Metallic Reviews

Overall, Metallic has helped us out tremendously from a backup and restore situation. We just had a pretty major restore that we had to do from Metallic two weeks ago for a file that was basically deleted five days ago, and they needed a copy from seven days prior to that. My whole team walked through the restore in about two to three minutes. We basically figured out which buttons to push, then the restore was done 30 seconds later. That was an eye-opener at that point, because we understand what a great decision we made by going with Metallic.

If you ask me today whether Metallic was appropriate for an enterprise-level environment, then I would say, "Yes." If you asked me a year and a half ago, I would have said, "No." Normally, you would think that a cloud-only backup type solution probably wouldn't work for an enterprise environment. Then, here comes NDOT and we're about as enterprise as it gets when it comes to the state of Nevada. Right now, we are doing all kinds of neat stuff with this solution where normally you would need an on-premises solution. They have me convinced now. We are backing up stuff that I couldn't get MABS or Rapid Recovery to backup, and those are on-prem and cloud, e.g., hybrid solutions. If we wanted to, we could go to hybrid with Metallic, but their cloud solution is so stable right now.

I ran the solution through my CISO. When it comes to server guys, I am probably the security-conscious systems guy on our team. I went to the same training that our CISO did. Between him and me, we love Metallic. We think their security is definitely acceptable at a high level.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature, which keeps the training down. Pretty much anybody in my group right now can do a whole bunch with Metallic compared to what we could do with our previous solution, on-prem Commvault. The ease of use is probably my number one priority. With the amount of systems that our systems team deals with, the ease of use is the most important thing. We were bouncing around all of the time from this system to that system to this system, trying to remember how things work. Whereas, Metallic keeps it simple.

It is just about as flexible as you can get; simple. You can put it anywhere you want. You can put it on-prem or in your cloud. I could see where a team that's looking for more of a follow the bouncy ball type of solution might get a little confused. "Oh, no. What do you mean I might have to do it this way or I can't do it that way?" Sometimes, people just want to be told what to do. For an enterprise environment, like we are at NDOT, everything we do is not standard. It is not industry standard; it is not normal. We have all kinds of one-offs. We do need flexibility in the solutions that we get. I will say that Metallic has been extremely flexible in that sense, where we are able to follow the bouncy ball if we wanted to. Obviously, we didn't. We did it our way and Metallic, as a whole solution, provided that to us with no issues.

Permissions can be tricky. There is granularity when trying to get people to write permissions to be able to view, backup, and restore. It is just hard to understand that granularity. I can't even 100% say that it is Commvault. I can say it is not super cut-and-dry right out of the gate. However, I would also say it is great because it is granular.

Getting my guys the right access has a learning curve. Sometimes, it is, "Oh, okay. I think I got it for you." Then, they say, "Oh, nope. I logged in but I can't see this." Then, it is, "Okay, hold on. Give me a second. Let me change that. Okay, it's this one." That learning curve has probably taken a little bit longer than some simpler things. So, Metallic has some granularity, and as a systems administrator, I appreciate that. At the same time, I also realize that I have to learn it.

Seven to eight months ago, the documentation needed improvement, but they have caught up on it now.

I have been using it for a year. My team has been using it for about seven to eight months.

It is a very stable platform.

Right now, we have seven guys on my team and two of us are setting up the backups. The other five of us are strictly doing restores mainly until we get all our backups entirely into the cloud and clean up the groups. I really just need two guys doing that, a junior admin and me. The junior admin has been setting this all up because he will be around for another 15 years. I might as well have him learn it now and be our guru.

For the most part, it does the updates for us. There is a piece that we own down on our network and there is a piece that they own on their network. For the most part, the piece that they own is definitely the bigger of the two. With that being said, our version that we are running on-premises needs an update, which basically means that it is waiting on a server restart. Our servers restart once a month, so I imagine it is scheduled to restart on Sunday. Then, we will get that up-to-date. Metallic pushes it out, then our server installs it. Metallic is mostly on the hook for updates and keeping things up-to-date.

It is 100% scalable.

We were on a hybrid system, which was on-prem and in the cloud as well as local. We had probably 10% of our servers that were backing up locally to themselves. We had about 40% of our big, large servers backing up on-premises. Then, the other percentage was backing up to the cloud.

Once we moved to Commvault, instead of about 80% of my servers backing up to the cloud, we will shortly have them all going to the cloud. Now, I'm not hybrid, but in a simple solution, which is a cloud backup solution. Adding to that is as simple as going to Azure, and saying, "Hey, I need this storage count to be a little bit bigger," as long as I have pre-planned the amount that I would buy from Metallic. In other words, Metallic gives us a price on 100 servers. I know that I have 50, and I am good to scale for another 50. All I have to do at that point is go into my Azure tenant, have it give me some more storage, and at that point now I am scaling.

Now, if I need to, I get a hold of Larry over there in Metallic, and I say, "Hey, buddy. I need to add another 50 servers." Then, he gives me a price quote, and we pay them again. The solution is simple, easy, and scalable. I don't need to buy hardware. I don't have a bunch of engineers down here reassessing our environment. I just got to add some more storage to the cloud, then I start sending more data out to the cloud. I would say, "Scalability is wow." They have done a great job there.

