Commvault Disaster Recovery In General Availability For VMware Cloud Environments

‘Partners are looking for simplicity and better economics. With the launch of Commvault Disaster Recovery, we are meeting both requirements. Customers can acquire what they need now, and disaster recovery is a critical need. And they can pay for only the services they need,’ says Mercer Rowe, vice president of Commvault’s global partner organization.

Data protection and data management technology developer Commvault Wednesday released Commvault Disaster Recovery, the company’s first stand-alone disaster recovery offering aimed at current and potential customers.

Commvault Disaster Recovery, which is being unveiled during this week’s Commvault Virtual Connections end-user event, offers a comprehensive technology for business continuity and verifiable recoverability of data by replicating it across on-premises and cloud environments.

Commvault also expanded its container-focused data protection capabilities.

[Related: CEO Sanjay Mirchandani: Commvault Is Future-Ready]

While Commvault has been a leader in data management for years, it previously required customers to have the company’s broader data protection application to use its previous disaster recovery technology, said Ranga Rajagopalan, vice president of products for the Tinton Falls, N.J.-based company.

The new Commvault Disaster Recovery is Commvault’s first disaster recovery application to be available as a stand-alone product, which is important for the current installed base and for businesses that have not yet deployed Commvault technology, Rajagopalan told CRN.

It ensures data availability with built-in replication, and automates the recovery of data so that if a customer clicks a button, applications can be recovered smoothly, Rajagopalan said. It also validates that data can be recovered before a disaster strikes, he said.

“Our portfolio has a lot of granular services,” he said. “Customers who use our disaster recovery technology can turn on our analytics capabilities. Service providers can use it to build their own Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service offerings. And our technology is multitenant.”

Commvault Disaster Recovery also can help solution providers bring other Commvault technologies to a wider audience, Rajagopalan said.

“It was designed to meet end-to-end needs of all workloads,” he said. “We also expect customers to turn on more capabilities as needed. They can get disaster recovery today, but if they need backup or other services, they can easily turn on other licenses.”

Commvault Disaster Recovery supports VMware environments for customers working with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud environments, Rajagopalan said.

“The initial release focuses on VMware because that is the most popular environment,” he said. “We will expand this in the future.”

Commvault has had proven disaster recovery capabilities before the release of the new Commvault Disaster Recovery application, said Steven Hannah, backup recovery solution architect at Meridian IT, a Deerfield, Ill.-based solution provider and longtime Commvault channel partner.

However, Hannah said, Commvault really needed the ability to replicate data to off-site locations as part of that technology.

“Commvault is getting feature parity with what other vendors have,” he said. “And with Commvault, the cloud part is already there. Commvault also has a good VMware focus, which is important as customers are willing to pay for this on a usage basis. They want to get rid of hardware and second sites and want VMware in the cloud. But they don’t want to pay for it until it’s needed.”

Commvault is showing how to build cloud-based disaster recovery with its replication to the cloud technology, Hannah said.

“It’s what we want to base our solution on,” he said. “I’ve tried other similar solutions, but none worked as advertised. Commvault’s replication to the cloud and its cloud disaster recovery works. We could do the same by combining three other technologies. But as a service provider, we like the Commvault solution.”

It was important that Commvault bring its new disaster recovery technology to customers at this time, said Mercer Rowe, vice president of Commvault’s global partner organization.

“Partners are looking for simplicity and better economics,” Rowe told CRN. “With the launch of Commvault Disaster Recovery, we are meeting both requirements. Customers can acquire what they need now, and disaster recovery is a critical need. And they can pay for only the services they need.”

On the container storage side, Commvault said its new feature release 11.20 for Commvault Backup and Recovery includes data protection for Kubernetes workloads. Support for Kubernetes is expected to also be part of Commvault Disaster Recovery in the future, Rajagopalan said.

Customers of Commvault’s Hedvig software-defined storage technology are also receiving storage container replication technology, he said.