VAST Data and Commvault are developing a co-engineered system to store backups in less space and restore them faster.
Commvault’s data protection software is widely used by enterprises while VAST is growing quickly by supplying its single-tier all-flash storage for large deployments in enterprise datacenters. There is a natural market fit between the two suppliers who have an existing partnership. They are capitalizing on current ransomware concerns by saying they can generate and store backups safely, and restore them fast if a ransomware attack removes access to current files.
Commvault’s chief partner officer, Alan Atkinson, said: “Through this partnership and our upcoming joint offering, we’re helping solution and service providers and their customers to protect, secure, and ultimately recover their data at a much faster rate – keeping their business up and running, even in the wake of an attack.”
The two will produce a validated design that can create backups from public clouds, datacenters, SaaS apps, containers, and the edge, and store them on a VAST cluster. The system will have fast restores; “instant recovery” is the claim, from VAST’s infrastructure instead of slower restores from purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA).
B&F understands that at least one PBBA supplier has an all-flash system on its roadmap.
They say Commvault’s own compression and deduplication combines with VAST’s similarity-based data reduction to reduce the amount of data sent over network links and stored on the VAST system. This enables a system cost, they say, “equivalent to HDD-based backup appliances, with over one hundred times better restore performance.”
No restore speed number was supplied. VAST currently claims it can “restore 50x faster than legacy PBBAs.” So, with Commvault’s help, it looks set to double that.
Commvault and VAST point out that VAST can run production and backup workloads on the same system, avoiding the need for a separate backup storage system, saving on cost, power and rackspace.
The VAST-Commvault system will take advantage of Commvault’s existing anti-threat measures, such as Metallic ThreatWise, multi-factor authentication, administrative workflows, Object Lock, and also VAST’s Indestructible Snapshots. The two say they will help customers to discover zero-day, unknown, and insider cyber threats.
Their validated design will have a detailed bill of materials and be offered on a consumption basis.
This VAST-Commvault engineered system idea follows on from a Pure Storage-Commvault reference architecture, with Pure’s FlashBlade as the backup store and Pure’s immutable snapshots safeguarding the data. That system delivers an up 270TB/hr restore speed; something for VAST to beat.
VAST is a backup target for Cohesity, Oracle (RMAN), Rubrik, Veeam, Veritas and HPE Zerto as well as Commvault. Commvault also has a partnership with Infinidat which has an SSA all-flash array in its product line. Polyamory rules in the backup software and target appliance world.
Commvault and VAST should have the validated design published and systems available from channel partners later this year. You can watch a video on LinkedIn if you want to see Alan Atkinson talking to VAST president Mike Wing about their two companies’ deal.