I had a conversation yesterday, between me and my manager, about when we will use Metallic's Office 365 Backup & Recovery. First, we need to get our backups. Between the Metallic solution, the file storage optimization, and now the 365, which are the three things that we have gotten from Commvault over the last year. File storage optimization is next, then 365 is after that. I am going to say sometime in October.

So far, I would give Commvault tech support 10 out of 10. We have dealt with some good and some bad tech supports. Between Microsoft, Dell, and Commvault, those three solutions are at the top of my list when it comes to support.

Anything that we find is usually something that we can fix ourselves. We can get ahold of support, then support takes care of it.

We were using Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS), but there were many problems with it. We turned around, started using Metallic about a year ago. I tested it out. We now have 80% of our servers being backed up to Metallic. We will probably have the rest in the next six to eight weeks. At that point, for the first time in two years, we will have all our servers completely backed up.

When we used to have the on-prem version of Commvault, it was nothing like Metallic. Metallic is a different solution, but it is Commvault. Back in those days, when we had Commvault, it was pretty complex. It was very granular. It had many features, but it was complex. You really only could have one or two guys working on it.

We left Commvault five years ago because the grass is always greener on the other side and cheaper: bigger, better, and stronger. Of course, we came to find out: none of the above. Nothing was true. Basically, we were talked into it by Dell EMC. My old manager, the person whose position I now have, was talked into using Quest Rapid Recovery product by Dell EMC, saying, "Hey, you don't need Commvault. They are one of the biggest backup solutions in the world, and we are an up-and-coming, starting company. We're going to make it cheaper for you. We are just as good. We will show you some cool demos." Those demos looked great. Of course, we went with it. To make a long story short, in the four and a half years that we had Quest Rapid Recovery, we were never compliant on our backups, not once. We were duped.

We are finally back with Commvault, and we now have a 100% compliance backup solution. 

We switched to Metallic because of money. Right now, we are paying less for Metallic than we ever were for Rapid Recovery. I have reclaimed man-hours back for my team. I had one guy for five to six hours a day managing those two other systems, Microsoft Azure Backup and Quest. I lost four to six hours a day for one of my top-level guys by having him troubleshooting that all day long. By going to Metallic, we have freed up man-hours, infrastructure costs, and the time to manage.

I did the first initial setup all by myself. I had it set up in about an hour and a half, then I was backing up a server in about an hour and 45 minutes. It was pretty easy. That was our proof of concept testing. I did that for about three or four months, then I blew it up, broke it, and reimplemented it. 

When we started using this solution, it was seven months into its infancy. By the time we bought it, they had just hit their first year. It has definitely changed around making things a little easier, instead of having to go: here, here, here, here, and there. They have simplified things. They have created nice new little shortcuts. 

The interface now is super easy. You can fumble around in there, then after awhile, you are like, "Okay. That is how this works."

The process of switching to Metallic was really easy. We actually ran Metallic backups during the MABS backup. In other words, we were actually backing up with those solutions as we migrated to Metallic. Of course, we had to age-off. The fact that we did not have to turn off the other backups so Metallic could do its backups made the implementation extremely easy. The cut over was easy. 

We were able to run it in parallel with the other system. It didn't cause any issues. It tells me right there that it's not the same design. Because if it was the same design, then we would've had to turn off the other one which means that we would not get backups for two or three weeks while Metallic catches up. That is not always a good thing to do when you are talking about important systems. Because of Metallic's different way that it backs up, we were able to run it in parallel. The implementation was very simple. It wasn't like we had to go and pull the tablecloth out from underneath the glasses while they were still sitting on the table. It was extremely seamless because of the fact that their backups are done differently than the not-so-good solution we were going with.

I had a couple phone calls with engineers and broke it really good a few times, to the point where it even broke up their stuff there. Once we decided we were going to buy the product and implement it into our environment, they set up a couple of calls with their top level engineers and had us set it up even better than I did in my test environments. They were really good about helping us. So, their assistance and the ease of setup were great.

After it was approved through our infrastructure technical committee, I needed to get a call set up with their engineers for an initial setup of the plans. The first plan to get going the way they recommend. Because when I was testing, I tested from every angle. I broke the heck out of it to know its limitations. We created an initial phone call with their engineers, who helped us set up the first 20 VMs to get backed up under their idea of how they set the system up to work. This was good because I didn't understand this when I was doing my testing. I just did the things I thought that were supposed to be done.

We had a second follow-up call with them. That second follow-up call was for any questions that we had for the month in-between what we were doing with our backups, e.g., checking things out and playing around. They answered a whole bunch of questions for us and helped us set up single sign-on. It was a smooth process. They were willing to help us out, which helped us out tremendously. We basically used their support to help us implement the solution.

Once you set up a bunch of these backups, you will get notified in an email if they are wrong. If you're not adding anything the next day or another server, there is no reason for you to even be in there, unless there is a restore. 

