Commvault Cloud Reviews

Our current use case is for storage backup of large Veritas Clusters. We have around 350 TB of storage backup and we use Commvault's HyperScale X with unlimited data backup.

With Commvault, our backup performance is way better, compared to what we had, because we have a disk-to-disk backup.

It also helps to ensure broad coverage with the discovery of unprotected workloads. That is always helpful for us. Our environment is very dynamic. We often have high data-demand spikes.

In terms of time saved, because the backups are automated, our team generally spends 30 to 45 minutes reviewing the logs and any errors, and it saves us two to three hours per week.

The deduplication and compression have helped to reduce my backup costs. This year, I haven't had to purchase any expansion for my backup storage, thanks to Commvault. Otherwise, I would likely have had to spend around $150,000. And next year, I can add one more node to HyperScale X before expanding it. So it has saved 20 percent of my backup budget.

The main solution from Commvault is the HyperScale X backup. Instead of a dedicated appliance, we have a three-node HPE Apollo cluster for backing up. That gives us the best value regarding speed.

Another valuable feature is that, in general, recovery is faster than any other solution we have reviewed. That is especially the case for small, micro files, 2 or 3 KB research files.

The Commvault user interface is very nice and intuitive. It's perfect compared with other products I have used. It's in a completely different world. When running a backup, the display is very clear about the estimated time.

And using Command Center, we know exactly how many backups are running and it gives us clarity on our backup state. It gives us a report and can just send a screenshot of it to the team.

In addition, Commvault gives us a single platform to manage and recover our data. Since we are a research organization, backup is one of the most critical parts of our IT operations and services. Internally, we run it as a managed service, and there is a single console that makes it easy for management to see the performance.

The majority of our file servers are backed up by Commvault. They provide protection against ransomware with their intelligent methods. We haven't experienced a ransomware attack, but I know they have good coverage. They will make sure they recover a backup at any cost.

They need to improve when it comes to large, video file archiving. They're good, but they have not met my expectations as a customer in this area.

Also, HyperScale X does not back up NDMP, or they only use a native file share backup.

I have been using Commvault for three years.

The stability means our team can relax. On average, we used to get six backup failure errors a week, and that has been reduced to two.

The scalability is good and we plan to increase our usage of Commvault in the future.

From the time that our deployment was successfully completed, we have hardly reported any errors.

During deployment we had a couple of issues. Commvault provided us with excellent support to make sure all the issues were fixed. Customer satisfaction is a priority. The local sales and consulting team also extended support to us. They made sure we had a clean installation and a clean operation. Initially, when we had problems, I thought things were not good, but my impression of them changed. I see the real value that they bring, and I appreciate them. I'm a very tough customer, but Commvault's support made sure that I achieved my goals and I respect them. They are patient.

Often, once the sale of a product is done, the salespeople run away. But here, the entire team was involved to make sure they delivered and deployed. After that, they extended support for anything that might require it. They said if anything happens, if there are any issues, here is a number to call to make sure that it is resolved.

After the deployment, both the sales guys and a technical guy came to meet with us to understand our future plans. They listened patiently and they did not try to sell me anything. They just added value. That is the reason they are number one.

They do a quarterly review and explain the latest improvements with Commvault's technical experts. There is also training and certification to help us use the latest features to our benefit.

Positive

Initially, our Commvault was configured for a particular use case. After that, we had a detailed discussion in which they listened to our complete concerns and architecture. From that point, the deployment of HyperScale X was very fast and clean. So when they know the environment, the setup is very good.

For our 350 TB deployment, it took seven days to complete, including networking, installation, updating, and getting a full backup to run. QoS took another few days, making the total time about 10 to 12 days.

Commvault support helped us to deploy the solution. I would especially recommend their professional services.

We look at return of value because as a backup solution, we cannot say it gives us ROI. We have a clear ROV due to the reduced efforts for our team, as well as manpower reductions and fewer failures. And technically, we have a faster backup. We have seen a high return of value, and management is also happy.

The pricing is very competitive. When Commvault knows you are comparing it with the other leading providers, they are ready to compromise on pricing. But you have to make sure you get a long-term commitment on the pricing. Otherwise, when you have a future expansion, they will take advantage of it.

