The IT Nerd

Commvault, a recognized global enterprise software leader in the management of data across cloud and on-premises environments, today announces a new partnership with Skytap to expand data protection and migration for IBM i (AS/400) workloads hosted in Skytap on Microsoft Azure. Through the partnership, Commvault and Skytap are further accelerating the hybrid cloud journey of enterprise customers by enabling the ability to migrate, run, and protect IBM i workloads natively on Azure. 

Many industries, including financial services, retail, entertainment, and casinos, for decades have relied on trusted IBM i technology to house mission-critical data on-premises. Now with the rising costs of protecting mainframe technology, businesses are looking to cloud alternatives, including Azure, to offer cost-effective solutions without compromising their data protection SLAs.

To address this need, Commvault is partnering with Skytap to offer a seamless solution that backs up, recovers, and migrates data on IBM i that is hosted and running in Skytap for Azure cloud datacenters. The solution eliminates expensive mainframe backup hardware, instead using Azure as a seamless backup target, powered by Commvault’s differentiated cloud-native data protection. As customers migrate their IBM i workloads from on-premises environments to Skytap on Azure, they can continue using the same trusted data protection from Commvault, driven by the simplicity of the Commvault Command Center.

Find more information about Commvault’s support for Microsoft Azure here.

Commvault today announced another expansion of its award-winning Metallic Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) portfolio. On the heels of last quarter’s accelerated innovation, Metallic is adding new data protection solutions, features, and enterprise workload support including: enhanced SaaS application protection with the introduction of Metallic Salesforce Backup and Microsoft Teams recovery enhancements; the addition of Oracle and Active Directory to Metallic Database Backup; and the expansion of its hybrid cloud capabilities with the addition of HyperScale X as a fully integrated appliance and edge offering for Metallic.

In addition, Metallic is now generally available in 23 countries in total, announcing support for nine new countries in the EMEA region today, including Austria, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland.

New Metallic Solutions

Understanding that businesses across the globe need dedicated protection for their SaaS applications, Metallic has made global availability a top priority, tripling its country availability and doubling its product offerings. Recent additions include hybrid cloud data protection solutions for SAP HANA and Kubernetes, in addition to today’s newest enhancements:

• Metallic™ Salesforce Backup provides customers scalable, enterprise-grade SaaS data protection for the Salesforce Sales, Service, and Financial Cloud. It offers simple protection for valuable Salesforce data with unlimited retention, unlimited storage, and hardened security controls built-in – helping to meet stringent standards, unique requirements like sandbox seeding, recovery requirements, and SLAs.
• Metallic™ Office 365 & Teams Backup & Recovery now builds on Metallic’s existing Microsoft Teams capabilities to include in-place restore of Teams conversations and other data. This enables administrators to granularly recover data stored within Teams, channels, and conversations, with better speed and precision while maintaining existing site structures and settings. All new and existing Metallic Office 365 Backup customers will automatically receive Microsoft Teams functionality as part of their subscription – which also provides coverage for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
• HyperScale X for Metallic offers customers the choice of a fully integrated appliance for single-vendor management of on-premises storage and SaaS-delivered data backup. It enables the Commvault appliance, HyperScale X, to run in edge mode, allowing it to operate as a backup target for hybrid cloud workloads protected by Metallic. This innovative edge offering represents the next step in Metallic’s hybrid expansion, combining the best of Metallic BaaS with the best of the HyperScale X scale-out storage platform. Customers can use Metallic to protect data in any hybrid data protection schema, whether cloud to cloud, on-premises data to cloud with an on-premises copy for fast restore, cloud to edge appliance, and more.
• Support for Oracle Database and Microsoft Active Directory backup are now offered as part of the Metallic™ Database Backup solution. Providing BaaS database protection for customers’ hybrid world, Metallic Database Backup gives administrators seamless visibility and database protection for SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and Active Directory on-premises, in the cloud, and in Azure.
  

For more information about Metallic’s cloud-native data protection solutions and availability, please visit www.metallic.io. 

