Hands on: Commvault Cloud review
This review first appeared in issue 359 PC Professional Edition.
A highly modular approach makes Commvault’s cloud an attractive option for businesses that need a hybrid backup solution that can be customized precisely to their needs. Originally launched as Metallic a few years ago, it is now integrated into Commvault’s cyber resiliency and recovery The cloud platform, which consists of 16 different components, thus appears to meet all data protection requirements.
For necessary offsite backups, you can use Commvault’s cloud storage as your backup destination, or choose from 26 third-party providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft sky blue and Google. Commvault gives ransomware Hard times to attack because it’s based on Azure cloud storage is air-gapped and immutable, and now provides modules for risk analysis and backup content malware scanning.
The Security IQ feature provides security posture ratings and options for force recovery and removal of additional entitlements. The Abnormal File Activity service alerts you if a ransomware attack is detected and provides Swift with the last good recovery point Data recovery.
The cloud portal displays a list of service catalogs and selecting a module will take you to a dedicated configuration page. Plenty of help is at your fingertips, as each one provides details on all prerequisites and clear setup instructions.
After assigning the system, application, or service that a module wants to protect, you can select a storage location; for hybrid backups, Commvault supports local storage or network shares as the primary location, and a cloud repository as a secondary stage. Next, you assign a backup A plan that defines recovery point objectives (RPO), backup windows, and data retention periods.
We want to protect the lab’s Hyper-V and VMware hosts, which requires the Commvault gateway component to be installed on the Windows Server hosts on the same network. Downloaded from the portal, it manages communication between sources and targets and handles all caching, deduplication and hash tables. For Hyper-V backups, you also need to install Commvault’s VSA package on each host server.
We announce Synology NAS For our primary backup location, using Commvault’s cloud as secondary storage, each plan starts by backing up selected virtual machines (VMs) to our NAS device. Once completed, they ran a secondary job to copy the local storage to the cloud and speed up the transfer process by sending only the deduplicated data.
VMware recovery services are excellent: we can browse and recover guest files, the entire virtual machine, or its VMDK files. Live recovery and live installation services can quickly restore failed virtual machines, loading them directly from backups on primary storage.
There are several cloud-to-cloud backup modules to choose from, and we found the MS365 option easy to deploy. You do need to use Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and teambut the whole process went very smoothly and we had our entire MS365 account backed up within 15 minutes. For project recovery, you can select the required MS365 components, select a recovery point, view all available versions and restore them to the original location or to another MS365 user.
Endpoint module supports Windows, macOS and Linux client. Once a user installs Commvault’s Edge Monitor application and logs into their account, it applies your predefined schedule. This backs up their systems to the cloud, creates local drive letters for drag-and-drop recovery, and provides access to a personal self-service portal.
Pricing could be more transparent, but Commvault Cloud is a great option for businesses that need a highly customizable cloud backup solution. It offers an impressive array of easy-to-deploy modules so you only pay for what you need, and it has a strong focus on data security and ransomware protection.
