Innovations to Commvault Data Platform

Commvault Systems, Inc. announced innovations to its Data Platform to further provide customers with a holistic, scalable, and cost-efficient means of storing, accessing and recovering business-critical data on premise and in the cloud.

These  innovations 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.

These innovations include extended hypervisor support, a scale-out storage option on commodity hardware, newly available of APIs that extend open access to the Data Platform, and expanded coverage and support for the company’s IntelliSnap ecosystem. These capabilities represent the latest wave of innovation to the company’s integrated solutions portfolio – which includes the Data Platform, firm’s software and company’s 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.“

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, the company announced that customers will now be able to protect and manage data and workloads across a full range of hypervisors. For example, leveraging the Data Platform, customers — through one solution – can now protect data and workloads inside of VMWare, HyperV, Xen, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (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 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 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 the firm’s offerings that include in-guest protection options for all cloud environments.

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

“The virtualisation journey for most organisations is still in progress, with converged/hyperconverged systems being the inevitable and ultimate accelerator for many,” said Jason Buffington, principal analyst, 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, Inc. “As IT organisations look to modernise their datacentres, 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 scale-out storage option
Company’s latest enhancements to the 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 Data Platform was conceived to be an open data management platform, native to all firm’s software while opening up its capabilities in storage, indexing, management, and access to customers, partners and third-party software developers.

With these updates to the platform, the company is extending the Data Platform’s capabilities through a set of new interfaces. Expanding visibility outside of traditional datacenter walls helps break down silos 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 Data Platform can 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 the company. These capabilities were made possible by implementing cloud and web-scale technology into the firm’s 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 IntelliSnap coverage and support
The latest innovations to the Data Platform feature IntelliSnap integration with snapshots on NEC Corporation‘ hardware and orchestrated snapshot control for the Nutanix environment. IntelliSnap enables customers to perform rapid online recovery from an extended library of application-consistent snapshots. With this integration, customers use company’s Intellisnap technology to orchestrate snapshot management (including recovery operations), while leveraging space-efficient snapshots for point-in-time copies. One orchestration framework helps speed recovery and simplify administration.

IntelliSnap coverage and support for NEC and Nutanix comes in addition to already-available IntelliSnap capabilities for Pure Storage, Inc., Nimble Storage, Inc., NetApp, Inc., EMC Corp., Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, Fujitsu Ltd., Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM Corp., Dell, Inc., Infinidat Ltd., DataCore Software Corporation and Oracle International Corporation, giving to the company a marketplace advantage as one of the most complete snapshot replication portfolio providers in the industry. The company 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 Data Platform enables customers to improve production performance for critical applications and hypervisor environments.

IDC global survey validates customer ROI in Commvault software
IDC validated efficiency gains in a recent survey of more than 700 company’s customers, reporting that users of firm’s software were able to improve IT, employee and organisational productivity by accelerating recovery, reducing downtime and streamlining data management. Notably, firm’s 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 the company helps customers simplify their environments, including reducing opex and capex. Firm’s 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, 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, DR, 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