Data management provider Commvault today unveiled a new offering that gives customers enterprise-class data protection for Kubernetes in the cloud. 

The Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup solution simplifies protection for Kubernetes containers and complements Commvault’s existing Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform and Commvault Complete Data Protection to store, protect and migrate containers in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Commvault now protects Kubernetes workloads in any customer environment, whether in the cloud or on-premises. 

The new product protects workloads including any CNCF-Certified Kubernetes distribution with validated support for Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and VMware Tanzu.

Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup is available immediately.

Commvault today announced a new solution that allows Commvault Backup and Recovery software and HyperScale X appliance customers to seamlessly adopt the cloud as a backup target, providing an additional layer of protection against ransomware and improving data security.

Called Metallic Cloud Storage Service, the product combines technology
from Commvault and Microsoft Azure to give customers single pane of
glass management through the Commvault Command Center.  Hybrid workloads involving the cloud and on-premises storage are becoming more complex to manage and Commvault believes this new managed cloud storage service will make it simpler for IT admins to use the cloud as a backup target with just a few clicks.

Metallic Cloud Storage Service is now available across North America,
EMEA and APAC, and Metallic SaaS is available in North America and ANZ.

Commvault has announced the availability of Metallic’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data protection portfolio in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Azure. Commvault customers can now take advantage of the productive and trusted Azure cloud platform, with streamlined deployment and management.

Based on Commvault’s core IP, Metallic SaaS data protection provides customers with a scalable, secure, and simple way to protect their data within a modern, hybrid cloud environment.Metallic Endpoint Backup and Recovery joins Metallic Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Office 365 as the second solution in Metallic’s portfolio to be available as in the Azure Marketplace. Supporting the proliferation of remote work in today’s environment, Metallic Endpoint Backup & Recovery protects laptop and desktop data without compromising productivity – offering flexible and granular restore capabilities along with scalability and unlimited cloud storage.

The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. It helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.

To learn more about Commvault’s partnership with Microsoft as well as Metallic’s SaaS portfolio of data protection solutions, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/metallic. 

Today at Commvault FutureReady, Commvault announced new enhancements in the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform for Kubernetes running in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Kubernetes has fast become the standard container infrastructure platform for application modernization. Businesses need to ensure the storage infrastructure supporting containerized workloads have an integrated solution for Kubernetes deployments. This infrastructure must integrate across all types of Kubernetes deployments (cloud-managed or self-managed) and deliver seamless migration, data protection, availability, and disaster recovery for the entirety of these containerized environments. Seamless migration features are key for a DevOps audience, whether their Kubernetes deployments are managed outside the organization or in-house. 

Commvault’s new native API Kubernetes enhancements in the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform provides customers the flexibility to develop and run new modern applications with encryption and third-party KMIP support for data security in any Kubernetes environment. It also offers the ability to seamlessly protect, migrate, and use the data stored in Hedvig to speed the DevOps process and remove any cloud-managed or self-managed Kubernetes service barriers.

Coupled with the industry’s broadest integration for on-premises infrastructure, cloud storage, and container orchestrators, Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform provides a comprehensive solution capable of managing data regardless of where it lives across containers, cloud native applications, and traditional workloads.

Key Features:

• Integrated Container Snapshots provide point in time protection for stateful container workloads.
• Container Migration delivers an efficient and intelligent data movement of unique changes across Hedvig storage clusters, on-prem to cloud, to support the DevOps process for new modern application development and enable HA/DR for Containerized workloads.
• Integrated Policy Automation enables granular control over the frequency of snapshot and migration operations and the targeted environment to which the data is intelligently sent. 

Commvault is a silver member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. 

Hedvig for Containers is currently available. For more information, please visit: https://commvault.com/product-announcement.

Today at Commvault FutureReady 2020, Commvault announced the launch of Commvault HyperScale™ X. HyperScale X is the latest generation of Commvault’s fully integrated scale-out data management solution, and is the first product in the portfolio to integrate technology from the recent Hedvig acquisition. 

