Commvault Cloud Reviews

Our primary use case is for backups. We are customers of Commvault and I'm a senior IT administrator.

Real-time synchronization is a good feature.

This is not a very high standard product. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The solution is not very stable. 

The technical support is below average. 

We had many issues so the deployment took around three months. We had two IT admins carrying out the implementation. 

I rate this solution four out of 10. 

We use it to backup and protect our virtual environments. We do Active Directory, SQL, file server, and some application levels backups. We do Office 365 and SharePoint backups too.

We back up everything locally first, then store it in the cloud.

It provides us a single solution to recover data. We haven't had a lot of restore requests. There have been a couple of them where we had to restore a full server and the work involved was very minimal. We were able to run a quick restore job. We did not really run into any challenges doing this. Every once in a while, we receive requests for files or emails that people have lost and those files are in SharePoint or OneDrive. We have the ability to restore it within 30 days directly from the portal. But if it's beyond the 30 days, we use Commvault to restore data and that has worked absolutely fine.

It has helped us drive innovation and accelerate growth. From a growth perspective, this storage solution has clearly helped us. The option for us to save the data in the cloud is very valuable for the organization.

The solution has helped our admins to minimize the time they spend on backup tasks and other projects. We have an administrator who manages the system. I'm more of an architect. Compared to the previous product where the administrator had to go around and look for a lot of information before he could find out whether the backup had competed successfully and the reporting structure was not that great, the reporting structure now with Commvault is where he can get daily emails from the jobs which have been completed. If there are any issues with jobs, he can directly drill-down to the details and find out why the job failed or why it did not run on time since there may be other dependencies that won't allow the job to run.

All the features used right now have been very valuable. The biggest advantage for us right now is the ability to back up our Office 365 mailboxes along with all our SharePoint and OneDrive data. Because all our users mostly store all their data in these locations, it is important for us that we back up all these services.

It provides us a good holistic view of everything that we have backed up so far. It also provides us all the recovery points. If we look at an an object that has been backed up, we can tell how many retention copies it has, how far we can go, and recover any data, if needed.

I have written a lot of different reviews about the product and every time I have mentioned the user interface is not user-friendly, e.g., the admin portal is not user-friendly. It definitely takes a lot of understanding to get familiar with the portal. However, once you are completely familiar with it, then it is pretty easy to manage. It's not something that you can jump in right away and start, knowing what exactly is going on. There are a lot of places that you need to look around to understand how the backups are configured.

The administration of the solution could be simplified. This would really make the administrator's life easier.

We've been using Commvault since early 2017. We are in our third year right now.

It has been pretty stable. We have not run into a situation where our systems were compromised. However, we have run into system corruption issues and were back in business within about two hours.

Right now, we only have one primary administrator for this product. We have a couple of backups in case this person or another is on vacation. We have other people who have been provided good knowledge transfer on how this product works. This way, if either of them is unavailable, there is somebody who can do the job.

It is definitely scalable. We are able to scale as we need, whether we need to add any compute, storage, or additional licenses for user accounts. All of that is very flexible when it comes to scalability. If we want to add more users to our Office 365 backup, we can quickly get new licenses from the vendor with a quick turnaround time. As soon as we get that, we are able to add those users' data to our backups. We generally have a buffer. However, sometimes if there are a lot of new hires, then we need to go in and secure new licenses.

We are using more space than what we were previous using, mainly because we did not have a lot of flexibility with the previous product that we were using. So, there was not much room for us to store the data for a long duration. At the same time, we did not have enough on premise storage capacity to leave the data around for a long time. Therefore, data growth has been significant over the past years because we have been able to store data. So, we are leaving the data on-premise for 30 days, then we moving it to the cloud. Most of the data is now in the cloud, but even on-premise we are now able to back up a lot of systems that we were not able to back up earlier. We have seen significant storage growth on long-term systems, because we are now backing those up and the data is there.

It is only my team managing the system. We back up all the data that the end user has. If they need help restoring their data, then one of my team members will go in and restore the data. The user has no direct interaction with the product.

