Last week, Commvault wrapped up its annual customer and
partner event known as Commvault GO, an industry event dedicated to backup and
recovery for the progressive enterprise.
This year's event took place at the brand-new Gaylord Rockies facility
in Denver, CO. And the theme this year? "More
than Ready" -- appropriate, as Commvault helps their customers solve their
enterprise's hardest data protection and management problems.
This was the company's fourth annual Commvault GO conference,
and it featured thought-provoking presentations from industry luminaries,
breakout sessions with Commvault customers and employees, and exhibition
displays from Commvault's partner ecosystem. Attendees were exposed to new technologies --
including AI-powered self-driving backup, automation, scale-out infrastructure
and dynamic data indexing technologies -- to better protect and activate their
data.
This was also the first Commvault GO event for the company's
new president and CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, who came on board by way of Puppet
back in February of this year. And Mirchandani
didn't disappoint.
Commvault may have been thought of as an old school enterprise data backup
company, but after this year's GO and with Mirchandani taking over the helm, it
was clear the company is reinventing itself.
In less than 9 months, Commvault's new CEO has already
shaken things up and course corrected a company that has been around for 20+ years. Despite the company being in the top right
quadrant for backup and recovery from both Gartner and Forrester, they are looking
to breathe new life into their product line.
While at Commvault GO, the company introduced new thinking, product
updates and enhancements; but perhaps the most interesting thing was the launch
of two new offerings. The first is a brand-new
SaaS-based product built from the ground up using a startup mentality - that
product is called Metallic. The second
is a product acquisition within the software-defined storage (SDS) market - and
here we have Hedvig. Both solutions were
prominently featured during the keynote discussion and both were on display in
a big way on the Commvault GO show floor.
There were several key messages from Commvault GO worth
highlighting, some of which included:
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Attendees can rein in the chaos of their current
data environments and move closer to a state of IT Nirvana by becoming Data
Ready.
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Commvault innovations are helping their
customers become Data Ready by making it easier for them to migrate, retain and
recover data wherever it resides.
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Commvault is helping its customers be Data Ready
by providing them flexibility and freedom of choice.
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Commvault will unify data and storage
management, simplify data services, and allow businesses to take advantage of
their data like never before.
There were also three notable products worth a deeper dive.
Activate
During this year's show, Commvault announced rich product
and experience enhancements to Commvault Activate, the company's data insights
and governance solution which took a key spotlight on stage at last year's
conference.
Commvault Activate gives customers greater visibility into
their data, identifies opportunities for storage efficiencies and manages risk.
Announced enhancements included the addition of file access controls for File
Storage Optimization and new redaction functions with Sensitive Data
Governance.
At GO 2018, Activate was launched as a total bundle and
was sold on a user model with the full package.
Unfortunately, that made licensing difficult, and therefore, hindered a wider
rollout. But last week, Commvault changed things up and introduced
a flexible licensing scheme.
"We had a lot of early adoption last year with Activate," said
Lance Shaw, Director of Solutions Marketing at Commvault. "And we learned a lot of lessons about it too. One of which was that use cases are fairly
unique. There's storage optimization,
data governance for things like GDPR, and there's search and discovery. And each of those have a slightly different
audience."
That's a major reason why Commvault decided to split
things up in terms of licensing and pricing in order to make it easier for
customers to buy what they needed rather than only provide the entire pool of options.
While the entire Commvault Activate suite continues to be
available on a per-user basis, organizations can now flexibly purchase
Commvault Activate's capabilities - File Storage Optimization, Sensitive Data
Governance and eDiscovery - on either a per terabyte basis (for use with file
and VM data) or a per user basis (for use with email or Microsoft Office 365
data). Commvault Activate licenses can
then be expanded as customer needs evolve.
This makes Activate easier to buy, and easier to sell.
Commvault also introduced Entitlement
Management to the Activate File Storage Optimization offering, enabling
customers to better control their critical or sensitive data and to apply
changes necessary to lock-down file access. The user experience for File Storage Optimization
has been streamlined by consolidating the dashboards into the Commvault Command
Center for easier management and reporting. As a result, users can quickly access the
various views when reviewing storage distribution and identify duplicated or orphan
files for clients or client-groups.
Redaction is available when exporting files
using Activate Sensitive Data Governance. For those who respond to GDPR Right-to-Access
and other similar requirements, the export function will optionally redact
sensitive data entities found within the files or emails.
Metallic
Commvault launched a brand-new shiny object to GO attendees,
a cloud-native data protection venture appropriately called Metallic. This offering's claim to fame is that it provides enterprise
scalability and it can be up and running in 15 minutes.
Created as a startup within an established company, the team
working on Metallic was given a mandate to recreate a fit-for-purpose product
and experience from the ground up, while leveraging Commvault's powerful core
technology. Metallic delivered a new
portfolio of backup services that are run in the cloud while still giving
customers the flexibility to choose their own storage. This could be their own AWS or Azure storage
or keeping a copy on an on-premises server for the fastest recovery option.
