Commvault Cloud Reviews

We're using it mainly to back up operating systems like Windows, Linux, and databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL.

It has simplified disaster recovery and we have used it for migration as well. For migrating from old FX servers to new FX servers, it was not possible to use any new feature from VMware. There was just vMotion and the success rate of migration of the whole disk was less than 50 percent. It was not possible to manage it that way. We used Live Sync and it was able to migrate 150 machines every day during the weekend, without major problems. That saved us a couple of weeks of time, probably 50 percent of the time it would have taken us. Without Live Sync it wouldn't have been possible to manage it.

The fact that the solution is a single platform has definitely enabled our company to accelerate growth because you don't need to leave the Commvault console. With NetBackup or TSM (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) when it comes to customization of scripts for databases, you have to go into the client at the operating system level and modify the scripts. With Commvault you don't have to do that. You don't need to access the operating system, which simplifies the work.

Commvault helps minimize the time spent on backup tasks, creating time for other projects. I'm able to write a workflow in Commvault's internal environment and I can automate any action I did manually before. For example, deployment of remote offices can be fully automated.

It also saves us money on infrastructure because the configuration which will be used for IntelliSnapshotting is very simplified.

Another company I worked for previously was being attacked by a ransomware virus. The company lost its whole Windows infrastructure, so it didn't have Active Directory. Commvault was on Windows as well and the Knowledge Base which ran on Linux was authenticated with AD. Everyone lost their workstations.

The recovery process was that we got the database from Commvault, because part of raising cases includes the ability to upload databases to Commvault. The Windows team found a backup of the main controller and the most important thing was to start communications and for every one to have Active Directory. With Commvault's support, we were also able to develop a process which recovered Volume C, and that was sufficient to fix the images. Within two months they were able to recover the whole infrastructure from scratch. Without Commvault, or with another solution based on Windows, I don't think the recovery would have been possible. 

I had never seen this kind of disaster. Nobody expects to lose everything. You think about losing the primary location or a remote office location, but no one thinks about losing the whole platform.

Among the best features are the BMR (Bare Metal Recovery), Live Sync, and IntelliSnap, which is used for snapshots of hypervisor storage. It's predefined so you only need to enable it and it works. I haven't seen anything like this in other backup tools like Veritas NetBackup or Dell EMC or TSM. We will use snapshotting for all our machines.

Live Sync replicates incremental data to remote locations. If you lose your primary data center, you enable the replicated machines in your DR location so you don't need to restore data.

It's great as a DR solution because it has a lot of capabilities for syncing with a cloud provider. But if you want to keep everything in-house, it's great that way as well because the replication is done by incrementals.

When it comes to the user interface for managing on-prem, cloud, or multi-cloud environments in one place, it's always better to have everything in one. I myself like multiple consoles, a Java console and an admin console. I only work with the Java console. It's great because it's possible to configure everything from there. But operations has that nice console, and having that one console is better than having multiple consoles.

They should move the CommServe outside of Windows machines and the database should be distributed among servers. It's still a single point of failure.

Also, I work a lot with workflows, which means a combination of XML files and commands. It would be helpful if they unified the use of workflows.

I have been using Commvault at my current company for almost two years but I have a total of five years of experience with it. I'm a Commvault engineer. I have built Commvault from scratch using the approach that is best for the client, and then prepared the documentation.

We are using service pack 16 because it is a new deployment so we have to deploy that before we push updates.

I haven't seen a crash of the database. The stability is great.

When I started with Commvault and compared it with NetBackup, I found that Commvault had features that NetBackup didn't have. Currently, we are able to cover 12,000 virtual machines.

Commvault has what it calls a HyperScale Appliance which is a media agent with the disk. This is the best option for storing data. The media agents are in clusters so they share data. It's a nice feature and I haven't seen any other backup company that has integrated this kind of solution. They always use a third-party vendor for this capability. But that involves communication over the network, something which HyperScale skips.