It is pretty extensively used right now. It is backing up all the data that we have right now. We are looking into some additional features, so we might not start looking at those until later this year. Commvault has come out with some new features and we want to look into those. For the first two years, it was a stabilization period for us to get the product implemented, ensure everything was stabilized, all the important data was being protected, and data was being stored in necessary places. We also looked at all the trending over the last two years to ensure we had enough capacity in all the areas to maintain the server and storage space. Now, we are at the stage where we are pretty comfortable on how we can scale this product when needed. We are looking into additional features that Commvault has, and we will start looking into these towards the end of the year.

Tech support has been good. I haven't had a lot of interactions.

Every once in a while when we have to make any architectural changes to the deployment, my administrators reach out and consult with me. We sometimes engage with the support team or Professional Services team. Their responses have been pretty good so far. We have never had a situation where we were kept waiting for days to get an answer or solution.

I used Commvault from 2011 to 2012 at one of my previous organization, but it was only for a short period of time that I worked with it. I then had to move onto other things. That experience helped me when we deployed the newer version of Commvault. At the time, it was Commvault Simpana, and now, it's only Commvault. That experience helped us to understand its requirements and how we could set it up.

We were using Dell EMC Data Protection Rapid Recovery. It wasn't flexible nor scalable. It did not meet all our requirements. It wasn't able to back up physical and cloud environments. It could not store data in the cloud, so we had to look at options to store and protect our data. We were unable to back up our Office 365 and SharePoint data. With Commvault, it has made it seamless for us to store data in the cloud, not only protect it. 

We can set up proper retention policies now. So, if we need to store any data, for example, over a year, seven years, or 10 years, we can accordingly store it. We can then apply policy to that storage, which after that retention period, we will not have to go in and do a manual cleanup.

The deployment took about a month. The planning was another month or two.

We wanted to ensure that we were able to protect all our systems and data not protected up until then. At the same time, the strategy was that we did not want to incur a lot of significant costs on just deploying the solution itself. Plus, we did not want a lot of administrative overhead while maintaining the servers and application environment. We did not want that routine daily administration activity. We wanted to set up the environment and not worry about it until something went wrong.

We had assistance from the vendor, so they did assist with the setup. The system was completely new for some of my team members who had never worked with it before, so it did take them a lot of time to get familiar with it. Those administrators are able to manage the system very well now compared to what they were able to do in their first year when they had to frequently go back to the vendor and ask them, "How do we do this? How can we do that?"

We worked directly with the vendor. The vendor's Professional Services team was able to assist us with the deployment.

After deploying the Commvault solution, we are saving four to five hours a week.

We have been able to save on infrastructure costs by not storing long-term data onto systems. Instead, we have been able to store them on cheaper cloud systems. There is a lot of savings there if you consider all the cost involved to store data on an on-premise server storage system, plus the maintenance, and the support which goes behind maintaining that system. 

I have seen return of investment.

There is a bit of cost involved with signing up the entire solution. It's not a cheap solution.

We did evaluate Veeam and Cohesity. 

At the time, Cohesity was not mature, as they were fairly new to the business. We had a few meetings with them, and after our discussions, we found that the solution might not meet all our requirements. E.g., the physical server backup was one important feature that was not supported at the time. 

Veeam is a platform that I have extensively worked with in all my previous roles at other companies. So, we do have a Veeam implementation that is used by a different team in our organization. They manage all their backups through Veeam. Our plan was not to use the same solution in all environments. We wanted to use different solutions within the entire organization for exposure to multiple data protection solutions. Also, Veeam did not support physical machine backups and only supported virtual machine backups.

In my previous deployment, there were no cloud features. The cloud was not popular and everything was on-prem. Even when we moved to Commvault, Veeam lacked a lot of features, which is why Commvault seems to be the best choice for us.

We already had our cloud solution in place. After understanding that Commvault does work with that cloud provider and it would help us store our data, we did not have any further concerns about cloud vendor selection. The cloud environment and Commvault environment were set up around the same time. We moved to the cloud at the end of 2016, and then, in early 2017, we moved to Commvault. So, everything worked out well.

