four or five of them, and one of them is a Mac.

Everybody in our company is affected by Commvault. We have about 7,500 employees and everybody uses a product or an application or a database or a server that is involved with Commvault.

For deployment and maintenance of Commvault we have just five people. That includes me as a data center manager and the other four are server engineers.

Commvault's support is a 10 out of 10. I've learned so much from the support. They're very fast and they're very flexible. If they can't figure out a solution right away, they offer a work-around pretty quickly and they always want you involved with the solution. They even offer custom solutions for things that their applications don't do. If you run into a service pack limitation or a limitation with the product itself, they'll actually add the solution they come up with as a feature in their application.

We needed to pick a global solution. I had been reading about Simpana, which is Commvault now, for a while and I had the opportunity to jump right into it and learn about it while deploying it. I had never used it. Everything, on paper, was exactly what we needed as far as it enabling a very granular setup goes, without it being a one-size-fits-all-application. That's what I liked about it: being able to customize and mold each location to use Commvault.

I had other requirements but they were requirements that I didn't know that I had until after I had found that I could do them in Commvault.

The setup is extremely easy. The first time I did it I was a little worried that I didn't do it properly because it was so easy. The overall configuration is a little bit more difficult, but that's roadmap-based configuration, so you have to think very far down the road when putting this together. You can't be thinking, "Oh, I only need this for a couple of months." It's a 10-year plan.

The setup itself took a couple of hours.

Since I had never used Commvault before, we had implementation support from Commvault. They walked me through it. They asked questions and I gave them answers and then they showed me what they were doing. What they showed me made sense. From there, the configuration started, which was mostly on my part. A lot of it was pretty straightforward. There are things that are difficult in a domain environment, things that take a little bit of configuration, such as setting up additional users and passwords for service accounts. But overall, it's a very streamlined process.

I think Commvault's model is now cost-efficient. When we first started with Commvault, I thought it was overpriced. I thought, "That's a lot of money for a piece of software." But as I used it, and developed a trust in and knowledge of the application, I definitely was made aware, very quickly, of how it was worth every penny. Over the years, it has actually become cheaper, due to the fact that I've become smarter about how to use it better. With that knowledge, you learn how to save money with the application.

I've used other solutions in the past, such as vRanger, Symantec Endpoint Protection, Metalogix for Exchange, as well as Data Domain. For data recovery, the others are definitely not as streamlined. I've had quite a few situations where I've had to recover large amounts of data but I don't have a comparison of the recovery times of Commvault versus the others because, in the last five years, all I've used is Commvault. All my large or business-critical restorations have been with Commvault. But judging by what I've done in the past, Commvault is far easier and far more consistent than any other application I've used.

In terms of advice, the biggest thing I would like to say is don't look at it as a dinosaur. A lot of people associate Commvault with being old and antiquated, and not having all the bells and whistles. If you look past that, you'll see that it's more far more capable than anything else that's on the market. You have to get through the complexity of the application and from there you have to trust that it will do what you want it to do.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Commvault is don't be afraid to call support.

We use it to back up NetApp shares, servers, and virtual servers. We also use it for Active Directory and databases. We used to use it to back up Exchange servers, but we're moving that to the cloud. It has a lot of features but we mostly use it to back up and recover stuff.

I can't really say how Commvault has improved the way our organization functions because, while I know there was use another product in use before Commvault, I came here way after the company started using Commvault. I wasn't in this role during the transition. When I've talked about this with the more senior guys, they say Commvault is supposed to be the best product available at this moment.

In general, it gives people confidence knowing that their data, on their servers and home shares on shared drives, is backed up. It gives our end-users confidence.

And the solution has helped us to optimize infrastructure usage. The deduplication in Commvault is great. We have 90-something percent savings using its deduplication technology. It's awesome. I love that aspect.

The solution provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise locations. Some of the guys have been using it to move a virtual machine from VMware to the Microsoft solution, Hyper-V. They back it up and then they restore to the different virtual machine provider, and that works great.

We have never managed to use it to full potential because we don't have a dedicated team to take care of Commvault, so we barely keep it running. It takes a lot of our time when we have ten other systems to take care of. That's why I'm not the biggest fan of this. Just to keep it running is time-consuming. There are five people on my team. Commvault was supposed to be one of the less time-consuming solutions, but in reality it takes 60 percent of our time just to keep it running, and that's not even fine-tuning it; that's just to keep it running. It's a pain.