We plan on using IntelliSnaps more and we are testing the cloud backup. We will use the cloud as a hot-DR location. I expect that will happen this year.

From my experience, I have had the best support interactions with Commvault. I always get a response within a couple of hours. If there is a task for Commvault's development side involved in the issue, I get an update every three days that someone is working on it. 

I have yet to find a support engineer at Commvault who has to speak to someone else. They are always able to troubleshoot the issue on the first strike. I can definitely recommend Commvault support.

Our company previously used NetBackup and TSM. One of the reasons we switched to Commvault was that our company was not satisfied with IBM's support. It was challenging. If support is not able to help you manage problems, you can't use the solution.

The plus with Commvault is that it really focuses on automation for deploying machines and discovering databases, etc. A Commvault administrator doesn't need to understand, in-depth, the application he is backing up because he doesn't need access into the application. It's much more focused on snapshotting for the synchronization between locations. The BMR process can be used across the cloud and on-prem solutions, so you can easily move machines from your environment to a cloud environment. And from that cloud environment you can convert to another vendor in the cloud.

That is all built on the BMR process, which is better than any other backup tool I know. Some of them, like TSM, don't even include a native BMR solution. Instead there is a third-party vendor that does it, so it's not fully-integrated.

I like it when everything is in one console and things can be automated via an internal workflow and deployment is fully automated so I don't need to access the operating system or application platform. Those are all benefits of Commvault.

The initial setup was really easy for me because I already had experience with NetBackup and TSM. It wasn't difficult for me to understand Commvault's logic. But, in my opinion, it's very easy to understand because the logic involved is minimal yet it offers a lot of configurable options. Because the process for the installation of agents, such as for databases and applications, is fully automated, you don't need to touch the application at all. That is one of the main reasons I prefer Commvault over other tools, where you always need to touch the client.

A basic implementation of Commvault depends on the size of the company. Installation of the server takes a couple of hours, but that is the same as with other backup tools. But the installation of it on clients and their configurations will take days if you don't want to customize it because Commvault comes with pre-defined groups. The process will take a number of days for a small company.

In terms of staff for deployment and maintenance, it could be just one person involved, depending on the roles of the people in the company. This person has to be able to do a lot of things, so it depends on whether he has these responsibilities and the capabilities.

We have about 100 users of the solution because we have a lot of operations.

The ROI is there, but I don't have figures on it.

Our deployment is primarily on-prem. We are trying to assess the cloud capabilities but it looks like the cloud is more expensive if you want to have the whole infrastructure.

Commvault is more administrator-friendly than other backup tools.

We are using Commvault for cloud support, but that part is at the PoC stage. But it's the same as the on-prem solution. Whether the library is on physical disk or in the cloud, it looks the same in Commvault, so that's not an issue in terms of configuration or use. There are even more cloud vendors than I had heard of and it looks like Commvault supports all of them.

We don't use it, but there is an archive function in Commvault which allows you to move data from primary storage to another type which is much cheaper.

Version 11 of Commvault has been on the market for something like seven years now. They have changed the naming so what they called service packs are now called feature packs. That means they are no longer changing the version number and they do what they call a "platform release." That was changed in SP19. In each new pack they add new features every three months. They also have hotfix releases every week or so.

I'm still surprised that they continue to come out with features that are really nice and that you didn't even think were possible.

We have changed out approach to our ROBO backup solution. Utilising Commvault we can now automate the decommissioning of our remote project sites and convert these on-premise backups into Azure hosted VMs. This not only brings the service online faster for our users but also reduces the operational impact of our remote IT staff, as they now no longer need to manually manage the data into the cloud or our eventual archive platform.

One of the biggest features is the global deduplication of our data sets. AWE have deployed a disk-to-disk-to-cloud solution for our on-premise backups. The capacity savings of this approach lead to significant cost savings on the long term retention of data in the cloud for us.

