We are using it for large data center backups, remote office backups, and cloud backups and restorations across all our environments.
External reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Works well, but not without flaws
Best support, reduces RTOs and RPOs, and completely supports our environment
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
We have implemented Threat Scan, and we have had several catches with it. The activity was not malicious, but it did allow us to know that somebody would do something.
It provides us with whatever we define. We have used some of their other tools in the past to tell us how old our data is and the things that we should be able to archive. It gives us a clear picture of our data when we need it.
Commvault has a platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads. For it to have all those features is very important because it completely supports our environment.
We are very satisfied with how it protects our data from the endpoint and to its final resting destination, whatever that may be. It could be local storage. It could be cloud storage. We are very satisfied with what it does for us.
There are some features that have significantly reduced our RTOs. It has helped reduce RPOs too. The reduction in RTOs and RPOs has been wonderful.
Commvault has helped our organization reduce its threat detection time. It has helped us identify some possibilities of threats. We have a full scope of different tools for threats across our enterprise, but it has helped isolate a possible threat.
Commvault has helped our organization reduce or avoid downtime. There were several cases where we were able to have a short downtime as compared to having a multi-hour downtime. It could turn a multi-hour downtime into less than 15 minutes.
What is most valuable?
The VM backups and the recovery from cloud infrastructure are valuable.
It is very easy to use for administrators for monitoring, analyzing, and managing our organization’s data environment. The instructions are pretty straightforward. It is very easy to monitor.
What needs improvement?
They can improve the VMware recovery and VMware backup. There is an improvement area on the VMware infrastructure. They can make available what they call a VSA proxy. They can have an appliance-type setup to deploy VSA backups and help recover quicker. They can have an appliance ready. Instead of having to have a server dedicated to that and installing software on a server, they can just provide an actual appliance for that.
For how long have I used the solution?
Personally, I have been using it for over 15 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of stability. We have had a few incidents over the years due to certain revisions of the software. We were hit by some of the known bugs, so we had to go back and patch.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It can probably improve on scalability. We have the typical Windows Server deployment. There can be easier automation when deploying new clients and agents.
How are customer service and support?
I love their tech support. As compared to other products we have used, Commvault's tech support is 100% one of the best. They let you know everything, and there is no mystery. They let you know what is happening in the background. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In the past, we have had an IBM solution. We have also used Micro Focus Data Protector. I personally also used NetBackup. It was called something else earlier, but it is NetBackup now.
How was the initial setup?
Our deployment model is hybrid. We have a small cloud, but it is largely on-prem. I have been involved in its deployment multiple times in both scenarios. It is straightforward.
In terms of maintenance, it requires standard patching updates or application updates. It does require that periodically.
What about the implementation team?
We do it all in-house. We have a team for deployment. For deployments, we have four people. We also have a dedicated recovery team due to the size of our organization.
What was our ROI?
It has helped us with our total cost of ownership with some of the newest features such as live recovery. It has caused our RTOs and RTOs to drop, so it has helped with our total cost of ownership.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is a little too high. I would like to get more of a consumption model or more of a periodic true-up type of model that is more friendly to the ups and downs that you may have in your data instead of locking into multi-year agreements.
What other advice do I have?
To those evaluating this solution, I would advise understanding the infrastructure that is needed to support the product. Understand what you need and dig into the details of what you have to purchase. That would be my recommendation.
We have not enabled Commvault’s automated policies. We have also not utilized the risk analysis tool.
Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
We can easily find and restore files, save backup time, and limit exposure
What is our primary use case?
All universities today have both on-premises and off-premises data. Therefore, Commvault is our go-to service for on-premises and off-premises storage arrays and data recovery. Thus, the best way for us to think of IT as a service today is to consider that whenever we have lost a file or something has crashed, we have been able to retrieve it 100 percent of the time for over ten years now. This is significant for us, and Commvault provides us with data backup as a service.
How has it helped my organization?
On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the easiest, Commvault Backup & Recovery is a ten for monitoring and managing our environment. It is so transparent and easy to use that nobody realizes we are using it, which is a plus.
I love Commvault's automated policies.
The Threat Scan feature works great.
Commvault provides excellent visibility across our organization's data.
The most critical function we have is Commvault's platform which offers recovery on cloud, on-premises, and SaaS workloads.
