I haven't used Commvault
but I have used Bakbone that apparently came from the same group in
AT&T, it recently beat Bakbone in the usual suspects reviews due to
more features.
I also know a guy who was a Bakbone expert who went to work for
Commvault without difficulty in transitioning because the products were
so similar albeit Commvault has a nicer interface at present.
Two years ago were were looking for a replacement to Legato Networker
(8.X I think possibly 8.6 but my memory isn't that great).
We found Legato almost unusable, the guy who went on the course was the
only one who could use it because it had so many weird and wonderful
quirks at that time that the rest of us just could deal with at the
time e.g. The backup client was separate from the restore client and
the support payments if you were off maintenance were extortionate! I
recall someone quoting $2.5K+ just for Legato to even look the problem
with zero guarantee of a fix or them to even work on the call.
We wanted something more user friendly and intuitive, so we looked at
Netbackup, Tivoli Storage manager and Bakbone. Due to the initially
very strong desire for "Ease of use" after using Legato, we kind of
ruled out Netbackup (it was then owned Veritas rather than Symantec)
because it wasn't like BackupExec (Really easy to use but geared to
Windows OS based systems mostly) so we thought it would have too much
in common with Legato and it didn't have enough features at the time
e.g. MacOS support, Synthetic backups (Consolidation) and MySQL
support. We also have a number of Network Appliance Filers so we need
NDMP support (that was the reason why we initially got Legato).
Knowing what I know now, I wish I had gone with Veritas/Symantec
Netbackup for a number of reasons:
- Bakbone pulled out
all the
stops for us and we had a brilliant Account Management team that where
was
always helpful and eager to help us until the time that all they both
*left*
Bakbone due to Internal issues within the Company's management,
direction
and product marketing and strategy, We also had major issues as well
due to the lack of resourcing on products that we (and the market)
actually needed today rather than products that they wanted to flog us
that incidentally others had done well before and way better. Let me
say there is nothing (and I mean nothing!) more sorrowful that a
pre-sales team trying to sell you something that their Executive
Management are pushing them to sell that they know in their hearts,
minds and souls is crap, you could literally see their souls being
destroyed, ever hear the saying "A great product sells itself?" We'll a
great product doesn't take a salesman, it only takes someone who
believes the product is the best, well it's was like their belief in
the greatness of their product was crumbling before your very eyes!
- If Commvault is
anything like Bakbone you will soon realise an amazing difference
between what is "Sold" and what is actually usable in the product.
- It was amazingly
difficult to get easy and transparent pricing for Tivoli Storage
Manager, the Vendor I went through wouldn't give me any straight
pricing on example scenarios e.g. What if I just wanted to backup a
Microsoft SQL Server and a Linux Apache Web Server, how much would that
cost?
- Netbackup is a
industry leader even though it may not be the best, nicest, most
technically advanced, state of the art with the latest features (and I
don't know any of these things personally, i.e. for all I know it's the
best thing since sliced bread) and shiny, most jobs/people seem to know
it so there must be some good reason why you can throw a brick out the
window at a backup specialists and odds on he knows Netbackup, I even
know some managed backup outsourcing services who only deal with
Netbackup i.e. They built their whole business model around providing
managed Netbackup services, now that's trust!
I have to balance this all with some comments though:
- Commvault is
available through Dell as a selectable option for all Servers so it
must have something serious going for it (or an fantastic resellers
commission), though if you do the Mercenary/Marketable skills
penetration test e.g. search through Dice.com today you will see the
following:
- Netbackup: 549
Hits
- Backup Exec: 138
hits
- Networker: 111
hits
- Commvault: 75 hits
- Retrospect: 9 hits
- Bakbone: 8
- Arkeia: 1
- If I was either a:
managing a team or b: wanting an easily transferable backup skill I'd
would go for Netbackup for the following reasons:
- Odds on I'd have
a larger pool of people to choose from if I opted for Netbackup because
it's the backup skill in demand re; the Cisco effect
- If I wanted to
look for a new role as a backup specialist I'd have a lot more roles to
choose from.
- They have some great
features listed on their portfolio i.e.
- Single Instance
Storage - i.e. File De-duplication only one copy of the same data
stored on Virtual Tape Library instead of multiple copies of the same
data.
- Recently refocused
on a MSP (Managed Service Provider) Programme to make Commvault more
attractive to vendors who wish to supply Managed Backup Services using
Commvault, so they are trying to make a big push into the software as a
service market provider space where the volumes are a lot higher.
Cheers
-Martin
John Stoffel wrote:
Hi all,
Is anyone here running CommVault Galaxy backup software? We're
investigating a move from Legato, but I'm personally not wild about
it, esp since it means moving to Windows Server 2003 as the main
server platform.
I know my anti-Windows bias is showing here, but it's hard to get rid
of it.
Anyway, I found a couple of forums and mailing lists, but they were
all very low volume with out anything useful on there. Something like
the networker mailing list would be great.
Thanks,
John
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