We have also been very impressed with the integration with public cloud services. We have deployed our Commvault environment on-premise and into Azure and this has given us the ability to not only make use of cloud storage for long tern retention, but also achieve the same level of protection as our on-premise systems for our Azure hosted IaaS VMs. We have also deployed backups from Commvault in Azure to our Office 365 install base too.

The cloud integration is a massive win for us, giving us a single backup service for all of our on-premise and cloud systems.

I have also been very happy with the automated updating of the platform. Since we have been running the platform we have had around five service packs released. These are automatically updated after a period of time (we set the system to defer updates for one month). The updates run without service disruption and patches the central management system, the media agents and the client agents too. Compared to our previous vendor this is another huge operational saving for out IT staff and ensures we get to utilize the new features that are dropped with each new SP.

The new HTML5-based management portals are very nice, but do not yet have all of the features of the Java-based client. I’d like to see all of the features move over to HTML5 so that we do not have to use Java ideally.

We have had no issues with stability. The service has been running for 18 months with no loss of service due to the platform.

We have grown our initial, on-premise VM-only backup solution to cover all three of our on-premise datacentres as well as our Azure IaaS and O365 environments. This was easy to do and the central management tool set easily coped with our rapid scaling up to our entire estate.

Customer Service:

We have had excellent engagement with our account team and they have been very helpful in ensuring that we get the most out of the platform. We get regular contact and they are keen to listen to data management issues that we have and see how they can address them with the Commvault platform. This has led us to be engaged in a couple of Beta test programmes and get early access to new features in some cases that resolved our challenges.

Technical Support:

Very good! We have had some very good dealings with support. In the main, this has been around us securing new systems and tweaking policies to get the best result for our infrastructure. In most cases the person answering the call resolved the ticket first time. When calls were escalated, the response was fast and the issue resolved to our satisfaction.

We often had scale issues with our previous vendor deployment or found other solutions were better for a particular system and so would introduce differing technologies to address these challenges. This led us to have a large and awkward-to-manage backup estate.

The biggest driver for us was to get all of the backup services into one tool set and to get better control and visibility of our data estate.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The only complex part was seeding our initial backup into Azure as, at the time, we were not on Express Route. We set bandwidth limits for aux copies during the working day and allowed the copies to burst out-of-hours. This just meant it took a week or so for the initial seeding to complete but all subsequent incremental copies ran fine.

After implementing Express Route we changes our architecture to copy the data through Azure hosted media agents into Azure storage. This then allowed us to seed much faster, although we now use the Azure import service for migrating large archive sets when required, as this is the fastest/cheapest approach we have found.

We used a vendor team to perform our initial deployment (a single resource). The consultant was very knowledgeable on the Commvault platform and made good recommendations regarding policy approaches to the various services we were targeting. The consultant performed a handover to our internal staff and we complimented this with certified training courses for the team who engage with our backup solution the most so that they could take on the task of scaling the deployment to the rest of our estate.

We have consolidated all of our backup technologies into the single platform and reduced maintenance costs and complexity in doing so. The OPEX costs equate to around the same but the biggest value returns have been in addressing our scale issues, ensuring compliance with backup policies and a significant reduction in operational staff’s time to manage the estate.

There is now a subscription based licence option that, depending on your environment, could offer a more efficient method to licence the solution if you are OPEX cost driven rather than CAPEX. This was not a concern for our deployment and we implemented on perpetual licences which had more commercial value to our business.

Initially we were looking at Veeam, as our first challenge was to address our on-premise VMware estate. Although they had a good vSphere integrated solution, we found limitations in cloud and beyond the virtual environment to be an issue for us. This was driven form our desire to have a tool set which could encompass all of our estate and allow us to simplify management and compliance etc.

Take the opportunity when engaging the Commvault sales team to walk them through other data management challenges that you have. You’ll likely find that the "backup" solution that you were looking for might be able to address these challenges and provide you with a greater ROI. This certainly worked for us and we have several new initiatives being developed to get more even value out of our deployment.

I'm using it in my company and using it with customers. 

The product offers many very valuable features that we use often.

