Commvault Extends Data Protection to the Cloud

Moving to make the data protection in the age of the cloud a simpler process to manage, Commvault this week released a bevy of data protect software offerings designed to collectively erase the divide between private and public clouds.

Starting with Commvault Cloud Gateway and Commvault Cloud Replication software, Phil Curran, director of product marketing for the Commvault Cloud Ops Business Unit, says that Commvault has reduced much of the complexity associated with deploying data protection software across a hybrid cloud computing environment.

“The cloud is clearly now part of the mainstream conversation in the data center,” says Curran. “Our approach is to integrate cloud APIs. We don’t want to require organizations to have to buy a separate cloud gateway appliance.”

As part of that effort Commvault has also released Commvault Cloud Disaster Recovery and Commvault Cloud Development and Test software. Not content to simply back data up into the cloud, Curran says IT organizations want a simple tool through which they can redirect end users to instances of their applications and data running on a public cloud in the event of a disaster. In that scenario, there’s no need to recover data until the IT organization as whole is ready, notes Curran. Instead, users can continue to remotely access their applications running on a public cloud until such time the IT organization deems it appropriate to once again spin up a local instance of those applications.

Rather than simply exposing Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure APIs, Curran says Commvault has created graphical applications that make it simpler for IT administrators to manage data protection workflow between their data centers and the public cloud. IT organizations can either opt to deploy the Commvault software on a server or use a dedicated appliance that Commvault built in conjunction with NetApp that was unveiled last year.

In either case, Curran says Commvault is trying to eliminate data center and public cloud silos that wind up making deploying a data protection strategy involving public clouds a lot more complex than it should be.

While there are often many compliance issues that have to be addressed when it comes to storing data in the cloud, the ability to spin up instances of applications on public that have suddenly gone offline for one reason or another is driving the emergence of disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS). While that concept has been around for several years, Curran says it’s just now becoming feasible for many IT organizations to automate that process in a way that finally doesn’t require a lot of extensive integration work on the part of the internal IT organizations to actually make it work.