Commvault Cloud - Foundational Protection

I work with a variety of backup solutions including Commvault, Avamar, Rubrik, and similar tools. I am part of Tata Consultancy Services where we pitch all these solutions to customers from the backup perspective while the overall solution revolves around how we are transforming the overall IT estate for the customers. This is a subpart of it, but we do deal with the backup solutions as a solution for the customers.

I have been dealing with Commvault Cloud for about four or five years and have been selling solutions around Commvault.

When it comes to recommending Commvault Cloud, it varies from manufacturing to retail. We usually deal with all the enterprise customers with petabyte scale of data in the environment. Wherever we have reliance RTO and RPO requirements from the customers for shipping the backup copies to the cloud, we leverage different components from Commvault. For example, we basically keep the CommServe in one of the cloud environments to have the policy orchestrations and all that. To ensure that whenever required, we can restore from the latest backups using Commvault Cloud onto the public cloud environments while the primary workloads are running on-premise. This is one scenario, but it spans across the industries and across the size of the customers where we leverage all these enterprise solutions, typically for the production workloads. We also leverage the cloud-native solutions from the respective hyperscalers for the non-production workloads to ensure that we are saving on the license costs while achieving the compression and dedupe capabilities from tools such as Commvault.

We find the most valuable features in Commvault Cloud to be from the appliances perspective. I mentioned CommServe, which basically orchestrates the overall backup policies for the customers. The features are primarily from the backup and restore perspective, which is a typical use case that we solution for the customer.

Basically, the public cloud acts as a bigger solution for the on-premise while the on-premise acts as a DR for the public cloud workloads.

I think improvements could be made in Commvault Cloud. Lately what I have seen is that there are AI capabilities that different data protection organizations are coming up with, which basically revolves around tiering of not frequently accessible data to glacier kind of storage, plus bringing in a high level of compression and deduplication capabilities. All those features I believe are there in other customers and they are bringing in new use cases from the AI perspective which I have not recently seen in Commvault.

I have seen that Dell does have such features. We recently pitched a solution to the customers where we talked about data tiering and the other AI use cases, identifying the data by itself and autonomously taking decisions on how to tier the data between the different storage classes that we have. Those kind of capabilities that we have proposed to the customer as far as the partner solutions are concerned.

I would like to see AI capabilities in Commvault Cloud. The rest of the features pretty much align with the other enterprise solutions that we have in the market. It is just the AI capability that is being asked by the customers as well as that I see missing with Commvault.

I have been working in this field for eight years.

I would rate the technical support provided by Commvault from 1 to 10. I do not come from the delivery background but from the solution architect background, so I sell the solution to the customers. At the pre-sale cycle, we have spocks aligned from Commvault with whom we get in touch, and they provide all the required support that we need.

I would assess the flexibility of Commvault Cloud in supporting cloud-based and on-premises deployments by saying that the components more or less remain the same. It depends on how many workloads that we are running onto the cloud. Whether to use production or whether to use Commvault solutions for the production workloads or take them to the non-production. We typically look for how much data storage that we need to protect via Commvault. Whether we are achieving a business case and bringing in cost-saving for the customer if the data size is too high from the non-production workloads as well. We typically go on and propose to the customer to leverage Commvault for the non-production workloads as well. For hybrid cloud customers, we have environments across on-premise and cloud. They have their virtual appliances running on Commvault in public cloud as well as the on-premise workloads. They typically use public cloud as a failover to the on-premise environment while they use on-premise for the workloads that are running on the public cloud.

To evaluate Commvault Cloud disaster recovery performance, we look for features including deduplication and how much data that we are saving and whether the cost saving comes from the actual FET that we get out of Commvault. FET is basically how much data that we need to back up using Commvault solution. Plus we look at how many licenses that we require. Competitors charge for per-VM based licenses. In Commvault we have VM-based licensing as well. I am not too sure with respect to how many licenses that we need for the file storage. These are the evaluation criteria when we are assessing what backup solution to go ahead with.

The product is competitive when it comes to the pricing. It is pretty much in line with the partner solutions.

I usually recommend other solutions instead of Commvault Cloud. We face a variety of customers where the customers already have solutions running in their environment. If not, if a customer wants a different solution, if they are moving from legacy systems to the cloud and there is a need to propose a new solution, then we go ahead with new backup data protection solutions. Otherwise, whatever that is running in the customer's environment and they are pretty much happy with it, we go ahead with the same solution for the customers.

I would rate this review overall as an eight out of ten.

Our main use cases for Commvault Cloud are primarily BFSI and banking.

The most helpful features of Commvault Cloud are its extensive capabilities, as they are in a position to take care of whatever use case presented to it.

Commvault Cloud provides features for managing multi-cloud environments.

Commvault Cloud has deduplication technology as part of its features.

I don't see any issue with storage efficiency or performance of the application; the only issue is it's a costly solution.

It's quite costly, but I would still consider it's worth the investment.

I have been working with Commvault Cloud for approximately three years.

It is not difficult to deploy Commvault Cloud; however, it requires good skills and a competent person to implement it, while Veeam will be completely simpler to deploy.

If a person knows what they are doing, deploying Commvault Cloud can take a few hours to a few days, depending on the use case.

I do not experience difficulties related to stability; the product is good in that regard.

I have not faced any downtimes with Commvault Cloud. The concerns arise more when I want changes or need to do some configuration, and if a bug appears, I reach out, and they are good at assisting.

I would consider that Commvault Cloud is scalable enough for those types of applications, as we are using them for multiple applications.

I am reasonably satisfied with Commvault Cloud's technical support team; however, the primary aspect is the number of people on the ground, which is limited, and the number of people who know Commvault Cloud is lesser compared to Veeam.

If I have an issue, it will indeed take more time to receive a response because they have limited resources, but otherwise, Commvault Cloud has reasonable support, although they will not come on-site and it will be remote support.

The main difference between Commvault Cloud and Veeam is that Commvault Cloud is much more real cross-platform and multi-cloud, designed for a real, exhaustive, real cross-platform, cross-cloud environment, evident in terms of a single pane of window. Veeam is more geared towards different types of use cases, as Veeam has naturally been for virtual environments and has been shaping up quite reasonably for cloud, being much simpler in terms of usability compared to Commvault Cloud.

The concerns arise more when I want changes or need to do some configuration. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Commvault Cloud a nine.