Our company evaluated other solutions, but that process was done by another team. But I read a document that reviewed the evaluation, and they evaluated Veeam as well as Micro Focus Data Protector and NetBackup. They looked at industry reviews and at our specific use case for archiving and backup, and Commvault had the best score.

Pricing is the one area where you have to focus. You need to have a clear plan. HyperScale X is one option and it's nice to use when you have third-party hardware, if you want to have disk-to-disk. 

Make sure you convey your use cases to Commvault's professional services. They will listen to you and they will advise on the options. Also, have an assessment done by Commvault professional services to make sure you have a long-term plan in place. 

Other than the large file archiving that needs improvement, VM is good, cloud backup is good, file server is amazing, and they do a good job when it comes to physical server backup. SQL backup is also good, and Linux back is also amazing.

We are using it for large data center backups, remote office backups, and cloud backups and restorations across all our environments.

We have implemented Threat Scan, and we have had several catches with it. The activity was not malicious, but it did allow us to know that somebody would do something.

It provides us with whatever we define. We have used some of their other tools in the past to tell us how old our data is and the things that we should be able to archive. It gives us a clear picture of our data when we need it.

Commvault has a platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads. For it to have all those features is very important because it completely supports our environment.

We are very satisfied with how it protects our data from the endpoint and to its final resting destination, whatever that may be. It could be local storage. It could be cloud storage. We are very satisfied with what it does for us.

There are some features that have significantly reduced our RTOs. It has helped reduce RPOs too. The reduction in RTOs and RPOs has been wonderful.

Commvault has helped our organization reduce its threat detection time. It has helped us identify some possibilities of threats. We have a full scope of different tools for threats across our enterprise, but it has helped isolate a possible threat.

Commvault has helped our organization reduce or avoid downtime. There were several cases where we were able to have a short downtime as compared to having a multi-hour downtime. It could turn a multi-hour downtime into less than 15 minutes.

The VM backups and the recovery from cloud infrastructure are valuable.

It is very easy to use for administrators for monitoring, analyzing, and managing our organization’s data environment. The instructions are pretty straightforward. It is very easy to monitor.

They can improve the VMware recovery and VMware backup. There is an improvement area on the VMware infrastructure. They can make available what they call a VSA proxy. They can have an appliance-type setup to deploy VSA backups and help recover quicker. They can have an appliance ready. Instead of having to have a server dedicated to that and installing software on a server, they can just provide an actual appliance for that.

Personally, I have been using it for over 15 years.

I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of stability. We have had a few incidents over the years due to certain revisions of the software. We were hit by some of the known bugs, so we had to go back and patch.

It can probably improve on scalability. We have the typical Windows Server deployment. There can be easier automation when deploying new clients and agents.

I love their tech support. As compared to other products we have used, Commvault's tech support is 100% one of the best. They let you know everything, and there is no mystery. They let you know what is happening in the background. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

In the past, we have had an IBM solution. We have also used Micro Focus Data Protector. I personally also used NetBackup. It was called something else earlier, but it is NetBackup now.

Our deployment model is hybrid. We have a small cloud, but it is largely on-prem. I have been involved in its deployment multiple times in both scenarios. It is straightforward.

In terms of maintenance, it requires standard patching updates or application updates. It does require that periodically.

We do it all in-house. We have a team for deployment. For deployments, we have four people. We also have a dedicated recovery team due to the size of our organization.

It has helped us with our total cost of ownership with some of the newest features such as live recovery. It has caused our RTOs and RTOs to drop, so it has helped with our total cost of ownership.

It is a little too high. I would like to get more of a consumption model or more of a periodic true-up type of model that is more friendly to the ups and downs that you may have in your data instead of locking into multi-year agreements.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise understanding the infrastructure that is needed to support the product. Understand what you need and dig into the details of what you have to purchase. That would be my recommendation.

We have not enabled Commvault’s automated policies. We have also not utilized the risk analysis tool.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The solution has the fastest backup and better licensing.

Compared to Rubrik, MongoDB Data Protector, and NetBackup, Commvault is better. The licensing team was quite tricky recently because they stopped the unlimited files for that license. Commvault made a bank of 500GB only, a node-based license can take it, which is disappointing. Reporting needs to be more granular. Also, there should be a showback of data being backed up, and the backup cost to share the cost internally with the department.

I have been using Commvault HyperScale X as a customer. I have almost nine HyperScale nodes and expect four more nodes this year.