At the moment, we are trying to add 400-plus servers. Therefore, we are going to have a guy in there for half an hour to an hour a day adding a few more servers. When adding a few more servers, you need to be careful. You don't want to rock the boat too much, then all of a sudden you have a big problem. So, it is just a little bit at a time. Right now, we are talking about an hour once or twice a week. Once our servers are sitting up there and this stuff is going, there should be no maintenance. 

I have made this very clear to my team. I don't need a guy in there, like we did with Rapid Recovery, chasing down errors. There are no errors. It is backing up. It will tell you when it is not. Then, when it's not backing up, we will tackle that. 

I just don't see a lot of maintenance on this solution. Management of it really has nothing to do with anything unless you are fixing or reimplementing something. For the most part, once you set it, then it is a set-and-forget SaaS solution.

We have a seven-man team. I am the supervisor with six guys underneath me, who are all veteran IT professionals. One of those gentlemen, a $100,000 a year guy, was on Rapid Recovery for four to six hours a day, every day for the four years that we had it. He was just maintaining it, fixing problems and backup errors. When we went to MABS, it was the same problem. He was now managing both of these things, because we were dual-headed at that point. Once we got into Metallic, I had one of our junior-level admins, at that point, take this project on. He moved 80% of our servers into the cloud and basically checks an email once or twice a week, looking at the backups for about 20 minutes a day.

The labor has gone down exponentially. It is insane. We are talking about a $100,000 solution that we paid for Rapid Recovery a year, plus the $100,000 a year salary for having one of my guys managing it every day. Whereas, we are paying Metallic an X amount of dollars right now and spend about five or 10 minutes every other day just to verify that the backups are good. We don't have to fix anything.

We are basically getting rid of hardware that we were paying for Rapid Recovery. We are actually leveraging some of Rapid Recovery's hardware for MABS, so we cut down on MABS and Rapid Recovery. Now, the hardware that we would need to renew warranties and get support for is no longer necessary.

I used the free trial to test it. That was our proof of concept. I had the servers up and running by the middle of the day. I think I started it some time around breakfast. It took a couple of hours. It was really simple.

Hands down, Metallic provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements. You are getting what you pay for. If they are charging you X amount of dollars at that point, that is what you are going to pay. So far, I have not seen any hidden costs or any kind of gotchas. It is pretty cut-and-dry. They will let you know, "Hey, you are going to use our storage and it will cost you this much. You are going to use your storage, then we are going to charge you this much to backup." What they told us they were going to charge us is exactly what they are charging us now for the next two and a half years.

We also evaluated NEC, which is another big solution out there, like Nike or Converse. NEC has their own data centers. The government uses them. They are big and their solution is robust. We tested it, and it worked well too. However, the bottom line was a huge sticker price shock. We went with Metallic because of cost. 

Since I have been in this NDOT environment for eight years, we have used Commvault, Rapid Recovery, MABS, and now we are back to Commvault Metallic. Of those four products, with Commvault being the first and now the last, those have been the two more stable products. The first one that we used was Commvault on-premises, with MediaAgent and physical servers on-prem, which was extremely stable. Then, we went to Rapid Recovery and that wasn't stable. Neither was MABS. Now, we are back to Metallic and it is stable again. Most solutions I have used from Metallic, from the on-prem now to the cloud, have been extremely stable when it comes to backup.

Definitely take advantage of the support team in your initial rollout because Commvault is not a follow the bouncy ball type of solution. It is definitely granular, configurable, and scalable. With the initial deployment, it is important to get that right because everything is going to start working off of that initial deployment. It is a good idea to take advantage of their support tier in that initial deployment and not try to set it up 100% on your own. I did, and It worked. However, once we got a hold of the engineers for the production rollout, they started answering some of my questions. If I would have known the answers that they gave me back when I rolled it out, the rollout would have been much easier and not as hard as it was. It could have been even better. 

Get a little knowledge from these guys. Have them help you roll it out. It takes half an hour. That is all it took us. We had the engineer on the phone for half an hour. He had us setup and backups going, with the vision that Metallic was built for, not the vision that I had thought it was for. My biggest recommendation is to take advantage of their support during the initial deployment. From there, you can be as creative as you want. It is always good to get that help in the beginning.

There have been discussions about doing the solution’s Endpoint Backup & Recovery. It really just comes down to the fact that we would need more push from the business. Right now, the business understands that most of their data is stored in the cloud as-is. So, backing up into a computer is not necessary, as the data that they are putting on that computer is in the cloud. I don't see us using it any time soon.

Right now, Metallic is used a lot. For the most part, it is now the entire backup of our 400-plus servers. It will be used even more with the 365 implementation, Active Directory backup implementation, and disaster recovery. One of the good things about going to Metallic in this cloud solution, where all of my servers now live in the cloud, is I have a DR solution now, as opposed to having to move it down to another place or building in Las Vegas. Now that we are central with our backups to the cloud, we can focus on a DR solution. It definitely is very important to our infrastructure. As a server team, backups are number one. Metallic has now become one of our fallbacks on solutions for all kinds of stuff.

