Commvault Unveils Next Gen Portfolio Including Open Data Platform

Commvault Systems, Inc. announced the next generation of its solutions portfolio, delivering a spectrum of innovation designed to help customers address the increasing challenges of managing data and information in highly disrupted, fast-paced global business environments.

The company’s new offerings fundamentally redefine the data protection, archive and cloud data markets where everything is application aware, authentication and encryption data security is essential, backup windows are reduced, instant recovery is the standard, data is accessible natively from all live and versioned locations, DR is automated, and resources are optimized and orchestrated (storage, compute, and network). These product innovations in the latest solutions release enable to help customers of all sizes transition from traditional to modern hyper and converged infrastructures, consume new technologies, and fully explore true exploitation of the cloud for critical business workloads.

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Company’s powerful combination of fully-integrated software applications, the Data Platform, and professional services provides enterprises with unprecedented levels of openness, offering customers flexibility of choice in infrastructure, platform, compute and storage providers. Customers have the ability to open up new opportunities to reduce legacy spend, be released from vendor lock-in, find pathways to more modern environments, and drive new efficiencies and speed in IT operations. These opportunities will enable the strategic deployment of resources for innovation, creativity and to increase business value.

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Company’s new solutions portfolio includes a range of innovations all designed to drive additional business insight and value for customers that redefine the market in these key areas:

• An open, standards-based approach: Runs natively in traditional on premise, hyper and converged environments, and across hybrid, private and public clouds, for protection, retention, access and compliance

• Enabling disruption: Single, unified data management approach takes the risk out of adopting new technology, and helps companies deal with the uncertainties arising from marketplace disruption

• The end of lock-in: Traditional data software format lock-in is eliminated and sets the new standard in hardware and infrastructure options for customers

• Move to the cloud: Provides the bridge from legacy to transitional hybrid to true exploitation of the public cloud; simplifies native moves to and from the cloud to enable DR; and fully migrate business critical workloads (compliance, data governance and backup) into the cloud; assures data security to, from, and in the cloud through advanced authentication and encryption protocols

• Redefines archive: Transform inaccessible digital landfills into directly accessible active data sets through familiar user experiences (file explorer, Outlook, mobile, etc.)

• Hardware array and converged and hyper-converged infrastructure ready: Leading the industry in snaps and replication management across HW arrays and infrastructures provides flexibility and choice

• Governance throughout the data lifecycle: Apply active governance from when data is created based on content and context, rather than applying methodologies only after the data is created

• End-to-end data security built in: Security is fully integrated for data in all locations, with management, audit and compliance monitoring & reporting throughout,

• Shift and reduce traditional IT spend through smarter IT: Speeds time to value, consolidates point solutions, shift resources from low to high value through faster business process execution and increased automation

• Total search: Search across all data (live and versioned), in all locations, across structured and unstructured data

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Innovations will permit customers to more easily consume new technology to evolve from traditional environments, close functionality gaps, eliminate the headaches of point solution integration, and address a range of emerging customer needs from targeted requirements up to full, web-scale projects. In addition, new company’s solutions can help shield customers from market consolidation disruption concerns while simultaneously assuring data protection, security, and compliance. Together, integrated software applications and the Data Platform represent the eleventh major version of company’s solutions.

“Commvault’s next generation software and platform are uniquely designed to help customers activate their data to unlock critical business insight and drive new value from their technology investments,” said N. Robert Hammer, chairman, president and CEO, Commvault. “The new Commvault release both leapfrogs point solution vendors in capabilities and functionality while also showcasing the performance, security, compliance, and economic benefits of a holistic data management strategy. For customers, our new platform makes it possible to better manage the challenges of disruption, whether they are seeking to move to data to the cloud, manage data in the cloud, provide secure access to data, consume new technology to replace legacy systems, move from closed proprietary systems to open, or assure a sound data management strategy in the midst of unprecedented market change and consolidation. Now, more than ever, companies are increasingly recognizing the need for a trusted partner to assure a solid data management foundation – Commvault is that foundation.“

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Openness at core of software design; new platform business model unveiled
The company has transformed its solutions and platform with a focus on openness to be a powerful IT management platform with a range to tools and technologies designed to streamline data management operations. The new software will be consumed by existing company’s customers upgrading from earlier versions, and available to new customers across a wide range of use cases across a broad choice of hardware and cloud platforms.

Answering calls from many parties to be able to more fully leverage company’s powerful platform differentiators, The company is transforming to a new business model to offer the Data Platform to a broad development ecosystem for innovation. Recognizing that gret ideas and innovation in technology are increasingly coming from inside customers’ IT shops, along with partners and third-party developers, the opportunity to open up the platform will expose new markets for the company and its partners. Commvault expects to develop and nurture an innovation ecosystem around the platform beginning early next year.

“When you modernize production, you have to modernize protection too! And nowhere is that more important than for organizations embracing emerging and disruptive new IT delivery models, such as hyper-converged infrastructures and public clouds. Between ever-heightening availability requirements and new mandates for compliance and data governance, organizations need smarter and more comprehensive data protection and management solutions,” said Jason Buffington, analyst, data protection, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Real, sustainable business and IT value and actionable insight comes from a holistic approach to data management that delivers flexibility, agility and data governance throughout the data lifecycle; wherever it is stored, consumed or shared. Commvault’s vision makes a lot of sense for customers looking for that next generation data management solution that must address a range of requirements that firmly put folks on a path to meeting their data needs today and in the future.”