The product is scalable. To scale, we need to buy more agents. We’re using HP hardware for HyperScale. We’ve three backup administrators working with the solution.

The customer support is interesting, but they need to work on their competency. My team is happy.

Positive

I work with a couple of other solutions, such as HP Store, Veeam, NetBackup, MongoDB Data Protector, and Rubrik. Commvault is the most competitive in the market because local support is easy and faster.

The solution is easy to implement if you have a proper infrastructure and require two people to set up.

The solution is bundled with hardware licensing. If I want to increase the hardware, I have to buy exactly the same because it's based on the core hardware license. We cannot tell discount because we have an NDA signed with Commvault because of my academic license. The solution is more expensive than NetBackup and Veeam but cheaper than Rubrik.

The solution is easy to use after four months of training. Before implementing, make sure you negotiate well and agree to the terms and conditions in advance. Once you implement it, you will use it for at least the next five to six years. So, you must negotiate and file a contract, the best way to know the cost of ownership in the beginning itself. Overall, I rate the solution an eight-point five out of ten.

We use Commvault to back up all our enterprise solutions, like MS SQL, Exchange, file servers, and MongoDB, but we don't use Commvault for multi-environment management. There is a primary site and a disaster recovery site that we control offsite with one console.

I know Commvault has another interface for the multi-site, but I've never used it before, so I don't have any experience with that. However, we have a passive primary server at the disaster recovery site, and if we have trouble at the main site, we can use the disaster recovery server. 

Commvault makes it easier to back up new additions to our environment. For example, when we added MongoDB, we found it in Commvault and could start backing it up. 

Right now, we are trying to integrate Kubernetes platforms into our environment, and I'm sure that Commvault can back up those. Commvault keeps up with new technologies, and if you upgrade to the latest stable version, you can find everything you need.

Backing up with Commvault doesn't require much effort. Commvault's reporting features are also excellent and user-friendly. It's easy to find anything we want. The workflow feature is handy, too. For example, we schedule an automated monthly backup and restoration test that we used to do manually. That has been integrated with Commvault's workflows and running automatically every month for four years. 

It runs all the tests and emails us the reports. We take daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots, and I integrate the storage snapshot scripts with the Commvault workflow. The Commvault workflow runs all the scripts and sends us the reports. It also features cloud-side reports and workflows. Commvault has many tools for backing up, restoring, and archiving, but we use another service for our archives. 

Commvault can show us unprotected workloads, servers, and SQL databases. It's a good feature, and I periodically get reports on this. However, it's a low priority because we are waiting for our inside customers to tell us whether they want something backed up or not. They must follow that, but we are using terabyte-based backups. We don't separate the agent— MS SQL or others—and we are only looking at the terabyte trends, so it's predictable for us. 

Our main pain point is that some of our hardware is old. For example, the SSD disks for our application database are slow. It's hard to avoid a slowdown in our environment because the size of our backups is growing every year. If you're growing and don't upgrade the environment, you will see slower backups and restores. You must enhance the environment if you are growing.

I've used Commvault for about 10 years, and we used it at my last company for around six years. 

Commvault's stability is good.

We have no problems scaling Commvault. I don't remember the numbers, but we have a terabyte license size. It's about 400 terabytes, but the backend is in the petabyte range. 

Troubleshooting is easy because Commvault support responds and finds the root cause quickly. When I've contacted support for other solutions, some of them ask you to recreate the scenario. They ask you to increase the debugging level and reproduce the scenario to get the error again. As a result, we waste a lot of time troubleshooting those solutions. With Commvault, we don't need to devote much time to the operational and troubleshooting aspects. 

I've used NetBackup before, and I think it's a good solution. It required more effort than Commvault, but I prefer it over EMC NetWorker. NetWorker was labor-intensive, buggy, and hard to use. We spent a lot of time dealing with EMC support. They have a large, competent support team, but we spent too much time with them. 

NetBackup is better than NetWorker, but it has fewer features than Commvault. NetBackup also has an old-fashioned interface that is harder to use than Commvault's. It's not user-friendly. Commvault is the best of the three.

Setting up Commvault was straightforward. You set up the primary server first, then the media agents, disks, and agents for clients. Each of those steps is easy. It's like a "next, next, finish" Windows installer. You can deploy it in half a day in a smaller environment, and it's maybe one or two days for a large one. 