It is straightforward to set up. 

It's stable.

Technical support is great. 

The solution is scalable. 

There are some features that need general improvement. 

With respect to the cloud, they need to offer more integrations.

We'd like to see the administration be a bit easier with respect to the command center in the future.

I've used the solution for 12 years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good. I'd rate the reliability nine out of ten. 

It is scalable. It is able to expand as needed. I'd rate the ability to scale at an eight or nine out of ten. 

In our company, we have about 100 people using the solution. 

They offer very good technical support. 

I do work with a variety of other products as well. Commvault offers easy administration and access and also is less complex. It has a lot of upsides. 

The solution is very simple to set up. 

The maintenance and how many people need to maintain the solution varies according to the product that is used. 

The pricing is mid-range. It's not too high, not too low.

We are Commvault partners. 

I'm using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

It's an enterprise backup tool. It is the competitor to Dell and IBM, TSM and Symantec NetBackup, or rather what's called Veritas NetBackup. 

It's an enterprise data protection tool. It's almost in the top three or four solutions out there.  

We have one environment with 500 servers, and another environment with 1,000 servers.

We definitely plan to continue using Commvault. We basically support the customers, their MSP. We use Dell as our own data center MSP product but we are supporting this for other customers.

It's a very good competitor database.

It's very user-friendly. It supports a wide range of workloads. It's quite easy to use, it's very powerful and it's scalable.

It's got the ability to do automation, that's another good thing about it. It's got workflow automation built-in. It enables you to automate certain tasks.

It can create backups, restore, and be used for DR testing. It's got all those features which are better than many other tools out there. It also has good reporting as well. 

It has a very easy-to-use interface that allows you to do everything within a single pane of glass — everything is right there. It's superior to many products in terms of its management interface.

We've run into some issues when attempting to restore very large numbers of files. Of course, that's more of a design issue. For example, if you have, say, 10 million small files with added encryption, and you want to restore them, it can end up taking days to restore them. That is a file-level restoring operation. One option is to go for Image Level backup and restore the entire image, which is much faster. Then you can extract whatever data you want from that image.

IntelliSnap is a storage snapshot application for storage snapshots. The tool is very good but we could not use it because we didn't have compatible storage. That would've helped us a lot because that's one of the very few tools which integrates with lots of storage products out there. It's very flexible, very easy-to-use. We had the VMware vSAN version which is not supported by Commvault IntelliSnap. 

The thing about Commvault is there are a lot of moving parts. You have to design it properly for resources, hardware and software, and licensing because you can install it on any of your Intel servers and then you can use any other storage as the destination. It just comes down to proper lower-level design in sizing.

I have been using Commvault for the past five years.

Commvault is quite stable.

The environment can scale nicely. It's got the ability to scale for multi-node clusters, but you need to ensure that you keep it updated.  

Commvault support is usually very, very responsive and they always help us quickly resolve any problems that we may have — they are excellent.

The initial setup is very easy, actually. We did it within one day.

We had a professional service engagement with Commvault and they did it in a matter of roughly one day. Implementation and configuration of the policies — it only took one day to set it up and test it.

We needed to have professional assistance from Commvault as it can be a little difficult to deploy. It can be done, but it's always handy to have professional assistance from Commvault factored into your own solution.

Capacity licensing is very good with Commvault.

I would definitely recommend using Commvault. On a scale from one to ten, I would give Commvault a rating of eight.

I am primarily using Commvault for backing up the physical and virtual servers.

This product has allowed us to recover data when we've had issues.

This product does what it says it's going to do, and generally backs up the data that you want it to back up.

It is a little more complicated than it really needs to be.

Reporting could definitely be improved.

I have been using Commvault, personally, for about three years.

It works, and there are definitely some bugs, but nothing major.

As it gets larger, it gets a lot more complex in terms of the configuration. Generally, the larger it gets, the harder it is to manage. We probably have about 1,000 servers right now that it is backing up.

