Commvault pleases customers by adding a new SaaS version to a strong repertoire with Azure services

Commvault is the keeper of data—the priceless currency of businesses all over the world, regardless of industry. The company owes its market leadership to its insistence on innovation, attention to detail, and technology talent. Now, the company that thousands of companies trust with their mission-critical applications and data trusts Microsoft Azure technologies for the control and data planes of its highly regarded Metallic data management and backup and recovery solution, released in late 2019. This brings its original Commvault Complete solution to users in software as a service (SaaS) form. Commvault customers enjoy a full range of security solutions, plus the data retention and e-discovery capabilities that are key to compliance, which is especially crucial for those in regulated industries. 

Sharing a beginning

Originally a Bell Labs development group and later a strategic business unit of AT&T Network Systems, Commvault spun off as an independent entity in 1996. The young company was an early Microsoft partner, collaborating on technology in experimental internal release sites at Microsoft in 1999. “From day one, our Commvault solution offered a full range of data management capabilities: migration, archiving, e-discovery, content indexing, search, and ransomware protection,” says Randy De Meno, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Commvault. “It just happens to also be the leading backup and recovery solution.” He points to reviews from Gartner and KuppingerCole that place Commvault in the leading position. 

Convinced of the broad appeal of Microsoft to business users, and the reliability, scalability, and security its products offer, Commvault approached the software company about a Windows-centric heterogeneous data management solution. The profusion of specialized solutions, platforms, and public clouds meant that most companies had complex landscapes to monitor and protect. “It turned out that our ideas converged,” says De Meno. “The stars perfectly aligned for us to be building something Microsoft had wanted.” Commvault based the control plane for its original product on a Windows server using a Microsoft SQL Server database. The announcement of its partnership with Microsoft coincided with the product release in 2000. 

Betting the company on Microsoft

Putting all its eggs in the basket of any one software company would have been a big bet for any nascent ISV. “We decided to use Microsoft as our foundation, trusting we could deliver what we intended to deliver using the reliability, scalability, and security of the Microsoft infrastructure,” says De Meno. “We literally bet our company on Microsoft.” 

With Metallic, the company doubles down on the partnership it established with Microsoft more than 20 years ago. “The platform we’ve built with Microsoft technology for our first offering and now with Azure has helped us realize our vision of a single view that delivers overall management capability for our customers’ heterogeneous data sources,” says David Ngo, Vice President for Metallic Products and Engineering at Commvault. He’s observed explosive growth in data use across all industries. Regardless of size or stage of digital transformation, Ngo finds that companies have adopted an array of solutions, giving rise to siloed data. “We’ve addressed the challenge caused by data silos with our Metallic product built on Microsoft Azure,” adds Ngo. “Our intelligent data management strategy for Commvault and our Metallic solution beautifully complement Azure, an intelligent data platform. This only enhances our partnership and reinforces the trust we’ve built with Microsoft over the years.”

For De Meno, using Microsoft technologies is a way to extend the same benefits that Commvault experiences back to his customers. “Microsoft is our foundation partner, and selecting Microsoft Azure as our platform to host and deliver Metallic and Metallic Cloud Storage Service was an easy decision,” he says. “This decision sparks customer confidence because of the performance, scale, reliability, and security of Azure, and it offers unique best practice guidance for customers and partners. Our customers rely on Microsoft and Azure-centric Commvault solutions every day to manage, migrate, and protect critical applications and the data required to support their digital transformation strategies.”

Providing a truly heterogeneous solution for an agile world

When most of us think of data management and backup and recovery solutions, we imagine large-scale disasters. But Commvault designed its solution for exquisite granularity. “We’ve all been there—we’ve deleted an important email or an image that we desperately want back,” De Meno says. “Probably 98 percent of recovery requests today require that degree of precision. We used Microsoft infrastructure to create that capability.” Furthermore, the solution will restore from a previous software version to a more recent one. “We use Azure to more securely host Commvault and Metallic with greater scalability. Our customers need only one solution—Metallic—to manage both on-premises and cloud assets from a single console. We’ve achieved powerful interoperability between on-premises Commvault and our new cloud-based Metallic solution by using Microsoft technology,” Ngo adds. 