Of course, it depends on the size of the agents and how many you need for your physical environment. If you have a rigid environment, it's effortless because you only define the vCenters or the Hyper-V management console, and that's it. You can take backups. 

On the other hand, you must install all the agents if you have too many physical environments. Still, Commvault makes it easy because you can install everything from the user interface on the primary server. In total, we have five people, including me, managing Commvault and all our other storage solutions. 

I rate Commvault 10 out of 10. If you're planning on implementing Commvault, I suggest doing a PoC first to try out all the features and to compare them to other products. We did a PoC for backup solutions to test some new features for our enterprise solutions, and some of the products didn't make the cut, so I would recommend a PoC.

We really needed a product where we could extend the Microsoft Office 365 backups and archival process, as well as back up our Office 365 SharePoints and our users' OneDrives. That way we could have a seven-year retention plan and if we need to go back and grab someone's email that they accidentally deleted two years ago, we could. 

We also needed a solution that we didn't have to have onsite storage for, because we had a storage restriction onsite. This product gave me the ability to have everything stored, as a SaaS model. Everything is right there.

We recently had an issue where someone couldn't find an email that they had just recently written. When I went looking inside the backups, I was able to find and restore that email and they were able to continue working. It was very critical for a customer sale, but that email was recovered and it was perfect. Because it was just a single email, it was relatively quick. If I had had to do it another way, it probably would have taken me an hour-and-a-half to two hours longer with our old way of doing it. Before we went with Office 365, we were Exchange on-premises and it would have required me to have pulled out a SAN snapshot to recover the data that way, or go to the tape. Because this is all hosted in the cloud and works in the cloud, I was able to do it in five minutes.

Metallic has helped minimize the time spent on backup tasks, absolutely. It has reduced the time, daily, that I deal with whether the backup is up, and performing backups, by about 50 percent. I have more time to do other things.

I have been able to save on hardware costs at my site due to the low price of the application. I am looking at a reduction in infrastructure costs of at least 25 percent.

The most valuable part of the solution is that it is fire-and-forget. Everything we've programmed into this Metallic SaaS offering is what they claim it to be. It's been just a treat to use it. From starting the trial, to the 15 minutes it took to run my first backup, to the 30-minutes for my first restore of the users' email, it has just been fantastic. It works as advertised.

Since it's built off the regular Commvault product, and I use that Commvault product, the user interface has been very easy for me to get into. It's easy to use and navigate through. I've had no questions on how to find the relevant information, and their documentation has been on-point for helping me find all the hidden features inside their menus.

The Command Center, as far as providing a complete view of data goes, is 100 percent accurate. I found stuff that I didn't know about. I was able to find out that a couple of things are flowing in an odd way and I was able to get those remedied and treated in a way that ended up improving my boss' daily life.

It also provides me with a single platform to move, manage, and recover data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud locations. It's a single window to see everything I needed to see regarding this level of backup. I really dislike like it when the company purchases multiple products that do similar things and I have to go to different windows to get full insight. This solution gives me the full insight without having to use other products, metrics, or reporting tools.

Since it plugs into my Office 365 tenant, it was literally three clicks. So it supports cloud well. And it's all documented well. They even provided training and onboarding help for that 15-minute process. It was just fantastic.

I would like to see some of the code execute a little bit better when I add new licenses and assign licenses to users. I'd like to see that information update a little quicker. It would also be helpful to be able to run a report on licensing so that I have better visibility into how much licensing I'm using.

I really have no other complaints beyond that. And they were able to get me that information relatively quickly when I submitted a ticket.

I've been using Metallic since day-one of its release in October, 2019.

I would give the stability "five nines." I've not seen it down. I can't say it hasn't been down once, but it's been up the entire time I've used it. There have been no issues. It's snappy and responsive. I'm impressed with the stability of it.

Scaling is amazingly easy. The way they recommend the setup, it is easy to drop a user into one of my security groups and, within 15 minutes, they are in the backup schedule rotation and are being backed up.

I have 75 users enrolled. We may have plans to expand in the future to start taking advantage of their endpoint product through Metallic. We would expand from 75 seats to 200 seats in the Office 365 backup, and would add on another set of 200 seats for their endpoint backup.

Commvault's technical support for the solution is knowledgeable. I haven't been able to stump them. They've been able to answer every single question and help me with any issues I've had. They've just been, bar none, fantastic.