Go through an assessment first before selecting the product. Every business is different and has different requirements. Do a complete assessment with the data protection partner, whether it's Commvault, Veeam, Cohesity, or someone else. Go through a proof of concept, if possible. Mind your business requirements, RPO, and RTO. Look at your budget too. This should help you to make the right decision.

The biggest lesson would be to have a proper data protection strategy for the organization. There were a lot of things that we had to implement after implementing the product. It's better if you completely understand your business requirements, then implement this product.

I would give it a rating of an eight (out of 10) because it does not have an easy deployment. The deployment is not something that just anybody can go in and deploy. It needs a good level of understanding for deployment. Once you deploy, you need to be familiar with how to administer the product, how to set up all the reporting, etc. Just navigating the admin interface is not really that easy.

This solution is mainly used for virtualization and Oracle data protection. The customers I work with use it to protect their machines and active databases.

It's a complete software that can protect all the main applications. Perhaps that's the feature I like most. The integration with the NetApp and other apps is also very nice.

I think the one thing that could be improved is the customer experience. The interface should be more user friendly.

The price could perhaps be lower as well.

I believe it's very stable. That's why the customers who buy Commvault stay with Commvault.

The solution is scalable, because you can add app features. It's very possible to scale.

We have four or five customers, so that's probably around 20 users. We are in a small country.

The technical support is very good. It was not very difficult. I had a bug and the Commvault supporter helped perfectly.

The initial setup is straightforward. We need one or two integrators to deploy and maintain this solution.

We evaluated other options, but Commvault is a very complete solution. In the end, it's a very useful tool. Our customers will already know Commvault. Their software always compares well with other vendors.

Perhaps, my best advice is to look for an integrator with expertise in Commvault to help deploy this solution. It's not that easy to install. It's not even possible after they all installed it. Customers should have someone with good expertise with Commvault to supply it.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

Backups happen over night instead of 3 days. Storage for backups has been reduced by 60%.

The most valuable feature is the ability to backup over the dedicated Fiber Channel directly from SAN. There's no impact to the network or users.

Bare-metal restore needs some work. It's not intuitive and seems to have been an afterthought.

We've had no issues with stability.

As we have used and scaled out the product SQL integration with the companies automated scripts proved to be a challenge. The Work Flow feature is your only solution and therefor you end up with a mix of scripts then relying on the products work flow to run and return expected results allowing your scripts to then continue. Not a very clean solution yet.

Customer Service:

Customer service is very good. They called back within 10 minutes of a request. They understood the issue and resolved it.

Technical Support:

Technical support is also very good.

Veritas

Complex with several separate hardware pieces and software modules. Media Servers, SAN, Fileserver, Comm Servers, Fiber Setup etc. Not extremely hard but lots of parts.

Vendor, I was not impressed with performance of vendor.

If budget allows using the per socket license and not the agent based with per GB counter for Dedup is the way to go.

The amount of hardware required to run the software and do the heavy lifting is this solutions biggest downside. In a time of reducing hardware being required to then add a media server a comm server a SAN and storage server and another media server. Well it's a bit overwhelming. Package it and create an appliance already.

If SQL heavy plan to use the work flow for your automated processes that involve Commvault.

I've done almost everything with Commvault, e.g., back and forth centralization for file systems and applications like SQL, Oracle, VMware, and Hyper-V. Commvault does a lot of integration. 

Most of our installations are on-premise, but I remember doing one installation on the cloud.

We always work with the latest version of the solution.

We are not utilizing Commvault as it should be. Most installations are for backup and protecting data. We have it on cloud or on-premise. Most of the customers need only this. So, I haven't given real value other than backup and restore. However, we are working on this with our customers, trying to give them the culture of how to use this data and product with value. For example, using Commvault to migrate your applications. 

You can back up everything from this one backup solution. You can do backups, archives, and replications. You can backup 89 percent of the application.