Spend it if you got it. The biggest lesson that I learned from using Metallic is sometimes going with cheaper isn't always better. That is why we left Commvault. While Metallic might be a little more expensive than Quest or MABS, with that extra dollar you are paying, you are going to get your money's worth.

I would rate them as 10 out of 10. I can't really complain. Right now, they look like a knight in shining armor. What do you normally do with a knight in shining armor? You put a medal on him.

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.

Our primary use case is for Office 365 Backup. We started out as an Exchange Online only company. Then we were looking for some sort of backup solution to augment the existing Microsoft Office 365 archiving features for a price that was more compatible with our company versus what Microsoft was offering for their archiving solution. We also needed the ability to do time and date stamp retrievals. We ended up settling on Commvault at that time. We've been with them, and we've seen it more from being in the Commvault virtualized infrastructure to being the Metallic.io SaaS solution.

We protect mostly Exchange Online, but really we do the whole breadth of Office 365 with them. We were looking at some other solutions, but with them, we're doing our entire Office 365 Microsoft Online platform.

It has helped my organization because we don't have to have tapes. We're not paying for tapes, storage tapes, or storage ourselves. It's definitely a bonus. We're more efficient in all of our backups for Office 365 because it is in a single pane of glass. If we were to integrate Commvault on-premise, we'd be able to use the same pane of glass to manage both on-prem and cloud solutions. It's taken our backup from being a full-time job to being when you need it, set it up. Our users could be empowered to access their own data backups. Which means we can alleviate a lot of the administration from the backup administrator.

It has significantly reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our backup operations. We're going from an on-prem to a non-on-prem, we're all doing nonsolutions. So we really can't compare it against anything else.

The way we look at it is that before, we used to manage a separate backup solution for our on-prem environment. We had to make sure that our logs are flushed after the backup was complete. If the logs weren't flushed then it caused our on-prem Exchange to offline. There's a lot more management involved from that point of view. The other thing is that we would have to purchase the tapes. We have a tape rotation, we would have to ship tapes to an offsite location. If we need to restore, we had to go back to the offsite location, and get the restore. In some cases, exchanging restore on-premise could be a lot harder because it doesn't give you some of the brick level functionality.

My impressions of the backup and granular recovery of features are that they're constantly evolving and we've had such great contact with the engineering and development teams at Commvault while they were building out this product. We've seen the evolution of the product, and it has gone from being a platform as a service to a complete service option. The number of upgrades, updates, and ease-of-use features that they continue to build into it, has dramatically reduced the amount of time we spend looking for objects in the backup repositories.

In terms of the speed of both backup and recovery of Office 365 data, for backup, we have a very large Office 365 footprint. We have over almost 15,000 unique mailboxes, according to their metrics. The backup is at least thrice daily. I find it to be very fast compared to other options in the market right now. Especially that it can back up 15,000 users with no problem.

In terms of the ease of use, the original learning curve was a bit steep, but now I would say the overall ease of use, now that they've started with the latest releases of it is fairly intuitive. If I need to go look at my Exchange, so I go click on Exchange. If I need to look at my One Drive backups, I click on One Drive. It's fairly intuitive and it does a great job of guiding me when I'm not sure of where to go.

I haven't gone down the security road too much. However, I've never had a security concern with the product. The scalability and availability of it are outstanding. It's scaled with us. But as far as security goes, I've never had an issue or a concern, or if I did have a concern they were able to address it immediately.

We also haven't really gone too much into the flexibility in terms of where the data is stored but it's a great feature. We're only using a head-end and we're a complete SaaS offering, but we did explore the local active copies, et cetera. We decided that there was no need for us to keep the data on-premise if they're going to maintain it in Azure or AWS. So for us, it was a very easy decision to keep it in the cloud and not on-premise.

The navigation of it needs improvement in terms of the UX. The product itself, it works as expected. It's all user experience and user interface improvements that could be made and it could be made a little more consumer-friendly. Instead of having one person or a few people that know the system intimately, it gives us the ability for other people that don't have to know the system intimately be able to navigate it.

I have been using this solution for two years. 

It's a SaaS offering. It's deployed in our infrastructure and we have a single VM in our infrastructure that we use for pulling any backups down to our infrastructure that we need.

It's appropriate for an enterprise-level environment. It's scaled with us from 900 mailboxes to 12,000 mailboxes, plus our scale of the Office 365 platform.

Before the COVID pandemic, we had six users using this solution. They're system administrators, they manage infrastructure and systems.

It has a 100% adoption rate. The product is being used every day. The backups are automated four times a day and we restore them on a need basis. We use the product every day.

Their support is awesome. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate them a fifteen. The entire Commvault team always goes above and beyond every time, for everything.

We were on-prem before with an old version of Exchange, and we used old backup software to back it up.

For us, the initial setup was complex because we were one of the first customers on this solution. However, we've reset it up a couple of times just as a demo for some of our subsidiaries, and the way the set works now is very straightforward, and very clean compared to what it was when we first got to it to 18 months to two years ago.