We were using Backup Exec for a lot of stuff and ShadowProtect SPX, a StorageCraft solution. Now that we have this online, it's fantastic. Every product that we use from Commvault, in general, has been fantastic.

We switched to Metallic from our other solutions because they didn't provide the Office 365 backup component we wanted.

We needed a backup solution and I purchased their standard Commvault for our on-premises stuff. When I attended Commvault Go, their customer conference, they debuted Metallic and I said, "That's exactly the product I was looking for, for my 365 backup, and I'm buying it from Commvault." I already knew how their software works and Metallic is same. They're just doing it in a SaaS model for 365, endpoint, and even server backup if you want. I really needed that 365.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's 100 percent accurate on their website. From start to finish: 15 minutes and you're running your first backup.

My implementation strategy for this was for the 365, the OneDrive and the SharePoint components. When we brought it online, my goal was to target the 75 most used, customer-facing mailboxes. Within 15 minutes I was able to make sure the product was working and, by the end of that day, I had everyone applied. Compared to other products, that would have taken days.

If you have technical experience it will be straightforward. We walked through their installation script just to confirm I had everything done, because, given how new the product is, they wanted to test their help script. And it was spot-on. They had it perfect. I am fully confident that, even if a person doesn't have great technical knowledge, they would be able to help that person through it.

When I purchased Commvault Metallic, they did have an onboarding process that helped me if I had any questions. It was literally a 15-minute process. I did everything before we even had that phone call, so I got to spend the call asking a few questions. It was really easy. 

I would say we have seen a return on investment, but it's a hard metric to come up with due to DR. We haven't had a DR scenario where it has paid for itself. But I view it like buying car insurance. It's better to have it and not need it, than something happening and needing it and not having it.

We are paying on a yearly basis and it comes out to about $3.80 a user per month.

There are no other costs for the specific features that I have. If I was to use server backups with them, there would be an additional cost per terabyte of storage, based on my storage targets, or an infrastructure cost if I was using it to target on-ground storage stuff. But because I'm using the platform that includes storage for the Office 365 backup exclusively, there is no additional cost.

The other products I was looking at wanted to charge me anywhere between $10 to $15 per person and I would have to do storage on top of that. That means I would be paying by the terabyte if I was putting the storage in the cloud or having to purchase hardware on-premises to do so. With the Office 365 offering from Metallic, at the price point we got it at, it was perfect. They knew exactly what the market needed and they hit their marks.

We really didn't evaluate other vendors because none of them gave me the options that I was looking for and that Metallic was offering: a low price per user, and storage included for the 365 backup. With other products I would have had to purchase cloud storage and pay for additional storage, or the cost per seat was just not something I was willing to pay.

The biggest lesson I've learned is to remind people that they still need to back up Office 365 emails. Just because it's not on their premises, they should still back it up.

Commvault gives you a fantastic 45-day trial. It's worth trying it. They have a really good, long trial period. They will answer any questions you have during that process. I know a lot of people say, "Just try the product." With this one, try the product and you'll see the ease of use.

For deployment and maintenance of the solution, for our size of company, it's just one person, a system administrator who does overall operations support.

We use the deception piece of Commvault, not the backup solution.

We use deception decoys across our corporate networks and across our OT networks to emulate vulnerable systems so that if a threat actor were to get inside and start scanning the network, the hope is they would bump into one of these, and we would get the alert, and we would be able to react and know some of these inside. Most of what we deploy in terms of decoys have some level of vulnerabilities that threat actors would be interested in, such as an old version of an operating system.

Building and deploying a decoy is fairly straightforward. If there is any work involved, it is just tuning the noise in terms of what happens inside your network. Most people probably do not realize how many times they are scanning their own network internally, and that decoy is going to feel like it is getting scanned, but that scan is being done by a dedicated device that you want to scan. You then build your exception rules in to not trigger on that and trigger on other devices when it is scanning. We have built the alerts back into our automation platform, so if we get alerts, our automation platform will do some runbook evaluation that is automated and then hand it off to an analyst if they think it is a real event.

They do a good job of building the decoys and deploying them, and then giving you good insights. When something happens, you can look at how the decoy was connected or attached to a scan and figure out if that is a real threat or not.

I like the coverage. We have 250 locations across the US, and we deploy decoys across every one of those networks.