Commvault's risk analysis is excellent. In all the years we've spent millions of dollars on technology, no one has ever suggested that we don't need Commvault or that they don't like it. It's that good, and it's transparent at the same time. With other systems, people will ask why we're using them and if we can get rid of them or scale back on them. But that never happens with Commvault.
Risk analysis is excellent for helping to limit exposure and ensure compliance. This is one of the first questions that comes up when applying for cybersecurity insurance: do we have the capability, and how well does it work? With Commvault, we can answer this question by showing how Commvault has been tested by cybersecurity insurance companies in the past three years.
Commvault reduced our backup time by 50 percent. Our backup time decreased, while our data volume increased significantly. This improvement is due to a combination of our improved internet connection or switching and Commvault's technology. What used to take 8 hours five years ago now takes only one hour.
Commvault reduced our RPO and our organization's threat detection time.
What is most valuable?
Commvault Backup & Recovery's search utility is its most valuable feature. I call it a "search and replace" utility because it allows me to quickly and easily find and restore files without anyone even knowing there was a problem. This is the feature that our IT department uses the most, but it is so transparent that most people don't even realize it is working behind the scenes 24/7.
What needs improvement?
Commvault is a behind-the-scenes operation that's working flawlessly. So how do I know what Commvault is doing for me every month? I would like more communication informing us on what Commvault is doing in the background.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Commvault Backup & Recovery for ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Commvault Backup & Recovery is stable.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is excellent.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Ten years ago, we were using a rudimentary backup system that I can't even remember the name of. It was not a major project or product, and I think we were using it to create disk backups on-site. Commvault allowed us to move to off-site backups with great visibility and transparency.
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment was moderate.
What about the implementation team?
We used Eaglesoft, the vendor from whom we purchased Commvault Backup & Recovery, to implement the system. One and a half full-time people for over two months were required for the deployment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Commvault Backup & Recovery is priced fairly, and its performance-to-cost ratio is also better than fair. I am not here trying to figure out how to get Commvault to reduce their cost by ten percent because I am satisfied.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated NetApp but it was too expensive and did not make sense for us.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Commvault Backup & Recovery ten out of ten.
Commvault Backup & Recovery does not require any maintenance.
I suggest conducting a fair evaluation, as it is very difficult to make a pure cost comparison due to the value that Commvault provides. Therefore, consider the full value that Commvault has brought to the table, not just data backup.
Good support - which is needed a lot
Nice Backup Tool
We can do hourly backups on more systems than ever before, and our RPOs have decreased significantly
What is our primary use case?
Backup and recovery is our primary use case, but we use it to back up all our laptops and help with our computer switch-out process. When somebody receives a new computer, we use Commvault to migrate their data from their old computer to their new one which has eliminated one of the most time-consuming pieces of that process.
We also use Commvault Activate for e-discovery and to help with lawsuits and claims at the end of our projects. It helps provide our outside counsel with the data they need.
How has it helped my organization?
We are able to sleep at night knowing that all of our data is protected and we can recover it very quickly. Instead of trying to do a recovery and hoping things are going to work, I'm fairly confident that within just a couple of minutes, we can have any of our machines restored wherever we need it.
We used to have daily RPOs on almost everything, but Commvault has given us the flexibility to create RPOs daily, every four hours, hourly, etc. For the most part, any request a data owner may have for their system, we can accommodate without difficult changes to our overall data protection strategy.
As for RTO, doing recoveries with Commvault for our virtual machines means we can have them running in under five minutes in most cases. Previously, that would have taken hours.
What is most valuable?
Having everything in one place is one of the biggest advantages, rather than having to go to individual products or different pieces to complete tasks.
We do offsite backups for all of our servers, but we also do onsite hourly backups for any location with important data. That has benefited us several times when we had a need to recover files but did not want to roll back to the previous day's offsite backup. We were able to just roll back certain data for an hour or two to resolve the issue.
When it comes to monitoring and managing our data environment, it's easy for our admins to use Commvault. Most of the time, through their documentation, our primary admin can find everything he needs. We utilize a value-added reseller to handle our first-line support and when we have to escalate something to them, they're usually able to resolve it without having to involve Commvault.