It constantly breaks and then we spend three or four days trying to fix the issue, working with support, going back and forth. When we finally resolve something, another issue pops up. Then we spend another three or four days trying to make it work. I'm not saying it's the product's fault. Maybe we didn't implement it correctly in the first place. I don't know, I wasn't here. But it takes a lot of time, and every issue is different so I cannot build experience. With another system, I know if I do this, this, and this then it breaks, and I know that I have to do this, this, and this to fix it. But every time Commvault breaks, it's something different, so it takes us a lot of time to fix it. It is frustrating.

Another thing I find frustrating is that when it fails and it says something like "Error code 19: etc., etc... Click here for more information," when I click I get an error page. Having the error codes documented in the Commvault Knowledge Base would help us a lot.

When I came to the role, they said, "Oh yeah, you're going to be doing this, this, and this, and maybe a little bit of Commvault. In reality, 60 to 70 percent of my day is just tinkering with Commvault.

I've been using Commvault for about two years.

It's not very stable in our environment. Every day there is something weird going on. When we solve the "weird thing of the week," the next day something different goes on.

The issue of scalability isn't applicable to us because we're not trying to just grow, grow, grow. It's not that we're going to have 200 percent growth next year. Our environment is more or less stable. We have 800 servers. Next year we might have 850, but it's not doubling.

Pretty much everything we back up is done via Commvault, except for desktops or laptops.

Their follow-up is great. If they send an email saying, "Hey, can you try this and this," if I'm busy with other stuff, the next day they follow up again and again and they harass me. But it's great because my experience with other companies' support is that you have to chase them instead of them chasing you.

Some of Commvault's people are better than others. That's normal. We're humans after all. I only had one case in which I could not agree with the guy, so I had to request another person. But most of the time they're okay or good. Once in a while, you get this really great person, someone who is really awesome. Overall, the support is good.

There were a couple of guys from Cohesity trying to get business from us. We met with them, but it never went anywhere. We heard what they had to say and it looked cool, it looked promising, but of course they are much smaller than Commvault. We didn't try Cohesity. They only did a demo for us.

It's not easy for us to make those kinds of changes. If we have a contract with Commvault, we can't just say, "Okay, let's forget about this. Let's bring in somebody new." We are government, so we can't just do that. We need to go through a bid process so it's not as easy as in other companies.

My advice is to have a dedicated team for Commvault, if possible. In our team we are dealing with DNS Exchange, antivirus, Active Directory, and Commvault. I feel I'm not successful enough in Commvault because I am always thinking about multiple things. If you really want to be successful with the product and use it to its full potential, a dedicated team just doing Commvault would be great. In reality it might not be easy to do, but if I had a magic wand, I would have two or three people just doing Commvault.

I think it's a great product that we are under-utilizing. The lesson I have learned from using it is that when I think I'm getting a handle on Commvault, when I think I'm learning it, something else happens that shows me that I know nothing about Commvault. It's a good product, but it's just it takes a lot of effort to support it. Sometimes we just don't have the time. When it works fine, it's awesome.

IT has the regular ComCell Console that looks ugly but is full of functionality. And it has another way to manage it called Command Center that is a nice-looking web interface but I find it doesn't have all the functionality, so I stick to the old interface because I can do everything there. I haven't used Command Center often. I don't find it's the best feature because there are some things that I cannot do in there. I got used to using the ComCell Console and have kept on using it.

The fact that the solution is a single platform hasn't really enabled our organization to accelerate growth or drive innovation. We're government, so we are not driven by growth or innovation. We prefer to have stability and reliability. We're not a company that is trying to quickly sell something. We don't care about that. We're not trying to grow; it's actually the opposite: The less impact that government has, the better.

In terms of the solution's breadth and depth of cloud support, we're not using cloud yet. In government, we don't want to have the latest and greatest and the shiniest thing. We have to be very careful. In a private company, somebody just says, "Okay, let's go cloud," and that's it. Next day everybody is in the cloud. But we have to be accountable to taxpayers and we usually have to justify the expense. Decisions are not made that fast, so we are not in the cloud yet.

We have not tried or simulated a disaster recovery scenario. It's something we have to test. We tried once and we killed the network and everybody complained, so we had to stop it. We have recovered the files here and there when people say, "Oops, I just deleted this file. Can you recover it?" But a whole disaster recovery is something we have never done, and I hope we never have to.

There are five administrators of it in our organization while a couple of more use it to move VMs from one place to another. There are three more on the SAP team who use it to push backups to us, and three more from the DBAs. We don't back up laptops or desktops. Our end-users don't have access to this, nor do our other IT teams such as the applications programmers. They have to come to us to restore something.

It works fine when it works. It's a good product but it takes a lot of effort to support it. I don't know if it's because we didn't implement it correctly or if it's our infrastructure or the product, but that's my general impression.