Commvault Cloud Reviews

We are a solution provider and we offer Commvault to our customers.

In my company, we are also using it for backup and recovery.

The price should be reduced because it is too expensive for our customers.

I would like to see a more user-friendly GUI.

I have been working with Commvault for between five and six years.

This is a very stable product.

Commvault is scalable. We have about seven or eight engineers 

The technical support is very professional.

In the past, we have worked with similar solutions from competitors such as Dell EMC.

I found the installation easy because I have a lot of experience with backup solutions.

My advice for anybody who is looking at Commvault is that it is better suited to larger businesses.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are using Commvault to protect some of our workloads in the public cloud. We are using it in AWS SAM and Office 365. 

Scalability, as well as stability, are a couple of important parts of this solution.

This product is overly complex to operate and run.

The price of this solution could be lower.

We have been working with Commvault for about 18 months.

From a stability point of view, it is very good.

It's extremely scalable. It's used across the coalition control team and the cloud team, so there are a couple of dozen administrators. We are running a great deal more than that in the backend systems.

The technical support is pretty good.

We used Spectrum Protect or Tivoli Storage Manager for quite a few years.

The initial setup looked complex so we contracted Commvault to do it.

Commault completed the deployment but even they had issues, particularly with getting Office 365 operating correctly. Their professional services were the ones who deployed it.

One of the issues with backup vendors is that they overprice, or overvalue their products.

We are looking at Metallic as an alternative because Commvault is a good product but it is a bit complex.

Overall, this is a good product and very capable. That said, my advice for anybody who is considering it is to make sure that it fits your purpose. If you can make do with a simpler product then choose a simpler product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use Commvault as our main backup solution.

Commvault is also a very reliable backup solution; this is one of our main use cases. There are several other use cases, but backup is the most dominant feature.

Our organization has between 500 to 1,000 employees. The IT department and a few admins use this solution.

Commvault has a very extensive report section, at least in the Java console and web console. There is a transition being made from Java to a web console currently, which offers a more sophisticated, more advanced, and more modern interface. 

I have been using Commvault for over eight years.

Commvault is both very stable and scalable.

The technical support is very good. We don't get direct support from Commvault as our first line of support; there is an intermediate organization that is very capable, who are masters, the highest degree of admins — they provide us with support. If there's any problem or any advice that we need, they are always available to support us.

The initial setup is rather complex, especially when switching versions.

The price could always be lower. I do not have the exact pricing information but I know it's not cheap.

We would like to evaluate other options. Other products could be more suited to our needs, but currently, we don't have the time to evaluate other options.

Think about your backup strategy before you begin making a blueprint — that's very important. Do not deploy it and then try to change it. This will only lead to unnecessary difficulties. What are the needs of your organizations? RTO and RPO are also very important. If you want to switch versions or solutions once it has already been deployed, it's not impossible to do so, but it's going to take some serious time and effort.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

In every product, there is always a balance between the features and how you use them. This solution provides many options; however, If you want to understand and use all of the features that are available, as there are so many, it's going to be quite difficult. I think that's quite common with every application: you use a specific set of features that you're used to and which are easy to use. There are almost too many features; it's almost too much for an admin to handle — It's just overkill. 

A more simplified interface or front-end would be more preferable. This is not to say that the back-end should be easier, it can be complex. Moreover, it needs to be complex to satisfy demanding customers.

So far we have tested the backups, add-on based backups and VM-based backups, as well as snapshot-based backups. We have done restores, file-server backups, and object-based restoring. We have done database backups as well.

DR is the most important thing. For other things it seems comparable to other backup solutions, but right now, we do not have any DR site. Using this, we are planning to set up DR.

Restores and backups seem very fast.

The site setup also seems good. We have only done one or two servers in two locations and it seems fine. This is important for DR, so that if anything happens on one side of the system, at least we have another site that we can make available for our service.

The solution’s user interface for managing the on-prem environment is good. 

The Command Center is pretty good. It provides us with a view of the main features and main areas, but they might be able to do things better. For example, are there any particular issues on a backup — to get everything on one tab. At the moment, we have to go to different tabs. It would be helpful to get the main notifications in a single dashboard.