The underlying Azure technologies transcend the data silos that have sprung up in businesses. De Meno shares Satya Nadella’s observations on the accelerated business impact of COVID-19 on people and organizations around the world. “We’ve had five years’ worth of advancement in three or four months,” De Meno says, citing the Nadella quote. That rapid change begot more change as so many businesses went virtual, adding what De Meno calls an explosion of remote data and the complexity of managing customer assets that no longer reside on-premises. 

Building a leading-edge solution with Microsoft technologies

When Commvault chose Azure technologies as the basis for the Metallic control plane, it based the decision on its shared trust with Microsoft. “Microsoft recommends Commvault to its customers,” says De Meno. “Those customers know that given our shared history, Microsoft has probably seen the specific scenario they’ll have. Our strong joint reliance leads to best practice guidance that only Commvault and Microsoft can offer to our mutual customers.” 

Like Microsoft, Commvault puts customers first. In a world where digital transformation is rapidly accelerating, customers not only need better security for critical data, but they also need simplified management with high performance and easy-to-use compliance features. Commvault uses Azure technologies to bring those capabilities to customers. And because Commvault solutions provide a full spectrum of security and compliance functionality, customers significantly simplify and reduce licencing costs by as much as 44 percent. What makes the difference for most customers is the speed and performance they achieve when backing up or restoring data, which is up to 90 percent faster than competing solutions. 

Ngo names the Azure technologies underlying Metallic: Azure Front Door to provide the highly secure yet scalable entry point for end users, with the app running on the infrastructure supplied by Azure Cloud Services. Because the Commvault team focuses on innovation, it depends on Azure serverless, freeing developers from infrastructure provisioning and management. They benefit from a full continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline through Azure DevOps, which further supports infrastructure concerns such as managing the end-to-end development lifecycle, including planning and code management. “We also use all types of Azure Storage, including Blob Storage, Table Storage, Ultra Disk Storage, and Queue Storage,” says Ngo. “Those options offer us the full spectrum of capabilities we need, and the scalability we achieve with Azure serverless is critical.”

Commvault recently made it even easier for its customers to use Azure with its Metallic Cloud Storage Service (MCSS)—preconfigured Blob Storage within its Commvault Complete solution. This enables hybrid customers to easily add the benefits of Azure Storage. 

For De Meno, accessing preconfigured Blob Storage is a fast, easy way for Commvault Complete customers to benefit from Metallic and Azure. “We’ve now integrated Commvault Complete and Metallic by enabling all Commvault Complete customers to use Metallic Cloud Storage Service,” he says. “MCSS and Azure are a click or two away for our customers and partners for secure, scalable, and reliable Azure Storage capabilities.” 

Exchanging trust in business, engineering, and philanthropy

Commvault customers trust the company with their mission-critical data, and Commvault trusts Microsoft for the expertise and technology it needs to keep that faith. Many of the 40,000 shared customers, including a large percentage in regulated industries, turn to Microsoft solutions based on their success with data retention and management using Commvault solutions. 

The companies have worked hard to provide technology that supports workers and organizations during the COVID-19 crisis and ensuing remote work mandates. They also share a commitment to the planet, such as participating in a recent United Nations Reduced Carbon footprint forum, and philanthropy. De Meno points to several examples, including the Commvault Hockey Helping Kids program for children with disabilities and underprivileged families, which Microsoft not only sponsors but helps to put on, even fielding Microsoft hockey players. The companies carried that activism directly back to the business world when early in the COVID-19 crisis, they offered their customers six months of free Commvault data protection plus six months of free Blob Storage to assist customers who were managing an explosion of endpoint data. “When we approached Microsoft about offering free data management for customers who were struggling in our current COVID-19 reality, within 72 hours we were partners on the program,” says De Meno. “We feel aligned with Microsoft’s approach to business, engineering, and philanthropy. Through our partnership, we place our trust in Microsoft, and we rely on it to help us deliver what’s best for our customers.” 

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