The fact that Commvault offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads is growing in importance for our company. We use it to protect some SaaS data today and it has set us up for when we are ready for that jump to the cloud. We know data protection is not going to be an issue and Commvault will actually help facilitate that move for us when the time comes.
What needs improvement?
As a long-time Commvault customer, we still use the Java console heavily because it is how we learned to do everything. The web-based Command Center is coming along and has most of what we need, but it is a learning process to change our knowledge to the new way of doing things.
As Commvault continues to grow SaaS data protection options, there are some that are on my wish list that have not yet made their roadmap. Knowing what is being worked on for future support would be great we can keep that in mind as we are looking at future technologies to adopt.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Commvault Backup & Recovery since 2006.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Commvault is very stable and I cannot think of any major downtime we have had in the last decade.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's scalable, absolutely. I imagine we are small in the world of Commvault. I can't imagine any point that we would get to that Commvault couldn't handle and manage well. But even for significantly larger companies than us, Commvault is going to be one of the best partners to grow with you.
How are customer service and support?
Whenever we do have to talk to Commvault directly, they engage the resources we need pretty quickly. That may be, in part, because we escalate through our VAR and they know that we've attempted all of the basic solutions first.
When we've had issues with some portion of the product, they will bring product managers, developers, or whomever we need on the phone pretty quickly to work with us until it's resolved. Sometimes that means a custom patch because we've discovered something new that somebody hadn't run into yet. But they're good at working with us through that, rolling it into a future update, and keeping us up and running.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using Veritas Backup Exec. It was very inconsistent in completing backups and made our servers very unstable. We used to restart servers on a weekly basis when we were running Backup Exec. Once we centralized those backups off the file servers, we had servers that could run for nearly a year if we wanted them to. Typically, we'd have to reboot them for updates, but they ran rock-solid after we took the backup software off.
How was the initial setup?
Implementation could be complex if you don't use some professional services to help. It's a big tool with a lot of features, and without some additional assistance with the installation, I'm not sure you'll get the full benefits out of it. Still, it's not an overwhelming engagement to undertake.
We brought in our value-added reseller, and their engineering team brought one person onsite for two to three weeks. He sat with us to teach us about the system. It was a much more complex protection method than we were used to, so they had to teach us about the Commvault methodology a little bit first. Then we had to pull large amounts of data—this was years ago, so the internet wasn't nearly as fast as it is today—and we were sending out hard drives, pulling back large amounts of data, and then doing incremental backups to catch up on the differences. It was interesting to tackle different locations with different approaches to get the data into the system, and then catch up after the fact. Our VAR helped with that significantly by planning it all out. We were fully off our old system in two to three months, so it was not a long ramp-up time.
Two people from our side were involved directly, my manager and me. My manager was mostly there to give business-related advice and do business decision-making. I was the admin, and we had one engineer from our VAR.
I was the day-to-day admin for about eight years, but I have now handed that over to one of my admins. He does most of the work under the guidance of our value-added reseller. If we're adding new features or functionality from Commvault, the reseller will guide us through it, but we do the work. That way, we make sure we're well-trained on it.
Our Commvault is a combination where we're primarily on-prem, but there is one service in the cloud that we use that will not allow on-prem data protection partners. We use Commvault Metallic for that one SaaS application.
Our environment for the backups is mostly centralized in one data center, and it's backing up about 40 locations. Our admin who works on Commvault spends about 10 percent of his time on it protecting about 1,200 laptops and 150 servers.
It's not difficult to maintain Commvault. When our admin needs to do an update, he might dedicate a half day to do so, because it's fairly easy to roll out updates to everything and monitor how that's going. It's very easy to maintain once everything is set the way you want it.
What about the implementation team?
The reseller we are working with is Eagle Technologies and it is worth a call to them if you're considering a partnership with Commvault.
What was our ROI?
We have never run the numbers, but I know intuitively that what we spend is well offset by the time we save on restores and admin time. It's money well spent.
It's valuable to us because we are confident that we can get the data back when we need it. There are definitely business savings from not having to struggle to return services to normal. Whenever somebody comes to us and needs data, we always have it for them.