Also, in the restore field, I couldn't find a separate option to restore the permissions only. I have to restore the complete data. Suppose I am restoring a particular file. If I want to restore the permissions only from that particular folder, that is not possible. I have to restore all the data for that particular folder. If there was an option to just restore the permissions, that would be better.

Right now we are testing this solution in a PoC. We have been testing it for around one month. We have done most of the test cases, but we still have some test cases to finish.

We have not done cloud-based testing yet. Perhaps after we finish the failover testing, we will start with that.

The stability is good. Compared to Veritas it is good.

The solution seems compatible with almost every platform, including VM Hyper-V, and most databases, including SQL, MongoDB, and Postgres.

Currently, we are using Veritas, and I have also used Veeam in the past. Veeam is a good product but I prefer Commvault for backup and DR.

The DR setup is a little better with Commvault, with the failover features that are available. Also, we have been having many issues with Veritas and their technical team has not been able to solve most of them. They have not found what the issues are and they are taking too much time.

The initial setup is complex because we are going to set up a DR and cloud. There are different networks in our site as well.

The deployment didn't take much time. Within a day to two days we had configured everything. But the test cases are taking time because right now we are working from home. We are connecting our systems remotely so there are some connection issues, due to our internet connectivity.

We have checked some other products, but we are not testing them because price-wise, Commvault is better than the other solutions.

If you need a better DR solution, this one is good. We will do failover testing: Where one site is down, the other site should automatically take over, so that everything will be available. If that works well, then this would be the main thing that I would highlight.

We use it to back up some servers and to restore things.

Commvault helps our administrators to minimize the time they spend on the backup tasks and that gives them time for other projects. I don't know how much time it saves them because our Commvault environment was already in place. We don't have very many restore problems and, for backup, it's almost automated, so we don't spend any time at the console.

For me, it just restores and backs up applications, nothing more. But what I find valuable is restoring the complete server. Restoring files is also valuable, but I like restoring the server because you don't have to rebuild a new one.

Also, we are able to manage our on-prem environment from one server, the whole environment from one place, which is great. There is only one place to search.

We get an alarm if a lot of files are deleted, for example. That could look like ransomware, even if it is not.

I have been using Commvault for one-and-a-half years, which is the time I have been working in this company.

It is fairly stable. We have never had trouble with Commvault itself. And if we do have trouble, we can call our Commvault partner and they will solve it.

The scalability is good, although we don't have plans to increase our usage of it.

Commvault's technical support is very good.

I used Avamar a long time ago. 

I don't know much about the pricing and licensing, but I do know it is very expensive.

I would recommend Commvault. We have not had many difficulties with it and I think it is a good product.

We don't use Command Center, only the CommCell Console. In our department, only five people are doing the backups and the restores. We are all system specialists, and we work together to maintain Commvault.

I would rate it at eight out of 10. A 10 is too high and would mean it is super-good. For me, an eight is very high.

We use it mostly for backup and sell it to our customers. We are moving more into data management. Our customers also use it for data classification, it's becoming a major role. 

The previous version of Commvault was complex from a licensing point of view. Veeam is taking up the virtualization space. 

It helps my customers recover data and to replicate the data as well. 

Commvault software is a single platform where you can enable whatever you want to use, like endpoint protection. You can enable those licenses on a single platform screen. This is where I see the value ad. This is a single management tool.

With other products, you need to have different management tools.

They don't market their products well. They don't do a lot of marketing to enable them to move forward. 

It's a very good product. It works. If their marketing was great, the product would sell itself. It's harder because their competitors have much better marketing. Everybody knows Veritas and Veeam because they market well. If a customer chooses Commvault, it would be the first time they've heard of it. 

My company has been using it for the last five years. 

Scalability is great. In the new license model, I can scale it on the virtual environment. We are going to increase our Commvault center in our data center. The maintenance will increase. 

Their technical support is very good. I am very satisfied. I work with somebody who is connected to the development side as well so they make sure to implement changes if we encounter issues. 