It can support the backup to and from the cloud. The cloud integration with Commvault is excellent. It can support a lot of cloud vendors, like Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

The endpoint protection for PCs, laptops, and mobile devices is a feature that they have done a lot of hard work with. It can do backups anytime, e.g., when you have a device connected from on-premise, when are you connected through the WAN, and if you didn't do the right setup. This is a good feature.

If you have cloud applications and payment applications, you can migrate from the payment app to the cloud and also migrate from one cloud to another cloud. There is a lot of flexibility on what you can do in Commvault.

In Commvault, they used to use only the CommCell Console for backup and configuration. They have been working on a new console for quite some time now. The last time I installed the solution (maybe last week), I used the Web Console, which is excellent. Commvault can be a bit complex, but on the Web Console, they have done very beautiful work. You can do a lot of things easily and simply with the Web Console. It has 90 percent solved the complexity of Commvault. You sometimes need to log into the complex interface, but almost everything can be done from the web interface.

The Command Center is provided from the web interface. You can back up the data for everybody, but also you can give everybody the ability to view and restore their data. For example, if a laptop, machine, or environment is owned by X, then X can look in and see the environment and data that he has backed up. He can see everything that he owns and can manage the environment as he wishes. It gives him an excellent view of his environment and infrastructure. Also, if you are a service provider, you can back up data for multiple companies and give everyone an interface for their environment to manage, backup, and restore data. Commvault has done excellent work in this area. 

I would like them to keep working on the new web interface to migrate out of the old interface because the old interface is a bit complex. It was driving customers away because of the complexity. If they migrate everything (100 percent of the features), this would make the product be perfect.

We have been using the solution for two years.

The stability is excellent. Once you install and configure everything the right way, there is only the infrastructure. If there is a problem with the infrastructure, it will reflect on your backup. If there are no problems with the infrastructure, then there will be no problems. I have been working with Commvault for two years and don't remember opening more than 10 cases for a lot of customers.

It is easily scalable. You may need to add a gateway, proxy, or media server to the environment before adding more data to the environment. 

Something that is not commonly used is that you can use Appian as a backup storage solution in one integrated package. 

I rarely use the technical support because of the stability. The technical support is very good. Once you have a case, depending on the severity, there is an engineer who will connect with you. That's the most important thing when you have a problem. They will connect with you and solve your problem on spot. Commvault has a built-in feature that if it's connected to the Internet with one click you can upload all the logs. Then, the Commvault engineer can see all the logs he needs. Most of the time, it takes one hour for a problem to be solved as they have excellent support.

It's an excellent solution for cloud support. One of the important features that I am selling and trying to convince customers to use is the backup for Office 365, SharePoint, and OneDrive from Microsoft. Microsoft can be in your environment with high availability and everything will be good, but if you delete it by mistake, then for a short period Microsoft can't restore anything. Also, the way Chromebooks integrates with the cloud services is excellent.

I started my experience with HPE Data Protector, which I now hate, because it's now Micro Focus and it's killing me.

I have worked with Dell EMC. Their solution does the work, but there are a lot of the problems with the ESXi.

I have worked with NetBackup. NetBackup is good, but I haven't seen the new feature like they have in Commvault for integration.

I have also worked with Veritas Backup Exec.

With Commvault, if you need basic integration and configuration but no advanced features, then you can do the setup in maximum three to four hours. However, if you need to do everything, you will need everything to be organized for you to work.

For the backup specifically, you have to implement the basic design with every client. It then depends on their needs, environment, and how we can make their life easier. Every time, we have to change something in order to give our customers the best experience.

The solution enables our customers to save on infrastructure costs by being able to manage what were disparate data management solutions in one place. It is one of the most important features: You can do backup for almost everything from one platform. Plus, you can reduce costs by using any cheap storage and still have the deduplication feature. You can present any cheap storage for the backup and not have to worry about the B2B high cost appliances, like HPE, Dell EMC Data Domain, etc. When you can do everything from one place, it's always better. It will reduce cost on the infrastructure and human resources who manage the environment.