Commvault has greatly reduced our downtime. If we have a server that has an issue, we're not opposed to rolling back to a previous backup point after a couple of minutes of discussion about our options. Usually, the decision is to just restore that virtual machine, and we'll have you back up and running in five to 10 minutes.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is fairly in line with the other products we've compared it with recently. We do spend more on it than we did in our Backup Exec days, but it's competitive with the other best-in-class data protection platforms. There are other systems that are less expensive that just do basic backup, but when you're talking about full data management, Commvault is hard to beat. Remember that low price doesn't mean low cost, a cheaper product may end up costing you valuable person hours or slower recovery times.
The licensing model changes can sometimes be confusing. Our value-added reseller does a great job of explaining the changes to us and preparing us for what's good and bad and what we need to be aware of during those changes. If we were dealing directly with Commvault, it might be a little more confusing than it needed to be.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked into several other solutions (Avamar, Backup Exec, Syncsort) back when originally choosing Commvault and they were a clear leader in the market, especially given some of the unique data protection needs we had. As we have kept an eye on the new up-and-comers in the space, Commvault always feels like they're steps ahead of the competition.
What other advice do I have?
Commvault has helped us reduce our threat detection time to some degree, although we have other tools more specifically focused on security. We have been alerted at times when something has been acting strangely on a file server and we were able to start investigating quickly. Instead of an employee having to tell us that something doesn't look right, our hourly backups have triggered and said, "Hey, something is different here. You need to take a look at it."
My advice is: don't let how big it is scare you off. Commvault is definitely one of the biggest players out there, but you can get in and get started in a small way. Even if you don't bite off everything to begin with, you can get started and have a much better solution than you may have today.
Most Robust Unified Data Protection Solution
A stable tool that alerts the security team about potential threats in the environment
What is our primary use case?
The product is a little honeypot server or technology we can deploy in our network. If an attacker gains access to our network and looks around for things, they would find assets that look real but are honeypots. We have a couple hundred of those deployed in our environment, looking like various servers, other types of technology, and workstations spread out across our network.
How has it helped my organization?
The tool gives us a lot of heads up if there's a potential threat in our environment. We've seen it when we have had penetration testers running tests. They trip all over it, thinking they're finding vulnerable services to exploit, but they were just alerting the security about their presence.
What is most valuable?
The solution looks like workstations and servers. If somebody tries to poke at one of them, they would think they're interacting with a real live service. The product alerts the security team about threats.
What needs improvement?
The solution must provide deception files across the network.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for two years. My organization has been using it for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I haven't seen any performance issues with the solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Once you have an appliance deployed somewhere, it's very scalable. It's pretty easy to deploy more traps. We have 14 different locations. So, we needed 14 different appliances that had to be configured, shipped out, and installed on the network. Generally, the product is pretty scalable, considering it has a physical deployment component.
How are customer service and support?
The support’s excellent. The team is always willing to get on the phone and work through our issues. We can go straight to our account manager. It's very convenient.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
We have a cloud management component of the tool, but all the hardware is physically deployed in different locations. We have appliances deployed to each location that run all the different VMs, and it looks like they're on those particular networks. The deployment will be a little bit of a heavy lift if we have a big distributed environment. We've just been using the products since we migrated from the on-premise appliance to the cloud-hosted one. We don't have to do any support or maintenance.
What was our ROI?
For the price that we spend, the peace of mind that the tool gives us is an ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I’m happy with the pricing of the product.
What other advice do I have?
It's a very good solution that meets most needs in the deceptions space. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
Provides extremely fast backup, is easy to manage, and is flexible
What is our primary use case?
We use Commvault Cloud for backup and recovery with Air Gap Protect and Risk Analysis to be more cyber resilient.
We deployed Commvault Cloud as a hybrid model both on the cloud and on-premises, and it will continue to be that way. It was 100 percent on-premises. With the migration, it will be about 90 percent cloud and 10 percent on-premises.
How has it helped my organization?
Commvault Cloud's automated policies provide the notification we need to ensure our data is secure and managed correctly.
Commvault Cloud provides excellent visibility across all of our organization's data.
It is extremely important to our organization that Commvault has a unified platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads.
It has helped our organization improve by simplifying the way we manage our environment. We could not manage the same environment with only half of our current staff. We have yet to find anything in our environment that Commvault does not support.
Commvault Cloud's Risk Analysis helps us identify, categorize, and classify sensitive data enabling us to take the appropriate actions to protect it.
Commvault does a good job helping us limit our exposure and ensure compliance.
