Commvault Cloud Reviews

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 primarily use the solution as a backup.

Our other solution deploys every agent on every single server, and then you back up that way. However, when you have to deploy to the APIs using the Commvault to their instance, due to the fact that we are a VMware shop, we are capable of leveraging the snapshot capability within the VPI. And then we back it up, the entire VM.

The license is counted as one VM. The other option is based on the capacity model. The cost on a capacity model is more expensive than the VM path model. That's why we switched. The functionality is very similar. 

The VSA, the virtual system agent backup, is the most useful aspect of the solution for our organization. Based on our use case, it cuts our costs significantly. Early on, when we had the software at one point, we were using the front-end data protection, the DPE model, with the licensing using an agent. Then, as the technology continued to evolve, they added additional features like the VSA path, VM path model and other things. We are switching from the DPE model to the VSA model. That helped us to eliminate some of the costs.

Once you get comfortable with the solution, it becomes pretty easy to use.

People are going to be very impressed with that kind of support that they get from Commvault. It's excellent. 

It's a comprehensive data management for all platforms. It works with multiple clouds and vendors.

They have a strong development team and are market leaders in the space.

With any product, there could be improvements made. 

I can't think of exact features that are lacking.

It's been a while, however, it's my understanding that they have new features coming out. 

Our cloud is still pretty old-school, I continue to use the console as the traditional admin tool for daily troubleshooting. In a newer version, they're using something called Command Center. I haven't played around with that yet. I heard that it's very sleek. At this point, the console is pretty dated, so it's good they're doing an update.

The Chargeback feature has recently changed as well. I haven't had a chance to explore it, however, I believe they've improved on it quite a bit.

The solution can be a bit complex for new users.

The solution needs better Office 365 data backup management.

I've been using the solution for six years now.

The product is very solid. They are the number one data management platform on the market. They are leading in that sense above the competition.

At this point, there are no plans for increasing usage right now. We are reducing our footprint on-prem and we've moved everything to Azure. Unfortunately, we leveraged some of the native protocols from Azure side. Commvault has gotten reduced. Due to that change,  the pricing or licensing that supports the functionality of it may be impacted a little bit.

While you can call support for anything, they have great online documentation that you can reference for assistance. It's easier to check out that before reaching out to them directly.

Their support is the best. They're worldwide, 24/7. I give credit for that. I deal with a lot of other vendors. Their support model is far superior. Once you open the ticket, if, after an hour, it's not resolved, you can click on it and another engineer will come online within the hour to assist, depending on the severity of the case. 

I'd rate them nine out of ten for sure.

At one point, we almost tried to switch to another vendor. However, due to the economic scale and other factors, we didn't move forward. We decided to stay with Commvault in order to leverage all the modeling and pricing, and we were able to accomplish what we needed.

Since I have worked here, the company has always used Commvault.

The initial implementation has a moderate amount of difficulty. It's complex at times, however, it depends on what it is. Once you know it, it's not that complex to set up. Overall, it is easy to use. It's not that difficult.

Deployment is probably just a couple of hours. In that time, you can spin up the environment and then you can set it up and deploy it and get a backup.

While we have a lot of users on the solution, I am the main person who handles the maintenance.

Most of the upgrades we do ourselves. In the cases where we have a major upgrade, we typically use a consultant. We did use a couple of consultants in the past for the upgrade. Early on, we didn't have the resource and personnel to handle everything. 

After using Commvault for six years now, I'm a bit more comfortable and confident in handling everything myself more and more.

We work directly with Commvault consultants.

The ROI comes from the fact that it's a solid product that works the way it is supposed to. When you need data recovery, it's perfect. That's your money's worth right there.

The licensing costs are determined on a yearly basis. It might be around $40,000 or $50,000. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Originally, we were on a private cloud, however, we've since moved to a public cloud.

I'd advise others that the implementation depends on the skill level of those setting it up. It's best to consult with the technical manager or the technical team. They can give recommendations. The costs are very reasonable. It may be only $4,000 or $5,000 for three or four days worth of consultant work. They handle the consulting remotely, not on-premises. 

Of course, if you don't know the answer to something at any time, you can always call support. That's for break/fix scenarios. For most other things, the online documentation will get you through.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten. We've been very happy with the product.

We use it for backup and disaster recovery. We protect Windows and Linux servers, Windows 10, SQL, and Office 365.

