Commvault vs Veritas Backup Exec

Frankly, we don't use any of above 2 software. We are using Veeam Backup, a rising star, as the mainline now.

We are a NetBackup shop. I have followed Commvault as well in discussions with my peers who use Commvault. I am more knowledgeable about NetBackup than I am about Commvault.

My very high level assessment would be that:
- if backup / restore is your only concern, then both are equally capable and it may come down to which one is more suitable to your particular environment, or price negotiations.
- my initial observations would appear to favor Commvault if you have a need for strong integration with storage and SAN architectures. Commvault appears to have many interfaces to different SAN and storage vendors.
- Veritas NetBackup is now more than just backup / restore especially if you want to start managing
or analyzing your data through NetBackup. You can purchase additional software from Veritas that can manage and analyze your data environment by leveraging the data and metadata information that NetBackup collects in its catalogs. If you intend to go down that path, then perhaps NetBackup might offer you options not (yet) available in Commvault.

Beyond this cursory high level assessment, you would of course have to carry out a more detailed analysis to determine what you want. I have not touched upon backup appliances from these vendors for example.

Regards,
Kyaw

I am afraid I am not a fan of either of these products I like Veeam or Redstor

I’ve run both and they are good. It’s been awhile since I used Veritas so I can’t speak to its current Enterprise capability, however, I do like that they use the industry standard tar format writing to tapes which aid in portability – unless that’s changed too. Commvault has a substantial vision and capability to meet most of your needs – and you’ll pay for it. They use a proprietary tape format among others, (dedupe) which does provide a small percentage performance improvement but likely is utilized to support some feature set in their software.

In order to provide your reader with a benchmark, our environment presently utilizes Commvault to backup 300TB to tape over the weekend and incremental daily jobs. Hardware is fiber channel connected tape libraries and storage utilizing several “media agents”. In Commvault lingo media agents are external servers processing the actual backup/restore jobs issued by the central server.

We also utilize a small Commvault deduplicated repository on disk.

Most of that is pretty much old school standard stuff for doing internal backups on site. The cloud data is a combination of several mechanisms depending on provider services and whether or not the cloud service is public or private. Appliances, gateway devices, can be handy for getting internal data into cloud – investigate carefully.

I would echo what many are posting on here. For simple backup/restore functions, either solution will do the job just as good. In that event, i would probably lean towards the more cost effective solution for my environment. With that said, they both have strengths and weaknesses in other areas just like all other competing technologies. You would need to understand what you business needs/requirements are to then choose which would fit your use case best. They are both very mature solutions and in many cases it will come down to a decision made out of preference more so than capabilities. Easy analogy: It is like Ford and Chevy. You will find a following for both and each will have their own reasons why but at the end, they will both take you to work just the same.

BR,
Jose Rosello