Commvault Hyperscale X is an intuitive and easy to deploy scale-out appliance that is fully integrated with Commvault’s intelligent data management platform. Integrated with the power of Commvault Hedvig, Hyperscale X provides unmatched scalability, security, and resiliency to accelerate an organization’s digital transformation journey as they move to hybrid cloud, container, and virtualized environments. Its flexible architecture allows customers to get up and running quickly and grow as their needs demand.

Improvements include enhanced resiliency by maintaining availability in the event of concurrent hardware failures, providing improved SLAs and minimized operational impact. HyperScale X also delivers high performance backup and recovery via the Hedvig file system’s scale-out capabilities that improves performance as you scale. 

Commvault HyperScale X delivers:

• Simple, flexible data protection for all workloads including containers, virtual, and databases
• Optimized scalability to easily grow as needed, on-prem and to the cloud
• Trusted security, including built-in ransomware protection and AI/ML anomaly detection

Commvault HyperScale X is generally available as an integrated appliance. For more information, please visit https://commvault.com/product-announcement.

Today at Commvault FutureReady, Commvault announced a new portfolio of products and services to intelligently manage data. In addition, the company also announced new flexible subscription pricing, optimizing value and making it easier for customers to simplify data management in hybrid cloud. 

New to the portfolio are Commvault^® Backup & Recovery, Commvault^® Disaster Recovery, Commvault Complete™ Data Protection and Commvault HyperScale™ X. 

• Commvault^® HyperScale X The next generation of Commvault HyperScale is a scale-out integrated solution that delivers simple, flexible data protection for all workloads (including containers, virtual, and databases), optimized scalability, and built-in ransomware protection. The first Hedvig integration with the Commvault portfolio, HyperScale X enables customers to simplify and accelerate hybrid cloud adoption.
  
  
• Commvault^® Backup & Recovery
  The new standalone backup & recovery product ensures data availability for all workloads – including containers, cloud-native, and virtual – across cloud and on-premises environments, delivering simple, reliable, data protection through a single extensible platform. 

• Commvault^® Disaster Recovery
  As a comprehensive disaster recovery product, Commvault Disaster Recovery enables customers to ensure business continuity and verify recoverability across cloud and on-prem environments, delivering simple, automated disaster recovery orchestration, flexible replication, and verified recovery readiness.

• Commvault Complete™ Data Protection The combination of Commvault Backup & Recovery and Commvault Disaster Recovery brings Commvault’s industry-leading functionality into a single data protection solution to ensure data availability and business continuity for all workloads across cloud and on-prem environments. 

Additional enhancements include new data insights and governance solutions, rich Kubernetes support in the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform, and broader availability of Commvault’s subscription-based licensing model.

• Commvault^® Data Governance, Commvault^® eDiscovery & Compliance and Commvault^® File Storage Optimization
  • These solutions, previously bundled together as Commvault Activate, give customers greater visibility into their data, identify opportunities for storage efficiencies and manage risk. Leveraging Commvault’s simplified pricing model, organizations can now purchase these solutions in alignment with how they consume other Commvault offerings.
    
• Enhanced Container Support for the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform
  • Commvault’s new native API Kubernetes enhancements in the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform provides customers the flexibility to develop and run modern applications in any Kubernetes environment with the ability to seamlessly protect, migrate, recover, and use their data.
    
• Optimized Subscription Pricing
  • As customers are increasingly looking to shift toward OPEX-based and cloud-like pricing, they require the flexibility and efficiency that a subscription pricing model enables. Commvault has led this transition, with more than 40 per cent of its software and product revenue coming from subscription licensing. Today’s announcement, further enables Commvault’s products and ecosystems to lead with subscription pricing models, enabling simplified choice for customers. Commvault will continue to support customer requirements for a perpetual pricing model.

Yesterday, Commvault published a blog announcing the news that Metallic is now available in Canada — including three enterprise-grade offerings: Metallic Core Backup & Recovery, Metallic Office 365 Backup & Recovery, and Metallic Endpoint Backup & Recovery. Additionally, Manoj Nair has been announced as the General Manager for Metallic.

Please see here for more.