The configuration interface was fairly straightforward. Aside from the initial, "This is a product that we are building. You are a beta customer. You're one of our first few customers on the platform.", it was fairly straightforward. Now it's very point and click. It's very straightforward, very intuitive, and well automated.

The deployment took one week.

Our implementation strategy was to get it absorbing our email while we're still migrating users to Office 365 from our on-prem solutions. For us, it was a shotgun approach. I was adding more users to our office tenants than anybody had expected. When we were rolling out Commvault we were rolling out Office 365 at the same time, and it was overwhelming Microsoft at the same time. The implementation strategy was to try to run a slow controlled burn and cut people over as needed, but we managed to get Commvault set up. Then every day, myself and the team at Commvault, were checking to make sure that all the users we had just imported into Office 365 were imported into Commvault.

It wouldn't have been possible without the support team and the development team. The implementation that works now is very clean compared to what I went through. They made themselves so available to us when we were doing our implementation that the reason it took so long to implement was because they were waiting for me for the next step.

Metallic provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements. They charge us on a model that we understand. We understand the pricing model a little bit differently. 

We investigated Backup Exec and Backupify. Backupify and Commvault were the top two. They were the two that we had narrowed in on, based on our needs analysis. We chose Commvault simply because of the scalability and expertise in enterprise.

Backupify was a SaaS solution and they had many similar features. But at the time they wanted us to add more service than we were expecting. They were fantastic competitor and they did everything we wanted them to do, just like Commvault. But we went with Commvault specifically because of their enterprise heritage.

We started with a free trial of Commvault. It might've been a POC then we just went from there.

They do a fantastic job with their documentation, so you can follow their documentation and implement it.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. We can't compare it against another staff solution that we're using. So for now it works for us, we're not seeing any issues, and it's better than what we used on-prem. 

We are doing backups for a customer's 365 tenant details. This is for 365 backup and recovery. The applications that it protects with backups include: all the details on 365, SharePoint, Team, and mailboxes.

Our client does the needed backup within our required window. We have a daily backup at 11:00 every day. We have not felt any pressure or performance issues with our 365 tenant.

The restore has been great. It has been faster than doing restores with the on-premises solution.

Quick backups and restores of data are the most valuable features. It is important that it is an easy solution to integrate with the SAML authentication of the tenant, so we can have the users log into the systems and do their own restores, if needed.

Metallic's backup & granular recovery of data for Office 365 works great. We have tested it many times for production reasons. We have done some tests and have always managed to do the recovery as we wanted and without any issues.

For simpler environments, they have some templates for startups. Possibly for a smaller environment, they need to do more automatic configuration and selections of users who want to do backups. This is mainly for smaller environments. I would like them to have the same system fit for all environments: small and big environments. Currently, we have to do a lot of configuration of the layout, which takes time. This solution is appropriate for enterprise-level enterprise, but I would like it to be easier to use for SMB environments.

Less than half a year.

Up until now, it has been a hundred percent working great. So, it looks stable.

Our customer's environment is not that big, but it looks like it can easily handle a big environment.

We back up a little less than a thousand users, whom we are licensed for, and a lot of them are company employees. 

There are two sysadmins managing the solution. One of them mainly does the monitoring and getting the work on the system.

The technical support was good enough when we needed their help. They were available for assistance and gave us good support. They fixed the issues that we had in the system. 

When we looked specifically for a solution that would hold the backup on their cloud environment, Metallic Cloud was what we wanted. We didn't want to bring the solution into our environment, but we wanted the whole solution. Metallic was exactly what we were looking for. From my point of view, Metallic Cloud was the best solution that we could find.

Previously, the client didn't have backups for the 365 report. People who deleted their emails or files on SharePoint just lost them. So, this solution was quite important, because trying to do backups from an on-premise environment wasn't successful. It took a lot of time because of the low bandwidth over the Internet.

This solution mainly gives us backup functionality that the client wasn't able to do before. It is saving them a lot of bandwidth over the Internet and giving them functionality that they previously didn't have, such as, backups to their 365 tenant. They save 150 to 200 Mbps for nightly backup runs.

Most of the important things were straightforward. It was quite easy. It is a SaaS-based, web-based configuration. It is very simple and easy. You learn by some kind of runbook, step-by-step. That's it.

In a couple of hours, we finished 80% of it. Over the next couple of days, we did a couple of tunings.

We did a PoC at the beginning. We weren't sure that we were going to purchase it because we didn't have experience with this product before. So, it was a testing environment first. When the test environment went well, we just went into production. We went from PoC status into production status. 

After we decided to move to production, we decided what would be our guiding rules for system backups, e.g., what would be the policy that we would have to decide internally. We had a small discussion about what we wanted to back up, what was the policy, who should do the management, and who should get the report. It was some type of late policy implementation after the product was already working in backups because we just moved from PoC to production immediately, which was easy enough.

The first backup is always long and takes a lot of time. After that, the daily incremental backup speed is quite fast.

We had some small issues, but we received good assistance from their support to fix those issues. The issues were mainly report type issues and changing it from HTML to PDF. These were very limited, small issues. I think they were related to small bugs in the versions. The support was helpful. So, we just got support for the issues that we had encountered during our implementation. Otherwise, we did the implementation ourselves.

