Customers Gain Increased Flexibility across Cloud, Hypervisor and Storage Ecosystems with Commvault Data Platform

Commvault announced new innovations to the Commvault Data Platform to further provide customers with a holistic, highly-scalable, and cost-efficient means of storing, accessing and recovering business-critical data on premise and in the cloud.  These new innovations in the Commvault Data Platform further enable customer choice, help eliminate vendor lock-in, and facilitate increased data portability while extending the platform's value to a larger range of applications and software ecosystems for customers, partners and third-party software developers.

The new innovations include extended hypervisor support, a scale-out storage option on commodity hardware, newly available of APIs that extend open access to the Commvault Data Platform, and expanded coverage and support for the Commvault IntelliSnap ecosystem. The new capabilities represent the latest wave of innovation to the company's integrated solutions portfolio -- which includes the Commvault Data Platform, Commvault Software and Commvault services. The eleventh version of Commvault's solution portfolio was first released in October of 2015.

"Broad applicability to customers, market-leading openness for innovation, and one of the industry's widest integrations to cloud, hypervisor, traditional and new technologies - these are the hallmarks of the Commvault integrated solutions portfolio and the reasons its launch has gained so much attention," said Don Foster, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Commvault. "Our commitment to continuing and ongoing innovation brings customers new options to meet today's data management challenges, to adapt new technologies, and to enable flexible data management strategies that will drive down costs, avoid vendor lock-in, and help companies activate the value in their data."

Commvault Extends Data Portability Options for Customers

To provide customers with increased flexibility to manage data and workloads across the full range of traditional, virtual, and cloud infrastructures, Commvault announced that customers will now be able to protect and manage data and workloads across a full range of hypervisors.  For example, leveraging the Commvault Data Platform, customers -- through one solution -- can now protect data and workloads inside of VMWare, HyperV, Zen, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), and Nutanix Acropolis.  In addition, these workloads can be protected as they move from hypervisors to the public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.  

The company also announced new innovations that provide migration options for data and workloads from on-premise VMWare and HyperV solutions moving directly to Microsoft Azure and now AWS Cloud environments.  Further, the Commvault Data Platform innovations enable new backup and recovery options for data born and resident inside AWS cloud environments.   Complete workload protection (native Amazon Machine Image (AMI) support) and recovery with file-level granularity in AWS environments further enhances Commvault's offerings that include in-guest protection options for all cloud environments.

These innovations provide powerful new options to give customers broad choices in how they deploy and protect data and workloads across virtual and cloud infrastructures.

"The virtualization journey for most organizations is still in progress, with converged/hyperconverged systems being the inevitable and ultimate accelerator for many," said Jason Buffington (@JBuff), Principal Analyst at ESG. "Ensuring flexible, reliable and rapid agility of that infrastructure and its VMs and data services, across diverse hypervisors and cloud infrastructures, will simplify and accelerate both their migration and enablement, as well as assure that IT can deliver what the businesses need."

"We're committed to helping customers build highly scalable, secure enterprise clouds that deliver on their application and business needs," said Venugopal Pai, VP, Business Development and Alliances, Nutanix. "As IT organizations look to modernize their datacenters, we're pleased to see our relationship with Commvault continue to grow, specifically with its support of the Acropolis hypervisor, so customers can deploy these enterprise clouds with seamless protection by Commvault."

Further Opens Platform and Provides New Scale-Out Storage Option

Commvault's latest enhancements to the Commvault Data Platform include APIs that enable customers, partners and third-party software developers to access the platform through Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3), REST, and NFS interfaces. Initially launched in October of 2015 as part of the company's eleventh version of its solutions portfolio, the Commvault Data Platform was conceived to be a truly open data management platform, native to all Commvault Software while opening up its capabilities in data storage, indexing, management, and access to customers, partners and third-party software developers.

With these new updates to the platform, Commvault is extending the Commvault Data Platform's capabilities through a set of new interfaces.  Expanding visibility outside of traditional data center walls helps break down siloes through extended search and now adds indexing support for SaaS applications, as well as file systems and websites. For customers leveraging the new extended platform, these updates provide one single index view of on- premise and off-premise data sets.

In addition to access through expanded APIs, the company also announced that the Commvault Data Platform can now offer customers a scale-out storage option running on any commodity hardware to support petabyte scale environments.  This provides customers with a new, cost-effective option as they consider how to deploy new technology and infrastructures at scale, while applying best-practice data management and protection from Commvault.  These new capabilities were made possible by implementing cloud and web-scale technology into the Commvault Software to enable the platform's virtual repository to "scale out" to meet today's high volume data set requirements and drive operational simplicity.

Extending Commvault Intelli Snap Coverage & Support

The latest innovations to the Commvault Data Platform feature IntelliSnap integration with snapshots on NEC hardware and orchestrated snapshot control for the Nutanix environment. Commvault IntelliSnap enables customers to perform rapid online recovery from an extended library of application-consistent snapshots. With this integration, customers use Commvault's Intellisnap technology to orchestrate snapshot management (including recovery operations), while leveraging space-efficient snapshots for point-in-time copies. One seamless orchestration framework helps speed recovery and simplify administration.  

IntelliSnap coverage and support for NEC and Nutanix comes in addition to already-available Commvault IntelliSnap capabilities for Pure, Nimble, NetApp, EMC, HDS, Fujitsu, Huawei, HPE, IBM, Dell, Infinidat, DataCore and Oracle, giving Commvault a marketplace advantage as one of the most complete snapshot replication portfolio providers in the industry.  Commvault support crosses the full spectrum of traditional, flash, converged and hyper-converged infrastructures. 

With snapshot technology one of the fastest and most efficient ways to recover data and applications, customers are looking to integrate the built-in snapshot technologies from their storage partners to deliver on SLAs for recovery. Addressing the demand for extended snapshot management capabilities, the Commvault Data Platform enables customers to improve production performance for critical applications and hypervisor environments.

IDC Global Survey Validates Customer Return on Investment in Commvault Software

IDC validated efficiency gains in a recent survey of more than 700 Commvault customers, reporting that users of Commvault Software were able to improve IT, employee and organizational productivity by accelerating recovery, reducing downtime and streamlining data management. Notably, Commvault customers halved the weekly admin time across IT functions for backup, snapshots, cloud provisioning and cloud data management, DR and discovery.

The study reports that Commvault helps customers simplify their environments, including reducing opex and capex. Commvault customers cited value in their ability to reduce risk-in terms of downtime, data loss, and recovery speed-and drive productivity gains, both tactically and strategically. For example, according to IDC, Commvault customer value achievements include

42-52% reduction in annual spending on data infrastructure, software, services and compliance

47-62% reduction in weekly administrative hours across cloud, disaster recovery, backup, snapshots, discovery, reporting and scripts

55% reduction in unplanned downtime

67-68% improvement in average recovery time for messages, files and VMs, as well as Exchange, Oracle, SharePoint and SQL

66-217% improvement in data coverage for protection, analytics, encryption, and reporting