I’ve been at Commvault (CV) for three years and have been working with Exchange for 21 years and it’s long overdue for me to write on both topics. When I was being recruited to join Commvault, I thought they “just did backup” and the recruiter did a good job of explaining the many ways Commvault does more than “just backup.” At tradeshows and when talking to customers and prospect it’s very common to hear “I didn’t know Commvault did that.” In this post, I will provide a high-level overview of what Commvault does for Microsoft Exchange and Exchange Online/Office 365. In future articles, I will look at CV’s support for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Azure, and other Microsoft solutions. CV also supports many other application and data management features. This initial post provides an overview of the Commvault product, two additional posts will go over Commvault’s support for Microsoft Exchange and Exchange Online (Office 365).

The elevator pitch

Commvault is made up of data experts and they help their customers become experts with their data. CV has been doing backup and recovery for over 20 years, but goes far beyond backups.

CV provides data protection, replication, retention, eDiscovery, compliance management, and more. This is done using a single platform to provide data management across many areas. Unlike the many point solutions in this space, CV was developed internally on a single platform versus by acquiring technologies. Therefore, all modules work very well together and can be used with a single management interface.

The platform

Commvault can be utilized to protect dozens of applications, storage, and cloud solutions using their native APIs to provide application\database consistent backup and recovery; in many cases down to object level. CV can utilize many different vendor’s hardware, hypervisor, storage, and cloud offering to host the Commvault infrastructure and data. CV agents reduce data transmitted and stored by utilizing client-side and server-side data deduplication support. “Storage policies” define what data should be stored where if it should be deduplicated, encrypted, replicated to other locations, and how long it should be stored at each location. Data can be backed up from servers, databases, SANs, NAS, clusters, DAGs, clouds, VMs, etc. It can then be stored on JBOD, DAS, NAS, SAN, cloud, or tape; and each copy can have their own retention policy. Using these policies, data can be transitioned to lower cost storage as it ages based on an organization needs, comfort factor, etc.

In my next post, I will cover what Commvault does for Exchange Server, mainly Exchange databases. In the last post in this series, I’ll cover how Commvault provides data management for items and messages in Exchange or transmitted via SMTP journaling.

Posts in this series:
1st post: Using Commvault, by an Exchange MVP (This post)
2nd post: Using Commvault for Exchange Server
3rd post: Using Commvault for Exchange & Exchange Online for Items

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this post are solely the author’s and don’t represent the views of Commvault.