It has streamlined data recovery, via a SaaS solution, to provide overarching protection. Metallic has also reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our backup operations by about 20 percent. In addition, it provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements because the egress charges are known.

• The SaaS offering is the most valuable feature because it provides endpoint, Office 365, and core server backup.
• The overall ease of use is good. The user experience is very in-tune and they are constantly making improvements as a result of feedback from customers.
• Its performance for both backup and recovery, and security, as an enterprise solution, is good. Integration with Active Directory and the Azure platform make it a complete solution.
• It's very easy to set up the storage across all platforms. This allows us to be dynamic and change on-the-fly.
• Metallic is also very nice because you're not connecting to a VPN to use the endpoint recovery.

There is room for improvement in the Knowledge Base and error reporting. I would like to see best practices in the Knowledge Base, and have the ability to diagnose errors without contacting support.

I have been using Commvault Metallic for three months.

It's stable. I've had some outages over the last week, but overall, it's stable.

It seems very scalable. We have plans to increase our usage of the solution.

Commvault's technical support is responsive.

There are multiple systems in place. We're in the process of replacing them.

As for the process of switching to Metallic, planning goes a long way. It's at an intermediate level between simple and complicated. We did the free trial and it was easy to get going.

We went with Metallic because it's a SaaS offering. It was one of the few solutions that offered SaaS with their own storage.

After doing it, it's straightforward, but it does require a little bit of understanding. It's in the middle between straightforward and complex. We're still in deployment but the initial setup took about one month.

Our implementation strategy is to cover critical applications: Office 365, Windows 10, and both Windows and Linux servers.

I've ran into some issues, which has made the configuration interface for configuring the solution for data protection more complex, but overall, if the instructions work, it's very simple.

The Commvault Success team helped. Other than that, it was just me. Their team was responsive. They pride themselves on making the product work for the client.

In terms of administrators of the system, there is just me in my role of network engineer. The individual users don't log in. We're a small business with under 200 users.

We evaluated Veeam and Rubrik. The pros for Metallic were that the costs were up-front and that it was a SaaS with dedicated cloud storage for endpoint and dedicated cloud storage for Office 365, separating those silos.

The drawback with Metallic is that it takes a bit of work to understand the process for registering clients, but once you have it down, it goes quickly.

Take your time to run the trial and understand what you're getting yourself into.

The move from on-premise to a cloud solution is definitely a change. Be patient with the process and open to understanding the SaaS solution.

We previously had two different backup solutions, one that covered physical machines and another one that covered the virtual machines. We decided to go ahead with an enterprise tool and we chose Commvault to back up both. It's backing up more than 1200 VMs and more than 150 physical machines.

We can follow any backup or restore situation in a granular way: Who did it and which files were restored. If they did a local restore or if somebody restored to another server or another location, we can see it down to a granular level. We can follow each action, including all the administration actions.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has enabled our company to accelerate growth. With the migration from Veeam and NetWorker to Commvault, the whole environment has become easy for us because we have one tool. It has helped to accelerate the growth because it's easy to expand the whole environment. As soon as we have more data to back up, we can easily change the way we back up the data or increase the storage devices for that data.

It is also a single platform to move, manage, and recover our on-premise data. It's not only easy to manage physical and virtual machines, it's easy to manage where you want to put the data and where you want to recover the data. It's clear to everyone inside the organization.

Another benefit is that Commvault minimizes the administration time. Administration that I personally do takes about two hours a day for the whole environment, and that is about a three-to-one reduction.

The solution has also helped us to optimize infrastructure usage by reducing storage space. With the deduplication option, we have reduced the end storage devices we need significantly. We need 70 to 80 percent less storage.

We do regular restore and recovery tests, five to 10 times a month, for files, folders, and whole machines. We haven't had an actual attack or virus situation. In terms of the time it takes to restore data, at the physical layer, it's four or five times faster than it was when we used EMC NetWorker. At the virtual layer, it's about 50 percent faster than Veeam.

I've worked with backup software for the last 25 years. I know NetBackup, Tivoli, NetWorker (Legato), DataProtector (Omniback) and Veeam. I have found that I can cover all what we need with Commvault. 