We saw its benefits immediately. The first time we got it and deployed it into one of our operating plant environments, the plant engineer noticed right away that there was a foreign device on his network that he did not really realize was out there. It was a support vendor coming in, and that vendor was scanning parts of his network that he did not realize. They were not necessarily doing it maliciously, but it gave him great insight, so he was sold on the product right away as we were. Shortly after implementation, we did our regular PAN and Red Team testing. I can say with 100% confidence that every time we do one of those, those teams come in and they tip over one of the decoys, and we see them fairly quickly.

The decoy side protects my data because I get early insight into if there is a threat actor in my environment and it is moving laterally because they typically will hit one of these decoys, so it gives me quick access. If a ransomware threat actor was in my environment, they would be moving laterally trying to get to a vulnerable system, so before they ever get to the point of deploying the ransomware payload, they are going to hit a decoy. I am going to get early insight, and hopefully, I can get them out of there.

In terms of its effect on the total cost of ownership (TCO), as with almost any security product, we are mitigating risk and protecting revenue. The total cost of ownership is an overhead when it comes to security. You want to spend as much as you think is necessary to mitigate high-risk areas. Otherwise, it is just money out the door. You are protecting revenue, but I would not put a TCO on it.

It has helped our organization reduce or avoid downtime a great deal. It has avoided a potential downtime because the decoy typically gets the threat actor. My threat actors are PAN Test and Red Team people. They are identified before they can get too far and cause a scenario where I have downtime because of whatever they are doing in the environment.

The expanse of the decoys that they have is valuable. They cover everything on the corporate side that you would think of, such as Windows, Linux, and even applications like SAP. They also go into the OT environment and emulate OT devices as well.

If I were to ask them to work on something, it would be the fidelity of the alerts that occur. They should tell me if it is a real event or not. It is easy for it to identify that something hit it but give me more information. They can build AI into the engine so that I get better output from an alert to tell me if I should really be interested in that or not.

We bought TrapX before Commvault acquired them, so we have been a customer of the deception technology, and a specific one, for over seven years.

It is very stable. We do not have a problem with availability or uptime on the product.

It is very scalable. We started with hundreds, and now, we have got thousands of decoys. The only thing that you have to be careful about is the more decoys, the more alerts. Can you handle them, tune them, and get them cleaned up so that you are effectively looking at real alerts when they come in?

I am the CISO here. I do not contact them, but my team certainly has used their support organization before.

We have not used any other solution. We have been a TrapX customer from early on when they were just coming out.

It was originally on-premises. They have since come out with the cloud version, and we are migrating to it right now. It should be done by the fifteenth of March, which will make it a lot easier because before, I had to buy hardware and deploy assets across my environment. Having a cloud solution is a much better model for me.

The deployment for the cloud one has been good so far. It has been going fairly well. We are on-prem, and we are moving to the cloud. I do not know if it would be different if I was deploying the cloud only and I had never deployed it before. I would imagine it would be easier than what I did in the past with on-premise equipment. I was building servers and VMs and allocating those types of resources to run this environment.

When we started, we did get help. We had professional services included. They were early to the market, so it kind of made sense. For this deployment in the cloud, we are just doing it ourselves.

I have one person doing the migration, and that one person does other things too. The lab time is going to be about 15 days, but he is not working a hundred percent on that. He has got other responsibilities. It is not difficult.

All the time, we have only had one engineer dedicated to this platform. Our SOC uses the output, but the person who manages it day to day takes upgrades, performs the upgrades, and does those types of things. There is just one person, and that is a part-time person, not a full-time person.

The maintenance is largely around what decoys you have deployed and the tuning of those decoys. Some of the maintenance is just internal processes, such as when the decoy gets tipped over, what exactly did that? Did somebody start up a new engine or a new scan internally that we did not know about? We have to manage that change process to make sure that we put an exception on the decoy so that it does not get alerted when it is not necessary.

Originally, it was really attractive when we were deployed on-prem. They have since built and moved it to the cloud, which I am a big fan of. I have all my security tools in the cloud, but it came with a significant increase in pricing. We ended up negotiating a better price because we have been a long-term customer, and I have also spoken on their behalf quite a few times, but if I have to buy it at its current rate, I am not sure if I would be a customer. It is expensive.

