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.

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.

And while I couldn't put a number to it, we have spent significantly less time managing and worrying about our backups. Recovery times are also way quicker than they used to be because they simply work.