The solution also provides us with a complete view of our data. I wrote scripts to report information from the Command Center daily.(A bunch of predefined reports are also available). I report them in HTML and have the status of the last day for the whole environment. Using the interface, I have predefined links to open daily or to send to my supervisors so they can see what's happening. They find it easy.

What I need is deeper CLI documentation for both QCommand and SQL queries.

I have been using Commvault for about 12 years. Starting with Simpana

When you talk about backup it must be stable. If not, we would change the tool.

We are increasing the capacity because we have an increase, on average, of about 20 percent a year. It's really scalable. With Commvault, you have a lot of possibilities. You can use your hardware or you can use dedicated hardware from Commvault. There are a lot of options for how you back up your environment. It's really good in this area.

One of the best points recently with Commvault is that it is a really good support organization. Overall, from one to 10, their tech support is between nine and 10. I used to place calls just to get know-how from the technicians, and sometimes because I really needed it. They always come back with fast and really accurate answers. It's really good.

As described before, we use NetWorker and Veeam and the idea was to consolidate the whole backup environment with ONE enterprise tool.

The initial setup was not complex for me. If you know the tool it's not complex. It could be a little complex for newer people because there are a lot of features. For a beginner, it's really not the best tool. It's not a tool for small business, it's more for medium and big companies.

We deployed Commvault, in this company, about four years ago, so I don't recall exactly how long it took. I think we needed three weekends to deploy and move all the data.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we have a team that takes care of backups. We first planned the whole architecture, what we wanted. Then we voted on the pros and cons of the architecture elements and decided where we were going with it. 

In addition to help from Commvault, we had an external analyst from a third-party who helped us with the initial deployment. Our experience with them was very good. I really appreciated it.

Internally, there are two of us in the organization who share the backup roles.

The implementation took place with our resources, but we have also a contract, with a vendor and also with a technical partner.

Two eyes see more than one! And if you have a problem, ussualy, you are part of it :)

From a licensing point of view, we now have one license which covers backup for the whole organization. And we spend less time administering the whole thing.

The solution's model is cost-efficient, but it depends on your environment. For us it was cost-efficient because we reduced the number of licenses. We came from two backup solutions, covering two types of servers, to now having a global license based on the amount of tera or petabytes we have. We cover all this with our license and that is cheaper than other options.

Overall, we have seen ROI in terms of both time and money. We started saving 40% of our resources and covering more each day.

As I once heard from a car salesman in California: every car has its girlfriend / boyfriend.

Here it is more or less the same, for each case it is necessary to study which is the best backup tool, basing ourselves first on the technical aspect and then on the financial one.

At the time we evaluated other options: NetBackup, HP Data Protector, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

There were two key points when we decided to change. One was the licensing type that was best for us, because the cost could have a big impact on our budget. The other point was internal knowledge of the tools. I cannot say one of these solutions is worse or better than the others. We chose what was better for our environment at that moment. We wanted a solution to cover our whole environment, including at the OS level and the virtual layer, and one with a license that worked with our budget.

Licensing is a key point when you decide to change or to buy new software. The licensing type has an enormous impact on your budget and your decision. If it doesn't work with your budget... And it's the same technically. If the tool is not good for you, then you cannot choose it. On one hand you have the budgets and the licenses, on the other hand, you have the technical needs.

If you don't have know-how regarding this solution, you will need assistance from certain parties, providers or the company itself. That's not only for Commvault, it's for backup tools or any other kind of implementation, in general. You can really make wrong choices at the beginning that are not easy to repair when the whole system is in production.

Commvault has two interfaces, a Java interface and a full HTML interface. People who use the tool must have the know-how, so internally we teach the people who use the tool how to do backups and restores; we focus on these situations. For me, with my know-how, the tool is really simple, both the Java and the HTML. But for newer people, it might be a little bit complicated.

The biggest lessons I have learned using this solution are about the different ways to back up a virtual environment, and the different types of deduplication options there are.

The product is really good for us. I can't say that it would be really good for someone else, it depends on your environment. For us, Commvault is between nine and 10 out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using this solution for two years. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The deployment took one week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the primary backup/recovery solution for our VMware platform.

It provides solid backup automation for VMs and automatic backup replication. It also has real-world compression and deduplication.

As a backup solution, it has minimized our task of backing up VMs. It is difficult to give it a time frame, but we are backing up over twice as many VMs than our previous solution with less effort.  

We have not experienced a disaster or attack so far. Commvault allows us to recover VMs rapidly with different levels of recovery.