Unveils key innovations in its next generation software
Designed to meet a broad range of data management use cases while helping customers adopt new and emerging technologies, the company unveiled key innovations in its next generation of software. Responding to increasing customer requirements to have additional choice and flexibility in designing, implementing and deploying their IT landscapes, and to get out from under the pressures associated with vendor lock-in,

The company announced it was further opening up its integrated data platform to unlock the data for a wider variety of secure user access and data sharing use cases:

• Open API architecture provides universal access to data under management in its standard captured format avoiding storage device lock-in

• Enable more active archive with the ability to create natively accessible secondary copies (REST/FS/APIs) where backup doesn’t make economic, performance, nor accessibility sense, like with rich media, pictures, genomics, video, etc.

• Powerful orchestration enables automation of workflows, not only through pre-configured common tasks and use cases, but also for customers and partners to build and deploy custom workflows to drive efficiencies in operations requiring the activation and usage of points in time of data. The platform increases reliability and lowers cost of ongoing IT and business operational tasks by closing the gap between the operation and the data.

• Through the openness of the platform, the company gives customers and third party software partners the ability to write their applications directly to the Data Platform. This allows information tasks to define data governance policies for all data from the moment of its inception through its lifecycle. Customers can then benefit from common data management services of the platform across all data sources (from Commvault and third-party solutions and applications).

The company said it was extending its position as into snapshot management and recovery:

• Extending IntelliSnap vendor support for snapshot orchestration to include Pure Storage, Inc., and Nutanix, Inc.

• Also extending IntelliSnap application workload coverage to include SAP HANA and Sybase and Postgres to the supported application portfolio.

• Introducing new Intellisnap orchestration to include an expansion into replication and DR management options adding management of EMC Corporation and HDS (Hitachi Data Systems Corporation ) replication configurations to complement Commvault’s current NetApp replication capabilities.

Understanding customer requirements to have more frequent recovery points while minimizing the impact on production systems, the company is introducing a universal change block tracking capability that extends across critical applications, virtual servers and file systems:

• The reduction of backup copy windows through intelligent incremental capture for files and applications opens opportunities to dramatically reduce workload impact during data protection operations while providing downstream efficiencies in network and storage utilization. Only reading and moving the delta blocks and only storing the unique changed blocks reduces bandwidth and storage requirements for ongoing recovery operations and dramatically improves RPO and RTO speed.

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The company is redefining recovery service levels by offering organizations a complete spectrum of recovery options across managed data — spanning snapshots, clones, vaults, and backups under a layer of native access methods:

• Instantaneous recovery virtually eliminates downtimes with direct native access from the open platform to point-in-time data copies

• Application awareness assures data is always available in the format required without a rewrite from proprietary storage and indexing protocols

• Extended native or on demand data delivery services that provide near-instant interactive access (recovery points) from the Commvault Virtual Repository in the format requested by the application, resulting in reduced operational effort, time and risk

• Improved user interfaces matched with enhanced reporting provide increased user efficiency and operational simplicity, while new innovation enables custom UI consoles both by user role and by use case.

Continuing to pace the multiplying virtualization platforms in the market, Commvault said it was embracing the next wave of hypervisor systems while extending a richer set of data management options behind those solutions:

• Further extending company’s virtualization coverage which today handles VMWare, Microsoft HyperV, and Citrix XenApp and now includes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

• Lead the industry with VM provisioning with easy workload portability across environments including VMWare, Hyper-V, Azure and AWS to drive more efficient use, enable automated DR solutions and drive cloud-based Test/Dev operations

DR orchestration technologies that speed and simplify DR planning and execution both on and off premise and in the cloud. These enhancements make DR operations easy to implement, test, validate, change and deploy regardless of the infrastructures and cloud technologies to be used.

“We’re excited about Commvault’s ability to develop solutions which anticipate the business trends and technology challenges we expect to face just around the corner, and look forward to the enhancements in this latest release which will help my team continue to drive value back to the organization,” said Craig Fletcher, CTO, CH2M Hill, Inc. “The reliable cadence of leading innovation we’ve come to expect from Commvault gives us a good feeling about our partnership and real confidence that we have the right technology platform in place to meet future business requirements.“

Across the company’s solution portfolio, more than 100 unique innovations will be delivered in the first wave of innovation. A complete listing can be found here.

“As a leading provider of integrated information technology solutions, CDW appreciates the ability to leverage Commvault’s unified platform as a core data center solution that we can offer to our customers spanning all major segments and verticals,” said Shea Hart, director, product and partner management, data center solutions, CDW Corporation. “Given the partnered success we’ve experienced thus far in working with Commvault, we are extremely excited to explore the joint opportunities that the next generation of the Commvault solution platform will open for us.“

Company’s next generation software and services offerings were already deployed with early adopter customers in a managed release, with full availability in December. As of this latest version of its software, the company is moving to a continuous innovation pipeline with new features, functionality, and capabilities delivered in a regular and continuous fashion matching customer demand and market dynamics, and in keeping with the reality that more than half of the companies relying on Commvault are today are consuming company’s software as a service rather than on premise, through the company’s extensive, global partner network.

Data Platform and solutions portfolio
The eleventh version of company’s solutions portfolio is uniquely positioned to help customers activate their data by accelerating the transformation from legacy data management to a modern data environment to unlock critical business insight and drive new value from customers’ technology investments. The company’s solutions portfolio is comprised of an product offering in the areas of data protection and recovery, cloud, virtualization, archive, and file sync and share that addresses evolving market trends, growth areas, and customer use cases. The Data Platform is open and standards-based, helping customers better leverage data, improve IT operations, and enabling 3rd party innovation.