There was a lot of news at CommvaultGO this year and it was our first chance to talk with their new CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani. Just prior to the show Commvault introduced new SaaS backup offering for the mid market, Metallic™ and about a month or so prior to the show Commvault had acquired Hedvig, a software defined storage solution. Keith and I also participated in a TechFieldDay Exclusive (TFDx) for Commvault, the day before the show began.
First up is Metallic, a Commvault Venture. When Sanjay arrived he took a worldwide tour of Commvault offices and customers and came back saying they needed a Software-as-a-Service backup offering to go after the mid market. That was about 6 months ago and since then, they have spun up a development and marketing team and today delivered their first product.
Metallic has three offerings all based on Commvault technology but re-implemented to be simpler to use and operate in the cloud.
- Metallic Core Backup & Recovery which is targeted at virtualized server environments whether on premises or in the cloud. It covers backup and recovery for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V & KVM VMs, SQL server and file servers running on Windows or Linux.
- Metallic Office 365 Backup & Recovery, which is targeted at Office 365 solutions and provides backup and recovery solutions for these customer environments.
- Metallic Endpoint Backup & Recovery, which is focused on desktop and laptop users and provides backup and recovery for those end-user environments.
Metallic operates in it’s own cloud environment (believed to be Microsoft Azure) and it’s a bring your own cloud secondary storage solution with an option to use Metallic cloud storage as secondary storage.
At the moment, Metallic is only offered to US based organizations and purchased through Commvault channel partners. However, the free (believe 45 day) trial can be downloaded and purchased without the channel.
Pricing for the Core Backup & Recovery is based on TB/month and pricing for the other two Metallic offerings is based on user seats/month. There doesn’t seem to be any retention limit for the Office365 and Endpoint products. The Core Backup product data retention is only limited by the TBs that are licensed.
Next up is Commvault Activate™. This product was announced at last years GO conference but neither Keith or I took note. Activate is data management solution using Commvault backup storage and provides three capabilities, File storage Optimization, which identifies files that are suitable for archive; Sensitive Data Governance, which profiles and id’s sensitive data in files and provides governance; and Compliance Search & eDiscovery, which can be used to put legal holds and create review sets for legal and other compliance activities.
And then there’s Hedvig, a Commvault Venture. At the show there was much talk about the Data Brain as having two sides, one was for the management of data protection and the other was for the management of storage. What Commvault plans to do over the next few years is to deliver on a unified storage and protection Data Brain that supports both of these sides. During the TFD sessions there was quite a lot of chatter, twitter and otherwise about whether customers would ever be willing to have both primary and secondary storage on the same system, or be have both be controlled by the same data plane. Commvault isn’t the only vendor to have gone down this path. We will need to wait and see how customers react.
The podcast is ~23 minutes. As mentioned previously, Keith is a long time friend and co-host of our GreyBeards On Storage podcast. He always has an interesting perspective on how new technology can benefit the data center today. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor
Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) is a IT thought leader who has written articles for many industry publications, interviewed many industry heavyweights, worked with Silicon Valley startups, and engineered cloud infrastructure for large government organizations.
Keith is the co-founder of The CTO Advisor, blogs at Virtualized Geek, and can be found on LinkedIN.