Commvault Furthers Intelligent Data Management Vision

Commvault came out of the gate swinging this week, with a series of announcements aimed at simplifying and broadening its approach toward comprehensive data storage, protection, optimization and usefulness.

Taken together, the announcements demonstrate Commvault's vision of intelligent data management, said Chris Powell, Commvault's chief marketing officer.

"The environments our customers are working in are far from simple, especially in today's environment," he said. "Our mission is to find a way for them to manage data more simply, holistically and intelligently."

Moving in that direction requires some reconfigured products, new features and different approaches.

A new standalone version of Commvault Backup & Recovery combines complete backup and recovery capabilities for the first time. This allows organizations to secure their environment as well as recover it. The goal is to make sure that all data is available and recoverable across cloud and on-premises environments.

Commvault Disaster Recovery is a completely new product in the portfolio. With automated disaster recovery orchestration and replication, the product brings together many of the features Commvault already had dispersed in other products.

By bringing all disaster recovery capabilities together in one product, companies won't have to use several solutions to get the DR capabilities they need. When different solutions are involved, each one typically keeps its own copy of the data and has its own user interface policies.

A third product, Commvault Complete Data Protection, combines both the Backup & Recovery and Disaster Recovery solutions.

HyperScale 2.0

Commvault also announced the next generation of its HyperScale scale-out storage architecture. While the previous version provided plenty of data protection across workloads, HyperScale X integrates technology from Commvault's recent Hedvig acquisition to improve data protection and make it easier to use.

HyperScale X is designed to protect all workloads including containers, virtual workloads and databases. Built-in security and resiliency improve ransomware protection. According to the company, improvements include better resiliency by maintaining availability in the event of concurrent hardware failures, better service-level agreements (SLAs) and lower operational impact.

The integration with Hedvig is key, Powell said, because users can expand the types of environments they can support. In addition, it helps advance Commvault's vision of combining storage management with data management.

"It can be a great tool as companies look to evolve their hybrid cloud architecture," he said. "Think of it as a tool that you can use on-premises that allows you to intelligently expand your environment into the public cloud."

The Hedvig integration is exactly what the market was waiting for, said Christophe Bertrand, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

"What's key here is the completeness and integration (containers, virtual and databases) combined with scalability," he said. "I see this as a major milestone for Commvault, and a significant competitive threat to certain vendors in the scale-out hyperconverged space, in particular those focusing on secondary storage. I see this platform becoming the instrument to get customers to intelligent data management, which is the next phase of this market."

With these announcements, Commvault is systematically putting the technology and functional components in place to go beyond backup and disaster recovery. That's exactly the right move, Bertrand said.

"It's an impressive pace of execution," he said. "This is a very different company, and it's been transforming very convincingly."