Its compression/deduplication allows us to store more backups and save storage space. The reporting is great; we are able to obtain critical business reports and infrastructure/usage information very easily.

The backup, recovery, and replication of VM workloads in a single platform has reduced backup windows, augmented platform availability, and recovery times.

The solution’s user interface for managing on-prem, cloud, or multi-cloud environments in one place is not the best. There are discrepancies between Java GUI plus HTML5. While additional improvements are coming soon, the lack of CLI makes administration tedious and time consuming.

The Command Center is decent. It does require major improvements for usability. SP19 will provide many desired features. It would be optimal to have CommServe running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The solution requires constant attention. Commvault is very complex. We are constantly making adjustments and working through hotfixes, updates, and issues. 

There is a steep learning curve. Training is essential.

More than one year.

We did not have the best initial impression regarding stability. Things got better after four months.

The Hyperscale scalability is very good. CV LiveSync is a great tool for protecting Commvault’s database.

There are two full-time engineers doing day-to-day administration of this solution. 

The product is currently in Phase I: VMware. We have plans to increase usage in Phase II: Exchange/Physical/Isilon.

They have very good, knowledgeable engineers.

We previously used IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). TSM does not offer a solid VMware solution nor does it have strong reporting.

This solution has helped us to optimize infrastructure usage. With the solution's deduplication, we are saving storage space. Whereas, on our old solution, we still needed the same storage space. We now have faster backup storage, giving us faster restores and file level restores. This saves time and time is money.

The initial setup was straightforward but that was primarily because of all the planning and a clear architecture design. We were able to run production backups in two weeks

Phase I of our implementation was the VMware platform. We hired a Commvault consultant who followed an approved architectural design.

The solution has enabled us to save on infrastructure costs by being able to manage what were disparate data management solutions in one place.

The solution’s model is cost-efficient. It provides an all-around, exceptional enterprise backup platform.

We work with Commvault and a partner on our environment needs according to capacity, licensing, pricing, components, modules, etc. Additional costs depend on your backup needs.

We evaluated Veeam, but concluded that it was not an enterprise solution.

Commvault is a great backup/recovery solution. Start small, then scale out. Training is very important, as it is a complex solution. 

The solution is very capable as a single platform. It has many features. However, we have not leveraged the capabilities to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise, hybrid, and cloud locations yet.

Commvault offers the best integration of multi-cloud/hybrid environments and is a leader in the market. The solution offers an extensive array of cloud options and features. However, we are leveraging it for on-premise workloads at the present time. 

Biggest lesson learnt: Backup replication requires a solid network infrastructure.

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

We have full functionality as a complete data warehouse, and I've been tasked to leverage the multiple features and licenses that Commvault has, as they apply to our business. We're using every feature and what we are not using, we plan to be using.

We back up multiple platforms in our environment: Windows, Red Hat, Linux, Oracle. We have hypervisors, a large VMware environment. So it's a pretty enterprise-class environment. 

We use it for custom reporting to better manage our backup environment and there is a lot of discovery in that area too. The better question might be how we're not using it right now. We try to leverage every feature that's out there, as a complete data warehouse.

It's a hybrid. It's an on-prem, but we're in Azure now, too.

We're saving storage space. The built-in deduplication features are really good. It's second to none in my experience with it. You really have a better handle on your deduplication database and block changes. Saving storage space is the biggest thing. We see up to 75 percent compression rates, and even higher, so we're saving on data.

Also, with archiving, we've been able to identify data that we were backing up multiple times and archive it instead and save money there. So overall, we've had a lot of space savings with data that's being compressed through the deduplication features of Commvault.

It has also helped us save on costs. There is money available to further use for fees in Commvault, which means the business is happy with what's going on. Those cost savings are from the fact that we don't have to keep increasing our storage the way we were before we were using Commvault. For me, as an engineer, that means I have training opportunities and I can also identify a service for server refresh because there's money available for infrastructure.

We expect that Commvault will also help our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks so they can spend time on other projects. We have identified how it can. Now we're trying to figure out how to implement that. It will involve using workflows and automated processes for scheduling, alerting, and reporting, and even using support resolution through automatic tickets that can be generated.