This software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup solution (or
Backup-as-a-Service) was engineered for the parent company's most requested use
cases: organizations with between 500-2,500 employees; mid-market customers; providing
Office 365 and endpoint backup and recovery; enterprise scalable, quick to get
started and simple to use.
For partners, Metallic is designed to drive business without
complex sales cycles and attaches easily to what they sell today, including
cloud storage and SaaS application licenses.
With Metallic, Commvault is attempting to secure backup and
data recovery business from those companies who have been abandoning
traditionally complex and difficult-to-use on-site backup products, opting
instead for newer appliance and SaaS-based solutions promising a different user
experience.
Metallic will offer an annual or monthly subscription-based
pricing. And it comes out of the gate in
three distinct offerings: Core Backup & Recovery, Office 365 Backup &
Recovery or Endpoint Backup & Recovery.
Core will focus on the essential of data backup covering
VMware data protection, to file servers and Microsoft SQL databases. Office 365 focuses on protecting an
organization's work within the suite of tools (Exchange, OneDrive, and Sharepoint) to safeguard against accidental
deletion and corruption. And Endpoint focuses
on protecting data on desktops and laptops with automated backups and flexible,
granular restore.
Customers will be able to access a free 45-day trial of any
of these three offerings which can be accessed on metallic.io, but in order to
get a paid plan, that would have to be facilitated by a partner so that they
can facilitate consultative conversations that allow them to bring value and
expertise to those customers.
Hedvig
Hedvig, a software-defined storage startup, is Commvault's
first acquisition since Mirchandani was brought on board as Commvault's new president
and CEO back in February of this year.
The price tag for the Hedvig acquisition came in at a price tag of $225 million, taking place only a month ago back in September.
"This acquisition demonstrates how Commvault is leading
the way towards the intersection of storage and data management," said
Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault CEO. "We
believe joining Hedvig's innovative software-defined storage capabilities with
Commvault's industry-leading data protection reduces fragmentation and
leapfrogs other solutions in the market."
During his opening keynote, Mirchandani introduced audience
members to the concept of a 'unified data brain' and suggested the concept ties
directly into the company's vision for decoupling data from applications and
infrastructure in an increasingly multi-cloud landscape. In this analogy, he outlined the synergies
between Commvault and the Hedvig technologies represented the overlap between
the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Mirchandani called the data brain 'the plane upon which data
and storage run in a unified way, operating together.' The brain encapsulates these two sets of
functionality.
He went on to say, "We believe that we have to go with
solutions that are re-engineered differently, that things require new ways to be solved."
"It refreshes, in many ways, how you and I think about
primary and secondary storage, in the more traditional sense," said Mirchandani. "It needs a rethink!"
The left brain of storage management added by Hedvig
provides multi-protocol capability, automated provisioning, storage API
automation, elastic scale and location transparency. And on the right side, data management
contributes indexing, intelligent automation, a data policy engine,
security & self-service, and ubiquitous control.
Commvault's roadmap offers a "better together"
solution which combines converged storage and data management with unbelievable
scale and a way to manage all that data that doesn't involve creating multiple
siloes.
New features for Hedvig were also announced at GO.
"New capabilities converge many of the latest storage,
container and cloud technologies, allowing enterprises to automate manual
infrastructure management processes and simplify their multi cloud
environments," said Avinash Lakshman, Chief Storage Strategist, Commvault.
"These capabilities enhance Commvault's
value to enterprises today. They also
show how the integration of technologies into Commvault's solutions portfolio
will deliver enterprises the industry standard solution in a multi cloud
world."
The innovative software-defined storage capabilities
introduced will enable enterprises to automate and simplify storage
administration, reduce storage costs and accelerate time to value. They include:
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Container Storage Interface (CSI) support, which
enables enterprises to use Commvault for the management of Kubernetes and other
container orchestrators (COs).
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Built-in data center availability, which helps
enterprises improve data resiliency.
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Support for erasure coding, which improves
storage efficiency.
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Comprehensive support for multi-tenant data
centers, including the ability to manage tenant level access, control, and
encryption settings, which will allow managed service providers (MSPs) to
deliver storage solutions across hybrid cloud environments.
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Multi-data center cluster management, alerting
and reporting, empowering enterprises and MSPs to configure and administer all
their data centers' software-defined storage infrastructure from a single
location.
By adding technologies like Metallic and Hedvig into the
mix, Commvault is taking a step to try and prevent any existing customers from
leaving for newer startup competitor products, perhaps something like Clumio,
Druva, Cohesity or Rubrik. Commvault will
also provide alternatives to prospective customers who are looking for
something different, in the hope of bringing in net-new clients to the company
as the "new and improved" Commvault brings the fight to the competition.
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