It was not very popular because of its previous cost, but they have been working on the pricing, and now anyone can afford to use Commvault. They changed the modeling criteria for their pricing. Previously, there was only the capacity modeling based on your content capacity. In this case, they would give you a license and you would have to pay it. Now, most of the environment is virtualized so you can have the best CPU, VMs, etc. You buy whatever you need and pay for what you need.

The most important feature that other backup solutions in the enterprise field are missing is a built-in feature for deduplication. It has a buildt-in deduplication engine and database. Therefore, you don't need another B2B vendor, like Appian, in order to do the deduplication. This is the most important feature that other solutions don't have. Most of them need another solution, like Appian or B2B storage. Also, the integration with storage and the snapshots (taken from the storage) have a lot of variety. 

I'm a fan of Commvault. I have worked with a lot of backup solutions for about eight years. Commvault is the best until now that I have worked with.

Commvault is the best for cloud integration. I tried VMware where you can back up to the cloud, but it's not easy. With CommVault, you can see the cloud environment, cloud machines and virtual machines (such as on-premises virtual machines). With other solutions, there are a few limitations.

I am still working with Veeam. 

There is also another solution, Cohesity. It is a good solution but it still has a lot to do.

Buy Commvault. It is an excellent backup solution. I would recommend the solution.

What is important to Commvault is the flexibility. E.g., if you have a new application that you want to integrate, but it's not supported, they can help you with that. They will start immediately working on it with the development. We have talked with Commvault many times, and this was one of the things that they are proud of. They can give you an integration, even if it's not integrated yet. In addition, Commvault has done a partnership with HPE, which helps with integrations.

I would rate the solution as a 10 (out of 10).

We primarily use the solution for ransomware protection.

It is a very stable product. It's reliable.

The product is scalable. 

It's great for getting data back.

The product is a bit complex. 

The price should be reduced more. We'd like to see improvement in the appliances, the OEMs. They have to increase the number of OEMs. 

Normally it's available with HP or Lenovo, yet very limited. We are expecting with open-source, with Supermicro, that those kinds of appliances will support as necessary.

I've been using the solution for four years, since 2018.

The solution is very stable and reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We can scale the solution as we need to. The hardware supports any kind of storage. 

Everyone is using Commvault. It takes a backup of their endpoint devices, and mostly it's used by the admins to restore, schedule backups, and other things.

We have maybe 700 people on the solution right now. 

Technical support is okay. We are mostly satisfied with the level of support.

Positive

I cannot say that the solution is straightforward. It's a little complex.

Normally, if it is the on-prem edition of Commvault, you need the expertise to handle the implementation. When it is the cloud, Commvault Metallic, it's very easy.

We handle implementations for clients. 

I'm purely technical. I don't deal with the licensing aspect of the product.

I'd rate the product four out of five in terms of affordability. From what I understand, it's not overly expensive. 

We are a partner of Commvault. We are an implementation partner. 

If a user decides to implement Comvault on-prem, they should select a partner who can support them better with the coordination of Commvault.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I like the scalability, steadiness, and reliability of the product. We can rely on Commvault for the data. 100%, you will get your data back. That's why we use it.

We primarily use the solution for all infrastructure. We're using it for the five pillars and for database backups and management.

The visualization backup is the most important aspect for us. It provides snapshot protection. 

The digital application and the compression of the disc at the storage site are great. That's one of the best features of this solution.

Technical support is very helpful.

We've faced problems backing up our virtual machines. A few of them, at least. However, we opened a ticket, and then we found out how to troubleshoot this issue and how to do a snapshot backup. We were able to understand exactly what was the root cause of the issue and a solution was provided to us.

We have already submitted a feature enhancement request to Commvault. They are working on it. That's in relation to the Commvault Metallic and is related to the workflow approval. We requested they implement workflow approval, just in case you want to allow, for example, general users to access the Commvault Metallic and browse what mailboxes they need to check if it is approved by the legal department. We can run them independently, this access without even referring back again to the IT division, however, we requested the workflow has to be based on approved access.