In general, technical support is okay. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Prior to Commvault, we used Tivoli Storage Manager from IBM. It is a bit lacking in terms of features, compared to Commvault.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward.

The price is a little bit high.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Commvault is to do their research. It's a good product for most use cases, although it's not the best. My main complaint is that it needs better reporting.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Right now we are using on-premise and cloud backups. We run 300 to 400 jobs per day.

Compared to other products out there, we have found that Commvault is best suited for our needs. We can easily restore and deploy the data.

Previously, before the introduction of Commvault, we used other software including Rubrik. But with Commvault we can deploy multiple clients at a time and we can back up multiple clients without any issues. Right now, we are using about 1,000 VMs. Before Commvault we used to back up about 200 servers and 100 VMs. Previously, backups took nine hours. With Commvault it takes minutes.

The solution definitely helps our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and to spend time on other projects. If we need to run backups for dozens of servers, it can be done in one minute because it can be done in a click. We can select the backups by selecting the client computer groups. We can categorize those groups and, based on that categorization, we can run the backups and we can restore the VMs as well. It can be done in minutes. Running backups twice a week, it saves us about 5 to 6 hours each time.

It is also saving us on infrastructure costs and has helped optimize infrastructure usage, like storage space. By using Commvault we have saved about 3 TBs of space.

We have used it to recover data when there was a problem with our database. It took about four hours to bring the data back. But recently, we introduced HA and it has saved us more time. With HA the data can be brought up in one hour. With other solutions it would take 10 to 24 hours.

We do monitor all the backups using the user interface. It is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and easy to create solutions with it. It is very comfortable. We can do multiple operations at a time.

We use Commvault Command Center for backups and restores and for the creation of new clients. We use it for other functionalities as well. In terms of VMware, I can go directly to the Command Center, enter VMware, and I can search it directly. Command Center is very useful and it can be used for more advanced techniques.

The cloud support is good. The on-premises cloud is working for us as is traditional cloud. All the clouds we're using are working with Commvault. We have Office365 and Azure.

I need documentation for Azure backups. One expectation that I have is regarding PDF documentation. When I was trying to browse the documentation, I could not locate that. The documentation should be in PDF format where it can be downloaded easily.

I have been using Commvault for the past five years.

The stability has been good. We haven't had any issues.

Scaling can be done easily.

I am now looking into an orchestrator. High-availability is another future use case for us.

We do not have any issues with support. Everything is fine. Commvault helps in fixing any issues and they help us to deploy the data whenever we need help. And they provide the security as well.

In the first year we raised many issues, but now it is easier for us to manage. We refer to the documentation.

We used to use Rubrik but we found Commvault to be a better solution. It provided time savings, handled more complexity, and provided more security.

With guidance from their team, and based on the documentation, it was easy to install. The deployment took one-and-a-half hours.

There are updates every quarter and they are getting easier to deploy.

We have about seven staff members on my team, IT analysts, who handle the solution, to account for different shifts and meal breaks, etc. Within the company there are 10 clients using it, mostly within IT.

We are very satisfied. It is a very useful product, daily. 

Commvault is constantly developing new use cases based on customers' requirements. They are developing new features on a regular basis. In version 11, 19 new features were added. For example, in previous versions we did not have the Command Center and whenever backups failed we could not restore the data. Now, there are options for restoring the data. These kinds of advanced techniques are introduced from day to day.

We use Commvault Complete Data Protection as an enterprise data backup solution. Previously, we used it for databases, but nowadays, we primarily use it for our servers and user data.

The functionality of Commvault Complete Data Protection is similar to that of other enterprise backup solutions, so there's not much benefit from it when you compare it with its competitors, except for the cost. Commvault Complete Data Protection is more affordable than my company's previous solution, Veritas NetBackup.

What I found most valuable in Commvault Complete Data Protection is its deduplication technique, mainly because the solution has the highest deduplication ratio, giving you higher storage capacity.