One and a half people were required for the deployment, one of the system engineers and myself (as CISO of the company). I did most of the configuration, then one of the system guys helped with the SAML configuration of the Azure tenant.

Metallic has reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our client's backup operations. It is reliable. We trust it and don't need to monitor it as much as another backup. This is quite labor-intensive, manual work, so it saves our technician time. It is saving us an hour or two a day.

It is not the cheapest solution. I think the pricing is fair for mid-side customers. It is between all the other options.

Costs are fairly predictable because you pay per user. It is quite easy to do the calculation.

If you have different use cases in the 365 tenant, I am not sure that the product gets the full agility of those licenses. If I want to do backups for just some of the users, I still need to do a backup for the full SharePoint and have a full license for all of the users who use SharePoint. If there could be a higher variety of license type for this that reduces the cost, that would be a nice functionality.

We were looking for a backup solution to do backups for all 365 data as well as SharePoint, Teams data, OneDrive, and mailboxes. We wanted all the data located on our 365 to be robust from one side, but easy enough to manage from the other side, not complicated, and reliable. After we did the PoC with Metallic and found it a suitable solution, we decided to keep working with it.

We mainly decided to use Metallic because Commvault has a good solution on-premises. We know Commvault as a company. They have a good product and we have a good relationship with them. Commvault is in Israel, so we decided to try the cloud product in the environment, and it was good.

We did PoCs with all the options that we evaluated. We mainly checked the supported functionalities and eliminated those that did not support our required functionality. In the end, we had two options and decided to go with Metallic.

I would give Metallic's overall ease of use as an eight out of 10. It is not too complicated. It is quite easy to use for people who are familiar with Commvault. They can understand the language pretty quickly. If you have Commvault on-premises, which we have for the same customer, you can understand the language of the solution pretty quickly.

Know what policies you need and what you want to back up beforehand. If you are planning to do backups of a few users, and not all your users, research the type of applications you need to do backups, e.g., if you need SharePoint, mailboxes, or OneDrive. Each of these applications behaves differently regarding license activities.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect, but it is a really good product. There were only small issues/bugs that I found in the beginning, e.g., small report issues and it was a little bit complicated the first time configuring for SMB users, which is a bit more complicated with limited options. However, since we have experience with other products, it was fast. I don't know another SaaS product doing 365 backups better than Metallic. This solution is the best one that I'm aware of.

We use it for endpoint backups. They are laptops and we needed a solution that could handle Linux, Macintoshes, and Windows, in different locations, and Metallic was the best option available.

We needed a solution that could handle Linux and Macintosh and Windows, all together. Metallic seemed to be the only one on the market that could provide an all-endpoints SaaS solution.

In terms of the manual work required to manage our backup operations, I don't have to manage it that much. There is not much that needs to be done or manual work involved. It works well. There's not much I have to do on our side and I don't have to dedicate any time to it.

Metallic has also saved our organization money on infrastructure costs because the price was amazingly affordable, and we didn't have to create an on-prem solution. Especially since we're moving the Parsons data centers to the cloud, we're reducing our on-prem footprint. This SaaS gives us a full cloud solution to take care of that . There's a huge cost savings for us with this. 

We're only using the endpoint backup solution part of it. It works very well. There's no impact on the endpoint. It runs in the background and it's something that you install and then forget about.

It's very easy to use. You don't really need to change anything or do anything different. For non-technical people it can be a little challenging trying to understand the GUI options because it can go a little bit deeper, but for basic use it's very simple to use.

It's definitely appropriate for an enterprise-level environment. Its performance for both backup and recovery is amazing. It runs very well. I don't even know when it's running and that's true during the backups as well. It completes successfully and there's zero impact on the endpoints.

The compression and deduplication are great for optimizing bandwidth and speed. I don't have to worry about it or think about it, and, because it's a SaaS solution, I don't have to worry about the storage size.

It's also very flexible in terms of where data is stored. You can choose what you would like. We're going to Azure cloud and the issue for us was more whether the security protocols were in place, and they are. As long as they met the security requirements, we were okay.

It has the AES-256 encryption. It meets that requirement and there is no issue with the amount of time it takes. The backups are very quick. There's no delay.

Adding new users who are non-technical can be a little challenging. You can push the software out through SCCM and install it that way, and that works great, but it would be nice to have another option where somebody could download an executable and run it and it would work. It's a little challenging to get it on other systems. I work from home but I have to go and help them because sometimes they don't know. I might send them the authentication code and they'll try to install it... I'm still working out the details, trying to figure out where they went wrong, but I've had several users try to do it and it hasn't worked.

I would like to see more customizable reports. I have reports going right now, but the daily report, for example, shows something like 40 jobs that ran when there are just a few endpoints on there. I'd like to just know if the endpoint was successfully backed up, not how many times. More customizable reports would be nice to have.

I've been using Metallic since it was released. We jumped onto it as soon as possible.

The stability is great. It just runs. I've had zero issues with it.

