Commvault has rejigged its product lines to better match market needs. The company has separated components for data protection, disaster recovery and data management tasks, and has integrated Hedvig software into HyperScale backup appliances.
Commvault announced the portfolio reshuffle yesterday at its Future Ready customer conference. The company has also rolled out subscription pricing to more products, while confirming ongoing support for perpetual licensing options.
Commvault chief product officer Rajiv Kottomtharayil provided an announcement quote: “Customers need to be increasingly agile, flexible, and scalable. This new portfolio addresses data management risks that exist today and that may exist tomorrow, intelligently. From a natural disaster, to human error, to ransomware, our customers are covered.”
Coming out of 2019, Commvault had six product lines: Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale, Commvault Orchestrate, Commvault Activate, Hedvig’s Distributed Storage Platform (DSP) and Metallic (SaaS backup and recovery service).
The new line-up is:
- HyperScale X with Hedvig technology
- Commvault Backup & Recovery
- Commvault Disaster Recovery
- Commvault Complete Data Protection
- Commvault Activate disaggregation into separate Data Governance, eDiscovery & Compliance and File Storage Optimization products
- Enhanced Container Support for Hedvig’s DSP
Commvault launched HyperScale appliances in 2017 to provide scale-out backup and recovery for containers, virtual and database workloads. The appliances supports on-premises deployments and multiple public clouds, with data movement between these locations.
HyperScale provides up to 5PB of capacity, automatic load balancing across nodes, data caching, cataloguing, automatic rebalancing of stored data across nodes, and integrated copy data management.
The new HyperScale X, available today, brings Hedvig’s DSP file system software to the appliance for the first time, adding higher performance backup and recovery as the system scales. Concurrent hardware failures are managed to maintain availability.
Commvault’s standalone Backup & Recovery protects containers, cloud-native, and virtual server workloads across cloud and on-premises environments. A separate Disaster Recovery product supports on-premises and cloud environments with automated DR orchestration, replication, and verified recovery readiness.
A Complete Data Protection offering combines Backup & Recovery and Disaster Recovery.
Not so simple
Commvault announced Activate in July 2018, in a product simplification exercise prompted by prodding from activist investor Elliott Management. The software is now disaggregated into separate data Governance, eDiscovery and compliance, and file storage optimisation products.
Hedvig’s DSP software, acquired last year, gets more container support. Hedvig introduced Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) support in October 2019 and with Hedvig for Containers has added:
- Native API Kubernetes enhancements to offer encryption and third-party key management (KMIP) support,
- Container snapshots for point-in-time protection of stateful workloads,
- Container migration to move data across Hedvig clusters on-premises or in the public cloud,
- High-availability and disaster recovery for containerised workloads,
- Automated policies for snapshot frequency and migrations.
Avinash Lakshman, chief storage strategist for Commvault, said in a statement: “Cloud native applications are critical to the enterprise, and Hedvig for Containers hits that sweet spot of software-defined storage coupled with protection for containerised applications.”
Hedvig for Containers is available today.
Comment
Commvault is in a data protection and storage marathon. The company competes intensely with Actifio, Cohesity, Dell, IBM, Rubrik, Veeam and Veritas for enterprise data protection and management accounts. Also, ambitious backup-as-a-service startups such as Clumio and Druva are muscling in to this territory.
Commvault has rearranged its shop window to better show its wares. It’s also moved to take advantage of its Hedvig software-defined software by adding it to the HyperScale appliance line. Hedvig’s latest updates should enhance the software’s appeal to enterprise DevOps cloud native users.
Commvault is claiming a stake in the general storage market with Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform providing file, block and object storage at cloud scale. This general storage market also features intense competition from new and established suppliers and the idea of a combined file, block and object storage product is not universally adopted.
Commvault can use Hedvig software in its own appliances, but it will be quite the challenge to gain wide traction in the general storage market. There are good growth prospects for the emerging stateful container market and Commvault is building a strong story here. However, the mainstream storage suppliers are not so far behind.
