This month we talk scale-out secondary storage with Jonathan Howard, Director of Technical Alliances at Commvault. Both Howard and I attended Commvault GO2017 for Tech Field Day, this past month in Washington DC. We had an interesting overview of their Hyperscale secondary storage solution and Jonathan was the one answering most of our questions, so we thought he would make an good guest for our podcast.
Commvault has been providing data protection solutions for a long time, using anyone’s secondary storag, but recently they have released a software defined, scale-out secondary storage solution that runs their software with a clustered file system.
Hyperscale secondary storage
They call their solution, Hyperscale secondary storage and it’s available in both an hardware-software appliance as well as software only configuration on compatible off the shelf commercial hardware. Hyperscale uses the Red Hat Gluster cluster file system and together with the Commvault Data Platform provides a highly scaleable, secondary storage cluster that can meet anyone’s secondary storage needs while providing high availability and high throughput performance.
Commvault’s Hyperscale secondary storage system operates onprem in customer data centers. Hyperscale uses flash storage for system metadata but most secondary storage resides on local server disk.
Combined with Commvault Data Platform
With the sophistication of Commvault Data Platform one can have all the capabilities of a standalone Commvault environment with software defined storage. This allows just about any RTO/RPO needed by today’s enterprise and includes Live Sync secondary storage replication, Onprem IntelliSnap for on storage snapshot management, Live Mount for instant recovery using secondary storage directly to boot your VMs without having to wait for data recovery. , and all the other recovery sophistication available from Commvault.
Hyperscale storage is capable of doing up to 5 Live Mount recoveries simultaneously per node without a problem but more are possible depending on performance requirements.
We also talked about Commvault’s cloud secondary storage solution which can make use of AWS S3 storage to hold backups.
Commvault’s organic growth
Most of the other data protection companies have came about through mergers, acquisitions or spinoffs. Commvault has continued along, enhancing their solution while bashing everything on an underlying centralized metadata database. So their codebase was grown from the bottom up and supports pretty much any and all data protection requirements.
The podcast runs ~50 minutes. Jonathan was very knowledgeable about the technology and was great to talk with. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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Jonathan Howard, Director, Technical and Engineering Alliances, Commvault
Jonathan Howard is a Director, Technology & Engineering Alliances for Commvault. A 20-year veteran of the IT industry, Jonathan has worked at Commvault for the past 8 years in various field, product management, and now alliance facing roles.
In his present role with Alliances, Jonathan works with business and technology leaders to design and create numerous joint solutions that have empowered Commvault alliance partners to create and deliver their own new customer solutions.