Commvault handles our backups across both cloud and data center environments. It manages our short-term backups on-premises, followed by a transfer to disaster recovery for data older than 30 days, ultimately migrating them to long-term storage.
We are seeking a solution for secure and encrypted backups that comply with both our information security policy and the data retention requirements for database archive logs. Additionally, these backups must fulfill all customer service level agreements for all storage under our responsibility, including NAS, SAN, and any other backup methods specified in our service catalog.
Our deployment model is a hybrid of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure. We primarily use AWS as our main cloud provider, with Azure as a secondary option.
We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies.
We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations.
Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages.
Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks.
It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs.
It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements.
The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights.
Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action.
To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices.
Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure.
By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA.
It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices.
Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms.
It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities.
In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent.
It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.
The features I find most helpful in Commvault are its ability to perform incremental backups and significantly reduce backup times for our diverse multi-architecture, multi-environment environment. This includes everything from Cisco equipment to IBM equipment, as well as SAN and NAS storage. Commvault allows us to back up these systems quickly and efficiently, and even recover data at equally impressive speeds.
Commvault could benefit from increased automation to streamline processes and enhance predictability. This includes automating routine tasks where appropriate, which would improve efficiency and reduce the need for support tickets. Additionally, when support is required, automating elements of the process and providing faster data access would enable quicker issue identification and resolution, preventing potential SLAs from being breached.
I have been using Commvault Cloud for seven years.
We haven't had problems, so Commvault is a very stable product from our perspective.
Commvault is highly scalable. We've successfully extended its reach by replicating the on-premises environment in the cloud and leveraging additional capacity across other utilized environments. This flexibility aligns well with the subscription licensing model.
We don't send many support tickets because Commvault is very reliable. We mainly handle user inquiries about how to use the product, conduct regular quarterly reviews, and provide dedicated technical account management.
Our primary backup solution has been Commvault, although different teams have utilized IBM Tivoli and other capabilities like Rubrik in the past. Commvault's stability and cost-effectiveness have solidified its position as our preferred choice.
The initial deployment was straightforward, except for some network connectivity issues related to specific aspects of connectivity, e.g., bandwidth, latency, and routing. Thankfully, there were no significant problems with the tool itself.
Our strategy was to be able to connect globally, from our data centers to our cloud solution.
Our deployment involved six individuals: two working on AWS, two on-premises, and two at the disaster recovery site.
We implemented our solution using Accenture, our third-party managed service provider. This was beneficial because we could leverage our existing relationship and account team, who were familiar with our environment. Their expertise proved invaluable during upgrades and major changes. Furthermore, we obtained the necessary technical skills and support from both Commvault and Accenture.
Preventative measures against outages limit their impact on customers, thereby maintaining near-perfect SLAs. This translates to increased customer satisfaction and minimal business disruption, which essentially constitutes our return on investment.
Using a subscription-based license has been advantageous. We've been able to significantly reduce costs by tailoring our spending to our actual usage. This is a stark contrast to the earlier model with its prohibitively high fixed-price licenses.
After evaluating Rubrik, we compared it to our existing backup solutions: AWS backups used by other teams and the IBM Tivoli TSM environment. The key differences between these options lie in their deployment and recovery capabilities. Some solutions are cloud-based, while others require on-premises infrastructure. Additionally, some have limitations in recovering data from specific environments, making them less suitable for multi-site backup scenarios.
I would rate Commvault Cloud a ten out of ten.
Transitioning from various solutions made implementation quite smooth. However, due to its extended use, we lack a comprehensive baseline for evaluation. We simply don't have enough prior cases to compare Commvault's implementation difficulty against.
Our company has implemented a large-scale global deployment with 5,000 endpoints across multiple data centers, regions, locations, and cloud providers.
We perform standard upgrades on both the Commvault servers and the storage environments NAS and SAN we deploy. These upgrades are determined by the operating system requirements of the Commvault servers. For short-term backups, we utilize on-premise storage, while long-term backups leverage AWS cloud storage.
While customer references are valuable, the ability to tailor our environment to meet our specific needs is equally important. This means defining the backup architecture based on the specific requirements of each application, like SIP shares and databases. Each application has unique needs, so understanding those requirements is crucial for crafting the right architecture to fulfill them.