I've been using the solution for a year and a half at this point.

The product is a reliable solution. We have experienced only one case where there was a total shutdown and a total disruption of service. This was a weird case. We were able to sort it out and submitted the case for investigation to understand what the root cause might have been. Later on, we had to upgrade a few things. However, since then, we haven't had any issues whatsoever. I'd describe the solution as quite stable. 

In terms of scalability, it is a skill level solution. You can scale up at any time by adding additional nodes.

Technical support is always good. Most of the time the call comes from the U.S. They don't have local support. They are always providing remote support in the U.S. and India. Most of the calls come from those two countries, however, we find that we get help mainly from the U.S.

The initial deployment was straightforward. We had a proper prerequisites exit sheet. We filled it out properly at the outset and the architecture was very clear. We started with the architecture. We were able to understand all of the components in this hyper-scale design, and we submitted a change request to our infrastructure. We were able to meet all of the requirements on time. We started up the implementation shortly after that.

In the end, it was a straightforward design. There was nothing too complex.

In terms of maintenance, we usually do a health check which is basically a checklist we run through in the morning. The system will still struggle from time to time if there are any recent updates that need to be done. It is a system that does the update by itself, and it shares with you all types of events that need to be taken care of. Therefore, it's pretty automated.

We bought the solution and the agreement was for three years. We simply pay in installments for three years. We'll do the payment at the beginning of every year. 

We're just a customer.

We do recommend the solution. However, a company needs to look again into why they need it. With Commvault, you can deploy on-premise or on the cloud. It is compatible with several cloud vendors. However, the deployment depends on what you need it for. For example, if you need to back up Office 365, then there are two solutions from the providers, from Commvault. Recently they have started talking about Commvault Metallic. They started trying to promote it in other regions. We've done a profound study in the Commvault Metallic for our Office 365 in the past. We compared it with two more products. We compared it to a Barracuda email protection and we compared it also with Veeam.

Any company should do the same and run comparisons. They need to know exactly for what purpose do they need to acquire the solution. If it is for Office 365 then there are two solutions for that. One of them is the Commvault Metallic, and it is a SaaS model. The SaaS model is fully manageable. The user will not even look into infrastructure. It will be fully managed by the Commvault team in the background. There is no need to worry about the storage consumption on Azure if you also choose to go with Microsoft Azure cloud. When you need infrastructural backup, then there is the Commvault hyper-scale solution. That's the only available option and is very powerful.

Overall, I would rate the solution ten out of ten. We've been very happy with it so far.

We use it to back up some servers and to restore things.

Commvault helps our administrators to minimize the time they spend on the backup tasks and that gives them time for other projects. I don't know how much time it saves them because our Commvault environment was already in place. We don't have very many restore problems and, for backup, it's almost automated, so we don't spend any time at the console.

For me, it just restores and backs up applications, nothing more. But what I find valuable is restoring the complete server. Restoring files is also valuable, but I like restoring the server because you don't have to rebuild a new one.

Also, we are able to manage our on-prem environment from one server, the whole environment from one place, which is great. There is only one place to search.

We get an alarm if a lot of files are deleted, for example. That could look like ransomware, even if it is not.

I have been using Commvault for one-and-a-half years, which is the time I have been working in this company.

It is fairly stable. We have never had trouble with Commvault itself. And if we do have trouble, we can call our Commvault partner and they will solve it.

The scalability is good, although we don't have plans to increase our usage of it.

Commvault's technical support is very good.

I used Avamar a long time ago. 

I don't know much about the pricing and licensing, but I do know it is very expensive.

I would recommend Commvault. We have not had many difficulties with it and I think it is a good product.

We don't use Command Center, only the CommCell Console. In our department, only five people are doing the backups and the restores. We are all system specialists, and we work together to maintain Commvault.

I would rate it at eight out of 10. A 10 is too high and would mean it is super-good. For me, an eight is very high.