We haven't yet used Commvault to recover from a disaster, attack, or to recover data for another reason. We just had a report that said we haven't had disaster recovery backup in the past year. Commvault sent us an alert and, within one day, they assembled a team to discuss what we could do to mitigate that risk. Once the team was assembled and we all got together on the phone, I noticed that the report had been inaccurate for a year. It was great that we didn't have a disaster, but I like the fact that Commvault was willing to address that need, at my immediate request, based on their alerting system. They were ready to assist me in a disaster at a moment's notice.

You have total control of your data. It's scary, but it's good once you understand it. There are a lot of unknowns that happen with your data, things that Commvault is doing, and you really need to be aware of them to maximize its overall performance. I like that you have complete hooks into and total control of your data.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that it doesn't break easily. You can get by with some mistakes. It's pretty intuitive. You're not intimidated that you may do something incorrectly and cause some damage. 

The data is well-protected. It doesn't age off until it's copied. That's a big feature right there. When you reach the end of your retention, it does not expire until the secondary copy is completed. That allows you to hold onto data that otherwise would have aged off by retention. I like that feature. It's hard to just delete or lose data using the Commvault platform.

It's tough to understand if you're really maximizing the features of such a large platform without engaging other services that Commvault offers to help you understand and leverage the data warehouse.

It's a little challenging because of the way Commvault communicates and works with third-party solutions. Right now, we're using Commvault to back up Office 365 mailboxes, so we have to work with Microsoft and Azure. There's a lot of handshaking in the background that the customer can be impacted by. For instance, Commvault can say, "Hey, we can back up a thousand mailboxes in two days, providing Microsoft lets us." "Microsoft letting you" means that Microsoft will throttle you at certain times, and there are also certain restrictions Microsoft has with how fast you're doing something, or how many you're doing. We, as a customer, are impacted from that perspective. Although Microsoft welcomes Commvault, there's always the strain of how these two platforms work together. So it's a little challenging when it crosses different platforms into other environments that Commvault doesn't have total control of.

Also, Commvault likes to be ahead of the game when it comes to merging with other platforms, but sometimes it's before they have the solution truly baked in. Office 365 is an example. I feel that my company might be a litmus test for their solution, because we have such a large environment. Some of the promised solutions that we received from Commvault were more like testing solutions. They weren't really validated, meaning they were possibilities. There have been a lot of hot fixes for the solution that we're using right now, more than we expected. It wasn't a simple, turnkey solution when we decided to use them. They could do a little bit more due diligence before they jump into a space to get some of that market share.

One particular issue we found was when we were trying to open up ports for communication. They had listed a couple of ports that we needed and we found out there were a lot more communication ports that they had already assumed we were aware of or already had in place. As we were doing our deployment, we had a lot of network communication issues when we were trying to communicate between resources on-prem and off-prem, due to different ports that were identified as being blocked.

They have to be willing to admit that, "Hey, we don't have this quite worked out yet, but we're working on it." I got to learn Commvault by implementing this Office 365 solution. That's my go-to for examples. There have been a lot of "gotchas" in performance. Commvault says, "Go to this SP, go to that SP," but you're talking about changing your whole service pack level in your environment, and you just can't do that overnight. You can't move as fast as they want you to move, business-wise, to take advantage of new releases and new features. They have to be more realistic that the customer can't keep up with their pace.

In addition, there are two of us who do all the maintenance, but we definitely make use of Commvault resources. They kind of make you dependent on utilizing their resources, which is not such a bad thing. But sometimes you may want to learn to manage your own environment completely, without engaging the vendor as much. Commvault finds a way to keep themselves engaged with what you're doing. You almost have to reach out to them to say, "How does this work? What's the best way to use this? I don't see any information on how to leverage this feature."

The documentation is lacking. You'll find some general stuff, but it's hard to find actual use cases. You also want to know who has tried a solution out, who is it working for, who can you talk to to get some pros and cons? They could do a little bit better with their documentation and not just have basic guidelines that you have to customize to follow.

I've been using Commvault for a year and a half.

We haven't seen any issues with scalability at all. They tend to have a suggestion for us when we come to them with a problem. Right now we're leveraging the IntelliSnap feature. It's been identified as a better way to back up, given some problems we've been having with some particular data that has been hard to capture within a certain time window. 

It's scalable. We haven't had any complaints at all. It rates pretty highly in scalability.