We did look at a couple, but I cannot say what they were because it was a while ago.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise looking at the maturity of their security organization. Do they have a SOC and are they going to be able to address the alerts that they are going to get on the decoys? If it is just more noise on top of the noise they are already dealing with, they probably should not put this type of technology in until they clean up their environment and have a good handle on the alerts they are getting. That is because you cannot put it in and ignore it. It is a decoy. Something is hitting it, and that something might be real, and you need to take action on it.

I would recommend Commvault to others. They have been an easy organization to work with. They have good technical support, and I still like their technology.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

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.

Positive

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 it to back up everything in Office 365: our Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. And we use it for Azure Active Directory. The thing we use it the most for is recovering email messages or mailboxes.

We moved our email to Office 365 and, when we did that, we were using an on-premises Commvault solution but that was not an efficient way to back up the O365 mailboxes. Metallic has definitely improved our ability to back up and restore email, as well as the other online systems.

Also, we spend very little time with the Metallic solution because it just runs, so it has reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our backup operations. With our former solution, I was spending two hours a week on that, so it's saving me that much time. The other benefit is that I now have three or four other people on my team who can do the backups and the restores, as necessary. With the on-premises solution it was very complicated and I was the only one who could do it. Not only have we reduced the time from two hours a week to almost zero, but we now have multiple people with the ability to use the tool.

And when it comes to infrastructure costs, it's saving us about $25,000 a year.

It is very easy to use and that's been good for my team because I can have multiple people use the solution. It's very intuitive.

In addition, the granularity of the Office 365 Backup & Recovery feature is very good. We've used all of it, recovering data from each of the four systems that we back up with it, and it works very well.

It has also been very reliable.

The speed of the Office 365 Backup & Recovery feature is adequate. Microsoft controls the amount of bandwidth that people have when they're using Azure and the O365 environment. It's not really a Metallic issue, it's more of a Microsoft limitation. If they could work out something with Microsoft to improve the speed, that would help. But, generally speaking, it's been fine. I don't know of anything else that I'd want to see improved.

I've been using Commvault for about 18 months.

We're very satisfied with the stability.

The scalability is excellent. Any plans to increase our usage of it in the future will come naturally with time.

I've contacted their technical support a couple of times and they were very good.

We switched to Metallic from Commvault's enterprise backup because that solution is not in the cloud. Given that it was on-premises, trying to back up the resources in the cloud was inefficient. Metallic is in the cloud and it can talk directly to those other cloud resources. It was designed better for what we need to do.

We used Commvault Metallic's implementation services. There was an engineer on the phone with us and he walked us through the steps and everything worked as it should. It was very simple. The configuration is all done through a web browser; just point and click. The deployment took about an hour. All I had to do was get it up and running and show my team how to use it.

Our experience with the Commvault engineer was excellent.

There are four of us who use the solution, including me. The others are all system administrators. We haven't had to designate anyone for maintenance.

It's hard to measure the ROI of a backup solution. It's like car insurance. You have to have it but it only pays for itself if you have a catastrophe.

The solution is licensed based on the number of objects that we're going to back up, and that's a known quantity. As a result, we get predictable costs for our backup requirements. The actual storage on the back end of the system is included and that means we don't have to plan for any storage growth or changes there. We just have to plan for the number of employees that we have. That makes it very predictable.

We researched Veeam Backup & Replication. The main factor in deciding to go with Metallic, at the time, was to stay with one backup vendor so that we did not have two different solutions in place.

The evaluation was to compare what Metallic was capable of doing with what Veeam was capable of doing for what we needed. We thought that Metallic was adequate so we stayed with that.

Use their professional services for the implementation. That was very helpful because whenever you're configuring anything that works in Azure, or AWS for that matter, there are complexities. The professional services walk you right through that so you don't stumble. After that, it's very simple to use.

The solution is definitely appropriate for an enterprise-level environment. The performance for both backup and recovery, in an enterprise, is very good.

When we signed up for it, it was a Microsoft Azure-based storage solution and Commvault has its relationship with Microsoft. We're just leveraging what Commvault offers, so there's not really any flexibility, but that's okay with us. We just subscribe to the service and it does what we need it to do. We didn't need storage flexibility or anything like that. We just needed what the solution had to offer.

What I've learned from using Metallic is "keep it simple." We use a very simple approach to back up everything and it works just fine.