The scalability is great. It's very scalable.

Currently, I only have 10 endpoints that I'm protecting and I'm trying to roll it out to more. There are a lot of employees in our company. Right now, we're using Metallic for just critical systems, critical endpoints. I'm hoping to create more awareness throughout Parsons so that others learn about it and see it and, maybe, start using it. But for now, it's going slowly trying to get Metallic in through the door.

Commvault's technical support for Metallic is great. I really enjoy working with Commvault tech support. They're very knowledgeable and I love how they handle tickets. They're on top of things. They're always kind and polite and understanding. I wouldn't want to go through third-party support. I'd want to go directly through Commvault.

Our company used to use PC Backup but that's gone away and now they want to use OneDrive. A lot of executives feel that OneDrive is sufficient and that we don't need an actual backup solution.

The reason for going to Metallic was that PC Backup couldn't do Linux or Macintosh. We needed something that could do everything. It is a complete SaaS solution, backing up to the cloud.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was me that set it up. We got our plan configured on the website and I installed it for myself and for somebody else. It was pretty straightforward and pretty easy to configure. The instructions work well. 

The interface was a simple webpage, which is something I like about it. It's something I'm used to and there wasn't much to add. You just add the endpoint into the policy and away it goes. You don't have to really configure it.

We enabled it with SAML, so it uses our Active Directory and automatic login, and that worked out pretty well. It's been a long time since I've dug into it and done it. I tried to add some other users and they just emailed me and said they couldn't get it to work. I'm not sure what they're doing. Somehow they went wrong and I'm not sure yet how.

Overall our initial deployment took about 10 to 15 minutes. It was quick. In terms of deployment and maintenance, I'm the sole person who is working with the solution.

We didn't have an implementation strategy. We were trying it out. I had a certain number of laptops that I knew that needed to be added to it. I went through and configured them to work with Metallic. It was a really quick, easy setup, and it just runs with no issues. It doesn't matter where the laptop is at, where it's connected.

For me, it works great and it does exactly what it says it does. I love having it. I would put it on my home computers if I could. I'm still working on trying to get it implemented throughout all of Parsons.

We looked at PC Backup. We also looked at other cloud solutions. Metallic was the one that offered all the options.

It's simple and it has very low-to-no impact on endpoints. It runs in the background and has some really cool features for the end-users to use on the computer, if they want to look at their backups, do restores, or to find their computer location. But it is very simple and basic for non-technical people to use.

I like the interface, how it works, and being able to get daily reports of any failures or anything that happens is very useful.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. I haven't come across anything that's better.

It is used as a single backup for my small office's Microsoft 365 account, particularly the OneDrive files.

The best example is that it hasn't impacted my operations, which is exactly how it's supposed to work. It's supposed to provide a backup in the case of an unforeseen event or emergency, if something happens to the OneDrive. That's what it's there for. Otherwise, it shouldn't have an impact and it doesn't.

It provides daily backups and, since I'm not doing manual backups anymore, it has greatly reduced the time that it was taking me to do those. I was doing them every day so it has greatly reduced my workload. In addition, it has provided much higher reliability and efficiency. It's saving me on the order of 20 hours a month, as it does backups more efficiently and more often than I did or would have.

The most valuable feature is the one that I'm using, which is the backup of my OneDrive. Thankfully I haven't had to use a backup yet, but the solution itself seems to be working very well.

In terms of the speed of backup, it operates seamlessly, so I'd rate it as excellent. The first backup took a while because I already had quite a bit of information residing on my OneDrive, but now, with my daily use and workload, quite honestly I don't even notice when it backs up. It's completely seamless.

I've been using Metallic for about a year.

I have not had any issues with its stability.

It seems like it has good scalability, which is another thing that I'm interested in because hopefully I won't be a small business for long. I've never run enterprise-level software, but I'm very happy with Metallic, as the owner of a small business.

As the business grows, as I add users, the ability to add backup features is there. It's something I've discussed with their customer support and tech support. I'm comfortable that as I add users and begin to use more features in my Office suite and elsewhere, Metallic will be able to provide backup. That's really the primary reason I have it: data backup and security.

I use it every day for the business. It's in OneDrive now but at some point I'm going to have employees and it will have to migrate over to SharePoint. I will then need it backed up in SharePoint as well for use by my team.

In terms of ease of use, I'm not an IT professional. I own a small business. So it was a little challenging to get running, but Metallic's customer service — their technical support and their sales and customer contact representatives — were world-class; among the best customer service interactions I've had with anyone, anywhere, for any reason. That was very much appreciated. I appreciate their follow up, their diligence, their responsiveness. That was just world-class. There's no other word for it.

They're very responsive. When a question comes in, they follow up, even when they haven't heard from me. They check to make sure everything is working properly, and they answer any questions preemptively. I have the utmost regard for their customer service and their tech support and their ability to solve issues. They have done a phenomenal job of customer outreach, problem solving, and tech support; the whole nine yards.

I had a physical hard drive that I backed everything up to, manually. That was my backup plan, which was not a good backup plan. I'm much more comfortable with how things are operating now.