One of the features I'm working on putting in place is access control: How to grant different levels of authorization. We currently have 51 users and six are primary users. Most of those 51 users log in to run reports. Those users have operational roles, administrative roles, and some are in engineering. We also have a couple of database admins who have read-only access to view metrics.

Support is pretty extensive. There are five different levels of support. We're at the top level and we have also experienced two levels below that. They have a great support system. 

They could use additional subject matter experts, but when you do get the right subject matter expert you have a person who is pretty knowledgeable. We haven't needed many escalations, but they do have a good escalation system. 

They've never been stumped. There's always somebody that has the knowledge and expertise to resolve the issue. And that's generally within a matter of days at the most — and sometimes it's only hours. I've never had an outstanding problem for longer than a week without having the right resources in place to resolve the issue.

We have the highest enterprise-level support contract, so we have a team that engages us on chronic issues. We have a team that engages us on new initiatives and we have a team that we work with on the overall Commvault experience. We also have a dedicated technical account manager and we can bounce anything off of him at a moment's notice.

We went from Veritas NetBackup to Commvault. We switched due to upfront licensing and costs. We have more visibility into what we're actually purchasing. It seemed like, overall, the cost of Commvault was cheaper.

The licensing is more visible. It's more "per-diem." They're not forcing you into certain purchases. You can buy in bulk, per se. You can try things out. Commvault offers a lot of good, temporary licenses where you try something out before you commit to buying it. Once you express interest in purchasing, they'll supply a lot more information for you to make a better decision. I like that, versus the way Veritas works.

Commvault is a cost-efficient solution. Just beware that there's a lot you're going to have to understand before you can get to the point where you're utilizing that cost-efficiency.

To convert over to Commvault from NetBackup took us three days, and part of that was standing up the environment. With Commvault, it's easy to bring new data and new platforms in. It's simply a matter of clicking on the agent, installing it, and then going from there. The fact that it's agent-based made it a little bit easier to adapt to and back up multiple platforms and storage devices.

Generally, it takes about five hours to two days to drop an architected solution and start the implementation process. You need time for whatever issues may arise, so it could take three to five days to get Commvault up and running. 

But to get started, it's just a matter of a few minutes. The fact that you can push out and do all your installs from Command Center is a good feature from Commvault. It's easy to get rolling and get started. To really get it fully leveraged takes some time.

Our company is in its fourth year with Commvault and we're just now getting to the tip of the iceberg with leveraging a lot of its features and the licensing that Commvault offers as a data warehouse.

Training-wise, there's a lot of information out there, a lot of free training. There are tutorials and a lot of YouTube videos and virtual classrooms. They encourage you to learn and leverage their data suite without paying for a lot of training.

Prior to using Commvault's Office 365 feature, we were backing up mailboxes at the database level. Commvault allows us to just point, click, and drag-and-drop for backup and restore. That's a really big ROI. Restores are easier to handle at the message and item level. Things are a lot easier to restore. We can restore in multiple ways, including as a PST file. Commvault has a way of looking at our mailbox data and picking out anything that is PST and backing that up in different ways. There are a lot of built-in APIs to make things a little bit easier.

So we do have a good ROI with our overall mailbox protection and restorability.

It's been a while since we used NetBackup, but I think Commvault is easier. It's really point-and-click. There isn't a lot of background stuff going on or command-line stuff. It's all Windows-based, easy drag-and-drop. With NetBackup there was a lot of stuff going on in the back-end, command-line wise, that you couldn't get a good visual of as you were doing it. 

Working with Windows is a little more explanatory, versus working with command-line, when it comes to installations. With command-line, you have this sense that if you do something incorrectly you might really do something bad. That's a big difference that I like with Commvault versus Veritas NetBackup.

Take advantage of any free training and look at other business cases and how they use Commvault, because it's so customizable. There's no right and wrong way. You have to look at your unique business needs to really maximize the platform.

If you're just going to back up and protect your data, I would recommend something outside of Commvault. If you really want to understand your data, audit your data, really manipulate your data, and save money through your data, then Commvault is the place to go.

I like the interface. It requires some assistance with navigation. It's very intimidating when you first jump in as a newbie. You don't know where to start or what's important. The best approach is to learn each one, one at a time. The problem is that you usually end up favoring one particular feature because that's where the fires are at. It's user-friendly, but it takes some time to get used to.