Commvault has helped us reduce our data management costs significantly. Compared to Dell Avamar, the costs are vastly different. Commvault is much more cost-effective. We are licensed by capacity, so we don't have to worry about licensing different features. We have all the features that are licensed by capacity. And as far as ongoing support costs and other expenses, they are much lower than what they were with Dell Avamar. Commvault also gives us the flexibility to use any storage we want, while Avamar is tied to the Data Domain, which is not cheap to support.
It has helped us reduce our backup time unless we are using Data Domain. This is because we can perform deduplication and compression on the client layer, which reduces the load on the network. We cannot do this with Data Domain. In fact, if we even attempt to perform a quick progress check before sending data to the Data Domain, the system fails completely. We learned this the hard way. We are using many more advanced features in Commvault Cloud than we ever did in Dell Avamar, simply because we had to license each feature separately in Avamar. As a result, we did not perform many backups in Avamar, such as all database backups (DB2, SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL). These backups were performed outside of Avamar. We are now using Direct Connect agents for all of our databases. This allows us to perform incremental backups, which we could not do with the previous method. As a result, we have reduced our backup times by two-thirds, or even more in some cases. Compared to when we were backing up directly to Data Domain, Commvault is now running our backups ten times faster. This has resulted in a significant reduction in our backup times.
Commvault has helped us reduce the RPO. Even in Data Domain, it has reduced our storage times by about half. It has also helped us reduce the threat detection time.
We reduced the RTO significantly with Commvault.
Commvault has helped us reduce downtime primarily due to the increase in the performance of resources.
What is most valuable?
At this time backup and recovery features are the most valuable. We haven't gotten into the more advanced features like LiveSync, just because we've been so busy with the migration to Azure.
The ability to manage everything from a single pane of glass is another major advantage. The management is also easy enough that most of our DBAs can manage their own stuff.
What needs improvement?
Commvault should keep and continue to develop the Java GUI.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Commvault Cloud for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability of Commvault Cloud a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have not encountered a scalability issue yet, and I do not foresee one in the near future. With proper infrastructure planning, I am unsure of the maximum scalability of Commvault Cloud, but we have scaled it to a significant size without any scalability issues. I believe the biggest limitation is that we are running Commvault on Windows, and Linux support is currently available. We will eventually migrate to Linux, but we are waiting for that side of the product to mature. Once we are on Linux, I believe scalability will no longer be a concern.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is excellent. We have ESP support, so we go to the top of the list whenever we call. Their response time has been excellent. We've been very happy with the level of knowledge of the support personnel. While we occasionally encounter someone who doesn't know what they're doing, the overall level of knowledge has been impressive. Our turnaround time from opening a call to receiving a call back has been fabulous.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used Dell Avamar Data Protection Software but it did not have a viable immutable backup copy option, so Air Gap Protect was the reason we switched to Commvault Cloud.
I've been doing this for about 30 years, and I've used a lot of backup packages, but Commvault Cloud for backup & recovery is the most impressive one I've ever used. Its breadth of support, stability, and configurability are years ahead of what I've seen in other products. It's more than just a backup and restore product; it's a cyber resilience product that we find new ways to use all the time, especially with our Azure migration. We're able to move data into Azure using Commvault a hundred times faster than any other method that the DBAs or server admins could find. There are several technical reasons for this. Commvault Backup & Recovery is simply light years ahead of any other backup and recovery solution I've seen.
How was the initial setup?
The deployment was of mixed complexity. The basic functions are straightforward, but the architectural aspects of laying everything out are more flexible, which has its pros and cons. On the one hand, this flexibility is a benefit, but on the other hand, it can lead to a learning curve from an architectural, deployment, and infrastructure standpoint. Once the infrastructure is in place, the rest is easy.
The number of people required for deployment depends on the size of the environment. We have five people on our team currently, one of whom is part-time. I and another team member have extremely deep experience and understanding of the architecture. We deployed and designed the architecture of our tape libraries, physical hardware, and so on. From that point on, four of us migrated 4,000 clients to Commvault Cloud in about six months.
What about the implementation team?
The implementation was completed in-house.
What was our ROI?
