Information Brief - Why Commvault is Hot!
June 2022
Below is a statement from Commvault’s CEO on their FY 2022 year end results:
"We are pleased to have delivered another record quarter to cap off the best year in our history," said Sanjay Mirchandani, President and CEO. "Demand is strong for our differentiated portfolio, our team is executing, and we are taking market share. We are excited about our growth prospects in the new fiscal year."
From DataPivot’s perspective, Commvault’s continued success is, in many ways, driven by the points we outline below.
Reason 1: Completeness
Wherever company data resides - on-premise, public cloud, SaaS applications, and endpoints - Commvault can backup and protect the data. There are practically NO use cases that Commvault cannot address from a data protection perspective.
This is critical as data is more spread out than ever before. Mirchandani addressed this point on an earnings call in 2021 saying:
“Data is in constant motion, almost kinetic, if you will, from here to there, from this application to that application, never has data been further away from the tool that created it than it is now and this causes multi-generational data sprawl throughout an organization and it's only getting worse as data grows exponentially. Frankly, it's out of control. This introduces massive data fragmentation, inefficiencies and potential points of failure.”
One longtime Commvault customer of DataPivot’s is now backing up the following workloads: Legacy on-premise including Isilon, native Azure workloads, native AWS, O365 AND soon to add Kubernetes. During this transformation from on-premise to a hybrid model, they did not need to change their backup software. Commvault has met and continues to meet all of their evolving data protection requirements.
Reason 2: Disaster Recovery
With the release of LiveSync in 2017, customers realized they could use one product – Commvault – to manage their backups and DR replication. Over the past few years the lines between backup and DR have blurred. Today they can use one product with Commvault.
One of our clients uses Commvault LiveSync to replicate their on-premise data to Azure. With this solution, they can seamlessly perform DR tests on a quarterly basis without impacting production. Easy DR testing provides real value to the organization.
Reason 3: Cost Savings.
Commvault helps customers save money and increase efficiencies. How? By eliminating point solutions. With the example we highlighted above, LiveSync – which is included in Commvault Complete – replaced costly licensing from Zerto. Other ways Commvault is reducing costs for clients include de-duplicating backup data before sending offsite; support of inexpensive storage targets including Cloudian’s S3 for on-premise and Wasabi for cloud storage. Some companies have to support multiple backup & DR products which all come with their own contracts, hardware, and support requirements. This can all be consolidated to a single solution with the Commvault platform.
Reason 4: Cloud Workloads & Portability
As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, they are finding that native snapshots are not meeting their retention requirements nor providing enough protection. A long standing principle of data protection is to separate your production data from your backup environment. In other words, do not put all of your eggs in one basket and rely on your cloud provider for backups.
Plus many existing Enterprise Backup solutions were designed for on premise and aren’t operationally or functionally viable for the cloud. Commvault is the original software defined platform. They paid attention to the public cloud very early on and are way ahead of the competition in this area.
Commvault can be deployed with no caveats in the public cloud to manage native backups efficiently and cost effectively. Commvault’s ability to de-duplicate data, utilize lower cost cloud storage and power down cloud resources when not in use all provide additional cost savings to organizations.
Reason 5: SaaS Applications
Companies would never have entertained not backing up their on-premise Exchange data. The same principle applies to today’s SaaS applications such as O365 and Salesforce. Even Microsoft and Salesforce recommend a 3rd party backup of their application. This is not a question of resiliency or uptime of the application. This has more to do with keeping a separate copy of your data to protect from the myriad of issues that can arise – Ransomware, malware, human error, insider threats, or simply the peace of mind of having a separate copy that is within your own corporate control. DataPivot is seeing an increase in O365 backup demand due to increase customer reliance on SharePoint and OneDrive. Commvault does a nice job of backing up leading SaaS applications such as O365, SFDC and G Suite.
Reason 6: Diverse Workloads
When the virtualization wave arrived fifteen years ago, VMware was the defacto standard and backup technologies only had to support one hypervisor. That is no longer the case as there a multiple viable hypervisors & containers. Companies are now having to deal with traditional on-premise VMware workloads, multiple public clouds, containers such as Kubernetes, open source databases, SaaS, you name it. Applications are everywhere and of every ilk and Commvault has the widest range of support.
Reason 7: Reporting
Perhaps one of the most underestimated of Commvault’s capabilities is reporting. Ask any IT executive about how much time audits and compliance reporting can consume and you’ll find a consensus – it’s way too much. Commvault has built in reporting that can be customized but the out of the box reports typically meet client requirements. There is a lot of value in being able to provide reports, trends, or analytics in real time vs. waiting weeks or even worse, not being able to provide it at all.
Reason 8: Single Dashboard
One product, one dashboard, no point solutions for all your workloads and data.
Reason 9: Activate
Data is the world’s most valuable resource. Companies are looking to harness their data for a competitive advantage. Commvault is more than “backup,” it is a Data Management Platform. Commvault Complete provides the most comprehensive coverage for backup/recovery and DR. Commvault Activate helps companies reclaim storage, classify their data and implement policies to meet GRC requirements.
Reason 10: Ransomware Risk Mitigation
Commvault can help identify anomalies within the backups it manages. If anomalies are detected on a media agent, it can disable itself and disconnect the storage to protect the backup data. There are also Ransomware settings that include setting up honeypots. If these honeypots get accessed, alerts are sent out. As an added layer, DataPivot also has service offerings to setup one-way traffic, encrypted tunnels to isolate offsite Media Agents for additional protection. Commvault also supports immutable storage.
Reason 11: Metallic
Some might point to Metallic as being a Top 3 reason why Commvault is hot. That may be the case. Metallic is Commvault’s SaaS offering that is built on the Commvault Complete technology. Metallic SaaS backs up VMs, Databases, O365 and Kubernetes. We expect Metallic to continue to add support for more workloads as the integrate enterprise Commvault features. Another offering is Metallic Cloud Storage Services (MCSS) which is the Easy button for sending data to the cloud with Commvault. MCSS is managed by Commvault in Azure.
(www.metallic.io)
Reason 12: Software Defined
Commvault can utilize existing server and storage infrastructure. Unlike appliances which result in expensive vendor lock-in, Commvault provides customers with the freedom of choice. Choose your server, cloud and storage vendor of choice.
DATAPIVOT TECHNOLOGIES:
“Your Complete Commvault Solution Provider.”