I'm still learning the Command Center. I think a lot of people are hesitant to transfer over to it because it is a little different than the Java console. I just had a tutorial and demonstration on it last week. I like it. It's easier. It's just that the layout is a lot different. It's not as busy as the Java console, and because it's not as busy you don't know what you're not using, or what you have quick access to. I think that may be what intimidates people with the Command Center, that the layout is really a lot different. But kind of like a desktop, once you get it the way you want it, it's a lot easier to work with. I think those initial challenges deter some people, which is why it's been a slow rollout, and Commvault hasn't just said, "We're going to turn this one off and this one on."

I'm in favor of the Command Center. I'm starting to use it a little bit more. It's a good tool, a good upgrade, but it's going to take a little bit of learning.

The fact that a Commvault is a single platform will enable our organization to accelerate growth and drive innovation. This is my second year with this company, and we're now leveraging the experts within Commvault to show us how to use Commvault, so I think it will. But getting to that stage where you have to align those resources can take a company some time. There are some challenges there. But once you embrace it and leverage it the way they want you to use it, instead of using it how you want to use it, it will make the transition a little easier.

This process is helping in identifying lost data and identifying backup performance. You can really drill into backup performance, throughput, network connections, firewalls, and ports. You can really see where a problem is. Fixing their problems is one thing, but you tend to have to upgrade to fix it. Commvault is really good at listening to what the customer says, to their challenges, and then taking those challenges and making solutions down the line. The problem is you have to upgrade your environment to take advantage of those new bug fixes.

What we're looking to do with Commvault in the next six months is to leverage its ability to protect and backup our stuff within the cloud, within Azure. We also want to leverage it more for identifying data analytics. Because we're in the compliance field and the medical field, we really want to understand our data. Is it deduping right? Is it being backed up correctly? How can we archive it? We're confident that it's protected. We're confident we can restore it. Now we want to understand it.

We really needed a product where we could extend the Microsoft Office 365 backups and archival process, as well as back up our Office 365 SharePoints and our users' OneDrives. That way we could have a seven-year retention plan and if we need to go back and grab someone's email that they accidentally deleted two years ago, we could. 

We also needed a solution that we didn't have to have onsite storage for, because we had a storage restriction onsite. This product gave me the ability to have everything stored, as a SaaS model. Everything is right there.

We recently had an issue where someone couldn't find an email that they had just recently written. When I went looking inside the backups, I was able to find and restore that email and they were able to continue working. It was very critical for a customer sale, but that email was recovered and it was perfect. Because it was just a single email, it was relatively quick. If I had had to do it another way, it probably would have taken me an hour-and-a-half to two hours longer with our old way of doing it. Before we went with Office 365, we were Exchange on-premises and it would have required me to have pulled out a SAN snapshot to recover the data that way, or go to the tape. Because this is all hosted in the cloud and works in the cloud, I was able to do it in five minutes.

Metallic has helped minimize the time spent on backup tasks, absolutely. It has reduced the time, daily, that I deal with whether the backup is up, and performing backups, by about 50 percent. I have more time to do other things.

I have been able to save on hardware costs at my site due to the low price of the application. I am looking at a reduction in infrastructure costs of at least 25 percent.

The most valuable part of the solution is that it is fire-and-forget. Everything we've programmed into this Metallic SaaS offering is what they claim it to be. It's been just a treat to use it. From starting the trial, to the 15 minutes it took to run my first backup, to the 30-minutes for my first restore of the users' email, it has just been fantastic. It works as advertised.

Since it's built off the regular Commvault product, and I use that Commvault product, the user interface has been very easy for me to get into. It's easy to use and navigate through. I've had no questions on how to find the relevant information, and their documentation has been on-point for helping me find all the hidden features inside their menus.

The Command Center, as far as providing a complete view of data goes, is 100 percent accurate. I found stuff that I didn't know about. I was able to find out that a couple of things are flowing in an odd way and I was able to get those remedied and treated in a way that ended up improving my boss' daily life.

It also provides me with a single platform to move, manage, and recover data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations. It's a single window to see everything I needed to see regarding this level of backup. I really dislike like it when the company purchases multiple products that do similar things and I have to go to different windows to get full insight. This solution gives me the full insight without having to use other products, metrics, or reporting tools.

Since it plugs into my Office 365 tenant, it was literally three clicks. So it supports cloud well. And it's all documented well. They even provided training and onboarding help for that 15-minute process. It was just fantastic.