A backup product does not typically have a direct return on investment. However, its value can be difficult to quantify in terms of dollars. For example, on January 1st we began migrating our 100 petabyte environment with 4,000 clients to Azure. Commvault saved our bacon by enabling us to move the data to Azure 50 to 100 times faster than we could have done on our own. What would have taken us three months, Commvault was able to do in 48 hours. So, while it is difficult to quantify the ROI of our backup product in terms of dollars, it has been invaluable in other ways.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Commvault Cloud is perhaps the best value for our money that I have seen in a backup product.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Commvault Cloud ten out of ten.
I would not consider expansions, configuration changes, or additions of more advanced features to be maintenance. Daily maintenance consists only of handling job failures, which involves reviewing and resolving them. This is simply a backup, which is unrelated to Commvault. It is the nature of things. No matter what product we use, there will always be failures. However, Commvault itself requires very little maintenance.
I suggest that instead of looking for a backup solution, look for a recovery solution. Backup solutions are common and behind the scenes. No one ever sees them or pays much attention to them. People just assume that their data is being backed up. Restore, on the other hand, is a top priority for management. In a critical situation where the business cannot function, management will come to the backup team demanding recovery immediately. Fortune 500 companies can lose millions of dollars for every hour they are down, and the management's attention will be focused on the recovery team. The faster and more reliably we can recover, the more valuable our recovery solution is. As John Deere says, "It's not how well you recover. It's how fast you recover well." That's the biggest thing to consider when evaluating backup software. If we focus on recovery backup, Commvault Cloud will sell itself.
Helps us achieve large deduplication savings, quick backup times, and good visibility
What is our primary use case?
Commvault Backup & Recovery backs up our central business services for the university. At the enterprise level, we have also expanded our environment to back up colleges across the university, including through specialized networks that we call the Campus Cloud. We provide MDMs and backups for these colleges. Many of our schools did not have any backups before, so this was a real gain for them. We were able to do this fairly easily with Commvault Backup & Recovery. We simply had to add disk space for their backups.
How has it helped my organization?
I appreciate Commvault's automated policies for ensuring that our data is secure and managed correctly. The reporting, alerting, and management that Commvault does automatically, as well as the provision of a health check report, are very helpful, especially for a team of one who manages all of the backups. In other products, we would have to write our own scripts to monitor many of these things, but Commvault's interface makes it easy to quickly assess what it is doing, what it has done, and what we might be missing.
Commvault provides visibility into all of our organization's data. The command center is very helpful, and we have customized the reporting for different business units, groups, and teams based on their needs. I can easily generate reports for them based on what they need from Commvault. Overall, I think it's pretty easy to use.
It is moderately important to us that Commvault has a platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS workloads because we are just starting to build more into the cloud. As a college, we have always been fine with everything on-premises, so those other initiatives were not really there. But now, cloud initiatives, doing things in the cloud, and building in the cloud are all on the roadmap, but we are not there yet. Therefore, having a product that can accommodate those needs as they arise is beneficial to me, because I do not want to have to go out and look for other software to do it. So knowing that Commvault can do it if and when I need to is a plus because they are always looking at doing more of those things.
Commvault has enabled us to provide much better data protection for all of the applications that serve the university. Prior to adopting Commvault, we had a large gap in our data protection strategy. However, Commvault now automatically detects and backs up every new VM that is created in our vCenter, without the need for any manual requests. This has minimized the gap in our data protection significantly, and I have rarely had a new machine go for more than one day without being backed up.
Commvault has helped reduce the organization's data management costs. When I started on this team with the old product, there were five people on my team and a dedicated manager. Now, there's just me. This has reduced staff, which I don't think is always a good thing, but it has allowed us to reduce costs. There was an increase in cost for storage and infrastructure, but that was needed regardless. Overall, Commvault has not really reduced the organization's total cost of ownership, but it has reduced a lot of the risk for the university. This is because there was a huge gap in what was being backed up before. People didn't rely on the backups when I joined the university 15 years ago. They had a warehouse full of tape, but no one even knew what was on them. One of the features of Commvault that was important to us was its ability to manage tape and vault. This is not really a thing anymore, but it was a big deal for us when we first switched to Commvault. We also appreciated the fact that Commvault still knows about all of our tapes and the data on them, even though we don't use them very often. This means that we can still bring back the data if we need to, and it will still work. Being on Commvault has also allowed us to get off of tape. We're now able to write long-term retentions to the cloud, which is a huge benefit and a win for the product. This is at least true for us, but it may not be true for all organizations.
