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.

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.

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.

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.

I've been using Commvault Backup & Recovery since 2006.

Commvault is very stable and I cannot think of any major downtime we have had in the last decade.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The solution must provide deception files across the network.

I have been using the solution for two years. My organization has been using it for four years.

I haven't seen any performance issues with 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.

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.

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.

For the price that we spend, the peace of mind that the tool gives us is an ROI.

I’m happy with the pricing of the product.

It's a very good solution that meets most needs in the deceptions space. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

Commvault should keep and continue to develop the Java GUI.

I have been using Commvault Cloud for two years.

I would rate the stability of Commvault Cloud a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The implementation was completed in-house.

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.

Commvault Cloud is perhaps the best value for our money that I have seen in a backup product.

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.

We had a requirement to store our database and virtual machine backups in the cloud instead of having local backups. To fulfill that requirement, we use a Metallic solution. The reason that we are moving to Commvault Metallic is that, at that moment, we are using a Commvault backup solution. While using the Commvault backup solution we got positive feedback. So, we didn't hesitate to move to their own cloud solution, Metallic. While using this product, we've also received the same positive feedback.

We had a backup solution. We were trying to find a better backup solution than the old one. We were searching for backup solutions based on the below criteria:

• Backup-taking method
• Backup retention and the ability to change retention
• WORM feature availability
• Security tools
• 24/7 Availability
• Portability of Backup and VM
• Deduplication ratios
• Encryption mechanism

While we were looking out at the market, we found this solution perfectly matched so we decided to try it.

The most valuable feature is the deduplication ratio. It saves most of our space and reduces the network traffic. Space is a very important factor. Thanks to this deduplication ratio, we are able to maintain our backup retention time for a variety of reasons. It also reduces network traffic and saves us from network-related issues. When the backup gets smaller, we can easily transfer between locations very quickly and accurately. It provides good cost savings as well.

We are using a production environment with customer-sensitive data on it. As per our central bank rules and regulations, we can't keep our customer's sensitive data in the cloud. So we are looking forward to having a good solution that can work with us. The Metallic team is working on this and will come up with a better solution in the future. If we can figure out this issue, we won't have future issues relating to our government authorities, and we can also fulfill our company's requirements easily.

I've been using this product for the last year.

It is maintaining our backup without failing.

The scalability is very good.

The support team wants to improve its SLA.

We did use a different solution; this is the better solution for us.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented with a vendor team and I would rate their services eight out of ten.

We have noticed an ROI related to good space and network utilization savings.

In this product, the cost-benefit is very high.

We also evaluated EMC NetWorker, Veeam, et cetera.

This is one of the best solutions I've come across.

The product is used purely for backup and restoration of data. A company can use the product if it needs to keep the sensitive data in its disk and cloud safe.

The 1-Touch recovery feature is helpful for all customers. If anything happens in the environment and a server shuts down, we can bring it back using the 1-Touch recovery feature. Commvault Backup & Recovery is simple compared to other products.

The stability of the tool could be improved. We were not able to take a secondary copy in Metallic on-premise. Some pharmaceutical customers keep their data on-premise so that they can maintain a copy on-premise if something happens to the cloud. Metallic does not provide an option to save a copy of data on-premises.

I have been using the solution for four years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the stability an eight and a half or nine out of ten.

It is scalable. We are providing services for 30 to 45 customers in our organization.

The support team is good. Whenever we raise tickets, the support team is available 24/7.

The initial setup is straightforward. As a beginner, I learned the entire deployment process in an hour. The entire configuration takes three to four hours to complete. The download takes 30 minutes. The installation is purely based on the network strength. If everything is good and we download the right package, the console can be deployed in three to four hours.

We need to download Media Kit from the console to deploy the solution. Then, we must extract it and download the entire software package. After that, we run a set of files from the downloaded package.

The solution is expensive, but it is worth the money. When we choose a good quality product, we must pay for it. We should not expect a good quality product at a lower price.

I have used versions 11.28 to 11.30. I have four years of experience in technical support. We should not think that the solution is expensive. It is worth the money. It is a worthy product. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.