The reason I moved to Metallic was that my OneDrive files got too big. The manual backup was taking too long and it was not being accomplished as often as I wanted it to be. I knew I needed an automatic cloud backup.

The setup was a little bit difficult for a non-IT person like me. My OneDrive is protected by multifactor authentication, and to get the backup to begin behind that multifactor authentication took a little bit of almost customized support, even though I was following the instructions and the videos. That process could have been easier. But considering that I needed the additional support, Metallic was phenomenally responsive and I give them the highest marks possible for their responsiveness and support.

It was configured through Azure. That was hands-on on my part. It was simple to understand. But even though I followed the instructions, I wound up doing a screen share with tech support that uncovered some additional items that the instructions did not cover. That was the source of the initial problem. But tech support and customer support helped me overcome those efficiently and they were really responsive and helpful.

I knew the setup would take a little bit of time and I set the time aside. When it didn't work and the backup wasn't occurring or was having trouble, I got in touch with customer support and technical support and they provided assistance. And then I would get busy and not be able to respond to them for some time, and then they would get back with me. The plan was to sit down and have it all done but it didn't work out that way. It took a little bit longer than planned, but that was not Metallic's fault.

I got everything installed, but I didn't have any backups accomplished till after the free trial expired. But again, that was not Metallic's fault.

It was just me and the Metallic support. One of the customer support agents at Metallic, Alix, was fantastic. I don't recall the names of the tech support people who I spoke with, but they were also excellent.

I'm the only one using and maintaining it at the moment.

It hasn't saved money for my company on infrastructure costs but the idea is that in the event that something unforeseen or catastrophic happens, it will save me money. It's like an insurance policy.

It certainly provides me with more predictable costs for my backup requirements. And there is ROI because I've got a backup that I don't have to do manually. That saves me time and headache.

I looked at this at the beginning of the year and I don't remember what the prices were for all the other services, but I thought that Metallic's was fair. It was also highly rated, which was even more important than cost because I need a reliable, secure, backup method.

I looked into other options but Metallic seemed like it had the greatest ability to scale up, add features, and it had a good price.

I would highly recommend it.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using it is that when I expand, I'm going to need an IT consultant to assist, so that I don't have to spend the time doing it. I will want someone who can deal with the issues efficiently.

With the caveat that I haven't needed a backup yet, since nothing catastrophic has happened, I would rate Metallic and their team as a 10. I can only assume and hope that if, God forbid, something were to happen and I were to need the backup, it would be as good as the service has been so far.

We use it for backup and disaster recovery. We protect Windows and Linux servers, Windows 10, SQL, and Office 365.

It has streamlined data recovery, via a SaaS solution, to provide overarching protection. Metallic has also reduced the amount of manual work required to manage our backup operations by about 20 percent. In addition, it provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements because the egress charges are known.

• The SaaS offering is the most valuable feature because it provides endpoint, Office 365, and core server backup.
• The overall ease of use is good. The user experience is very in-tune and they are constantly making improvements as a result of feedback from customers.
• Its performance for both backup and recovery, and security, as an enterprise solution, is good. Integration with Active Directory and the Azure platform make it a complete solution.
• It's very easy to set up the storage across all platforms. This allows us to be dynamic and change on-the-fly.
• Metallic is also very nice because you're not connecting to a VPN to use the endpoint recovery.

There is room for improvement in the Knowledge Base and error reporting. I would like to see best practices in the Knowledge Base, and have the ability to diagnose errors without contacting support.

I have been using Commvault Metallic for three months.

It's stable. I've had some outages over the last week, but overall, it's stable.

It seems very scalable. We have plans to increase our usage of the solution.

Commvault's technical support is responsive.

There are multiple systems in place. We're in the process of replacing them.

As for the process of switching to Metallic, planning goes a long way. It's at an intermediate level between simple and complicated. We did the free trial and it was easy to get going.

We went with Metallic because it's a SaaS offering. It was one of the few solutions that offered SaaS with their own storage.

After doing it, it's straightforward, but it does require a little bit of understanding. It's in the middle between straightforward and complex. We're still in deployment but the initial setup took about one month.

Our implementation strategy is to cover critical applications: Office 365, Windows 10, and both Windows and Linux servers.

I've ran into some issues, which has made the configuration interface for configuring the solution for data protection more complex, but overall, if the instructions work, it's very simple.

The Commvault Success team helped. Other than that, it was just me. Their team was responsive. They pride themselves on making the product work for the client.

In terms of administrators of the system, there is just me in my role of network engineer. The individual users don't log in. We're a small business with under 200 users.

We evaluated Veeam and Rubrik. The pros for Metallic were that the costs were up-front and that it was a SaaS with dedicated cloud storage for endpoint and dedicated cloud storage for Office 365, separating those silos.

The drawback with Metallic is that it takes a bit of work to understand the process for registering clients, but once you have it down, it goes quickly.

Take your time to run the trial and understand what you're getting yourself into.

The move from on-premise to a cloud solution is definitely a change. Be patient with the process and open to understanding the SaaS solution.