Commvault is an enterprise product set and Veeam only started the virtualization layer. Commvault is already at the front. Veritas has a lot of appliances and Commvault only started doing appliances a few years ago. Veritas marketed their appliances aggressively but Commvault didn't. I think Commvault is moving into data management. 

It's not that easy to implement. It takes some time to implement and make it work. It was complex to implement and understand how to get everything correctly. 

Commvault changed their model to make it easier for partners and customers to understand. Before there were 16 licenses for one area but now they've made it easier to work.

Understand the way it works in terms of sizing and configuration. As soon as that is correctly done, it's not so difficult to understand. 

We are a partner for Commvault and our role is to implement the solution for our customers. Our customers in Egypt are in the banking and financial sector. They use Commvault to back up their data. We help in sizing the workload of the customer, designing the solution and implementing it. We also support the customer if they face any issues.

We have a hybrid implementation. The first target for the backup is on-premises and the offsite backup is on Azure cloud.

The solution provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations. We completely depend on Commvault for managing our data, from backup to restore to replication.

Commvault saves significant time for administrators. It also saves on infrastructure costs by being able to manage what were disparate data management solutions in one place. It saves us on a monthly basis. It also has embedded deduplication which works well. It saves about 90 percent of the front-end data.

In terms of recovery, it depends on the teams that we restore for. Sometimes we restore for the database team, and other times for the application team when they add a new feature or change something and they need to roll back. Also, sometimes our users are attacked by ransomware or by a virus or trojan, and their data is encrypted or deleted. Commvault has helped us in these scenarios. It has always been successful in restoring the backup. 

Commvault's compatibility matrix is tops. It supports almost any workload and technology our customers have.

It provides fast backup and fast restore. The amount of time it takes depends on the size of the restored data, but Commvault has a good feature through which you can add many streams when restoring. That helps us in restoring rapidly. In my opinion, Commvault is one of the fastest solutions when it comes to restoring. I use competitive solutions, such as Veeam and Rubrik, and Commvault is the fastest among them, in both backup and restore.

It integrates with many cloud providers, like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. Also, all workloads can be integrated with Commvault. If we use a new technology, Commvault integrates with it. Commvault is a data management solution with support for building the DR side of things. With Commvault we can rapidly back up and restore any application we add to our environment.

Commvault software can be implemented on any hardware. This helps when we are competing against another backup solution. It helps win customers.

The Command Center is good. It has a good dashboard and it's very easy to use. It gives us a view of about 85 percent of the environment, because something like tape configuration and monitoring are needed. In the new version they have added good features and they have worked on improving the documentation.

The dashboard provides a good view into any issues so that users can address them. It provides understandable messages when there are errors, telling you where the issue is, and you can research the error code or send it to Commvault for help.

One issue we face is the complexity of the console. That could be improved on. It takes users time to get familiar with Commvault. On average, it takes our customers between one and three months to learn it. The console and the way you configure Commvault have very advanced settings. It takes time to understand how it works. 

After a customer understands it, he can improve and add to the configuration.

I have been using Commvault for around three years.

It's a very stable solution.

It is also scalable.

The efficiency of Commvault's support is something that, it seems, the vendor needs to pay attention to. At times, when we open a support case, it can take two to four days to find a solution and close the case. 

The setup process is complex. The person who implements it has to pay close attention to certain things. The index cache must be in SSD storage, and the same is true for the deduplication database. The sizing of the CommServe must be done well. In terms of agents, and other features, everything must be calculated very well. All these things will affect the performance in the future.

It can take hours or days to implement, depending on the project. The administrative part of the deployment takes about a day, but the integration part can take from three days to a couple of months, depending on the size of the project.

After we do the first implementation, the customer can do future implementations. 

Commvault has advanced its licensing in the last year with its complete licensing solution. The complete license gives us options for all the features. Commvault does not license based on storage or the management components. It can integrate with any storage vendor. That means that when we are out of storage and need more, we can integrate without additional licensing.

In my opinion, Commvault needs to reduce the licensing cost by 20 to 40 percent to make it cost-efficient.

You need to size the CommServe and the agents very well because it will help the performance.

Overall, Commvault is a good solution for midsize and enterprise companies.

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.