Commvault Complete Data Protection meets market standards, but an area for improvement is its licensing model because everyone else offers the subscription-based model nowadays. At the same time, Commvault still has the traditional license model, where you must buy a set of licenses.

For example, you must purchase one hundred licenses if you're backing up one hundred virtual machines. At the same time, other players offer a pay-as-you-go subscription model, which means if you use one hundred this month, you'll pay for one hundred, and if you use thirty next month, you'll pay for thirty. With Commvault Complete Data Protection, on the other hand, you pay for one hundred licenses even if you only use fifty virtual machines, so the licensing model needs improvement.

I've been working with Commvault Complete Data Protection for a few years.

Commvault Complete Data Protection is a stable solution. Still, there was one case when the media server was rebooted because of a hardware problem, and then Commvault Complete Data Protection also ran into issues with the internal database. Otherwise, it is good in terms of stability. There was no major problem with the solution.

Commvault Complete Data Protection is scalable. My company was able to scale it when it had a media server problem, particularly storage issues.

The company quickly added disk libraries to the server, particularly disk expansion units. You can add additional media servers. It can be physical or virtual, or you can add a virtual machine from the cloud as a media server. Commvault Complete Data Protection is easy to scale.

My company receives good Commvault Complete Data Protection support from the reseller, which provides first-level support when my company experiences any issues. If the reseller cannot solve the problems, that's when Commvault support steps in. Commvault support is pretty good and responds very quickly.

We used Veritas NetBackup before but switched to Commvault Complete Data Protection because the costs associated with Veritas NetBackup were higher than the cost of Commvault Complete Data Protection. Veritas NetBackup had similar functionalities but had a higher price.

The initial setup for Commvault Complete Data Protection was straightforward.

Commvault Complete Data Protection has master and media server models, so my company prepared two on-premise machines, one for the master server and one for the media server, according to Commvault specifications.

You had to click, click, and click to install Commvault Complete Data Protection, then install the master and media servers. The company's environment is mainly on a virtual infrastructure, so it just had to add the vCenter into Commvault Complete Data Protection to explore every offshore machine under that vCenter. The installation process was pretty easy.

The reseller implemented Commvault Complete Data Protection for my company because the company's purchase from that specific reseller includes installation services.

We do have a great ROI from Commvault Complete Data Protection.

I cannot give the exact pricing for Commvault Complete Data Protection because I was not involved in the purchasing process. Still, my company purchased through a reseller, so the pricing may differ.

I'm using the latest version of Commvault Complete Data Protection.

The vendor provides maintenance for Commvault Complete Data Protection, and support-wise, it's good, and the maintenance is easy.

My company has a small IT team, so it's mostly people from the IT team who have access to the solution. The IT team manages it. Regarding backup, every employee's data goes into Commvault Complete Data Protection, but four to five people access and use the solution.

Suppose anybody asks me about wanting to start using Commvault Complete Data Protection. In that case, I will say go for it because the solution is good and functions like any other backup tool, such as Veritas NetBackup.

My rating for Commvault Complete Data Protection is eight out of ten. It's a good solution.

We use Commvault HyperScale X as an enterprise backup solution. We do backups of different applications and save their backups on this solution.

The most valuable features of Commvault HyperScale X are all the general functions and the performance.

Commvault HyperScale X could improve by allowing backups of the storage area network (SAN).

I have been using Commvault HyperScale X for approximately three years.

Commvault HyperScale X is a reliable solution.

The scalability of Commvault HyperScale X is very good.

I rate the support from Commvault HyperScale X a four out of five.

The initial setup of Commvault HyperScale X was a little complex. It took approximately two weeks to complete.

We used professional services for the implementation of Commvault HyperScale X.

The number of supporting staff needed depends on the environment, but typically two to three administrators are sufficient.

The license for Commvault HyperScale X is paid annually.

Overall the solution is very good and highly stable. Commvault HyperScale X is based on Red Hat and there are licensing costs involved which can be looked at as a disadvantage to other solutions.

I rate Commvault HyperScale X a nine out of ten.