It has helped us reduce our backup time significantly. I don't have much to compare it to in this environment because it's so different from what we had before. When we started using Commvault, it was a pioneer in the industry. Before that, we were only backing up a handful of production machines. When we brought Commvault on, we started backing up everything. So, Commvault has reduced our backup time because we're now running a much larger environment, but our backup jobs still take less than 14 hours, even with nearly 3000 VMs to back up each night.
We have reduced our organization's RPO tremendously. We can meet our recovery point objectives in 24 hours.
Commvault has helped reduce our organization's RTO.
What is most valuable?
The use of hyperscale storage hardware and Commvault software has allowed us to create a large storage pool and achieve significant savings in our back-end storage costs. We have been unable to find any other hardware or software solution that can compare to Commvault in terms of deduplication performance. Our storage team has been particularly impressed with Commvault's ability to back up over 13 petabytes of data and 1 petabyte of core storage while achieving deduplication savings of between 88 to 90 percent. The smaller storage footprint that we have achieved with Commvault has been the biggest gain for us. We also appreciate the ease of use and flexibility of the Commvault interface, which allows us to mix and match storage devices as needed.
What needs improvement?
The workflow has room for improvement.
One of my biggest problems has been the lack of specialized training for things like hyperscale for Commvault customers, especially smaller ones like myself. During COVID, Commvault stopped having their conference, which was a major source of education and information for me as a customer. I needed to learn about new functionalities and how they worked, but there weren't many classes available. It seems like Commvault expects customers to take the responsibility of engaging with them, but it's difficult for smaller customers to do so. I've been advocating for smaller customers, and Commvault has listened and started to include us in their roadmap, just like they do for Fortune 500 companies.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Commvault Backup & Recovery for almost eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability of Commvault Backup & Recovery nine out of ten.
Commvault Backup & Recovery has helped reduce our downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I am impressed with Commvault Backup & Recovery's scalability and my ability to use different storage options.
How are customer service and support?
Commvault technical support is inconsistent. I'm reluctant to criticize, but I've had challenges with them, particularly from the first level to development. This is a common problem with many solutions, including Oracle. Once an issue goes to development, customers are left in the dark about when it will be fixed. I've had to escalate several issues to my Commvault team over the past few years. While I don't have many cases with Commvault support, it needs improvement.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used Atempo Time Navigator before Commvault Backup & Recovery but could not back up virtual machines or perform snapshot backups. This was a major problem, as we had a large environment of virtual machines that were not being backed up. Commvault solved this problem, as it can back up both virtual and physical machines. This was the main reason we chose Commvault, and we have been very happy with it since then. Atempo Time Navigator also had horrible support.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a return on investment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Commvault's pricing model and pricing structure were initially confusing, but once we worked more closely with the company, we were able to transition to a subscription license that saved us a lot of money. Commvault had some problems with their costing and pricing initially, but the subscription model is a good one, and the pricing is fair.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated Dell NetWorker and Veeam Backup & Replication. Because Veeam was not able to back up physical machines at the time, we eliminated it from the evaluation.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Commvault Backup & Recovery nine out of ten.
We are not currently using Metallic, but we are investigating it with our Commvault team for our renewal in 2025. We are also renewing our hardware at the same time. Therefore, we are considering leveraging the Commvault cloud for additional protection, possibly as a tertiary copy with ransomware protection. We engaged with Commvault this year and conducted a ransomware readiness assessment. So, we are looking at Commvault Cloud as a potential location for an AirGap copy.
Implementing Commvault is just as challenging as other backup and recovery solutions, but it is not significantly more difficult.
I have two sites with storage pools at two different locations. One is a primary data center and the other is a secondary data center. I also have some cloud bucket storage. Commvault is used by me and my assisted admin team of 25 people. We provide backup and recovery services to everyone else.
I perform maintenance on Commvault on a quarterly basis.
I recommend taking a close look at using Commvault's software deduplication to write to a hyperscale storage pool, rather than spending a lot of money on a Data Domain appliance with dedupe in the hardware. We saw real cost savings with this approach. Additionally, the new Commvault Cloud subclient is very beneficial for protecting against ransomware, especially by providing air-gapped copies of data. This allows us to eliminate tape from our environment, which was a major goal for us.