I would like to see some of the code execute a little bit better when I add new licenses and assign licenses to users. I'd like to see that information update a little quicker. It would also be helpful to be able to run a report on licensing so that I have better visibility into how much licensing I'm using.

I really have no other complaints beyond that. And they were able to get me that information relatively quickly when I submitted a ticket.

I've been using Metallic since day-one of its release in October, 2019.

I would give the stability "five nines." I've not seen it down. I can't say it hasn't been down once, but it's been up the entire time I've used it. There have been no issues. It's snappy and responsive. I'm impressed with the stability of it.

Scaling is amazingly easy. The way they recommend the setup, it is easy to drop a user into one of my security groups and, within 15 minutes, they are in the backup schedule rotation and are being backed up.

I have 75 users enrolled. We may have plans to expand in the future to start taking advantage of their endpoint product through Metallic. We would expand from 75 seats to 200 seats in the Office 365 backup, and would add on another set of 200 seats for their endpoint backup.

Commvault's technical support for the solution is knowledgeable. I haven't been able to stump them. They've been able to answer every single question and help me with any issues I've had. They've just been, bar none, fantastic.

We were using Backup Exec for a lot of stuff and ShadowProtect SPX, a StorageCraft solution. Now that we have this online, it's fantastic. Every product that we use from Commvault, in general, has been fantastic.

We switched to Metallic from our other solutions because they didn't provide the Office 365 backup component we wanted.

We needed a backup solution and I purchased their standard Commvault for our on-premises stuff. When I attended Commvault Go, their customer conference, they debuted Metallic and I said, "That's exactly the product I was looking for, for my 365 backup, and I'm buying it from Commvault." I already knew how their software works and Metallic is same. They're just doing it in a SaaS model for 365, endpoint, and even server backup if you want. I really needed that 365.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's 100 percent accurate on their website. From start to finish: 15 minutes and you're running your first backup.

My implementation strategy for this was for the 365, the OneDrive and the SharePoint components. When we brought it online, my goal was to target the 75 most used, customer-facing mailboxes. Within 15 minutes I was able to make sure the product was working and, by the end of that day, I had everyone applied. Compared to other products, that would have taken days.

If you have technical experience it will be straightforward. We walked through their installation script just to confirm I had everything done, because, given how new the product is, they wanted to test their help script. And it was spot-on. They had it perfect. I am fully confident that, even if a person doesn't have great technical knowledge, they would be able to help that person through it.

When I purchased Commvault Metallic, they did have an onboarding process that helped me if I had any questions. It was literally a 15-minute process. I did everything before we even had that phone call, so I got to spend the call asking a few questions. It was really easy. 

I would say we have seen a return on investment, but it's a hard metric to come up with due to DR. We haven't had a DR scenario where it has paid for itself. But I view it like buying car insurance. It's better to have it and not need it, than something happening and needing it and not having it.

We are paying on a yearly basis and it comes out to about $3.80 a user per month.

There are no other costs for the specific features that I have. If I was to use server backups with them, there would be an additional cost per terabyte of storage, based on my storage targets, or an infrastructure cost if I was using it to target on-ground storage stuff. But because I'm using the platform that includes storage for the Office 365 backup exclusively, there is no additional cost.

The other products I was looking at wanted to charge me anywhere between $10 to $15 per person and I would have to do storage on top of that. That means I would be paying by the terabyte if I was putting the storage in the cloud or having to purchase hardware on-premises to do so. With the Office 365 offering from Metallic, at the price point we got it at, it was perfect. They knew exactly what the market needed and they hit their marks.

We really didn't evaluate other vendors because none of them gave me the options that I was looking for and that Metallic was offering: a low price per user, and storage included for the 365 backup. With other products I would have had to purchase cloud storage and pay for additional storage, or the cost per seat was just not something I was willing to pay.

The biggest lesson I've learned is to remind people that they still need to back up Office 365 emails. Just because it's not on their premises, they should still back it up.

Commvault gives you a fantastic 45-day trial. It's worth trying it. They have a really good, long trial period. They will answer any questions you have during that process. I know a lot of people say, "Just try the product." With this one, try the product and you'll see the ease of use.

For deployment and maintenance of the solution, for our size of company, it's just one person, a system administrator who does overall operations support.

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.

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.