Commvault adds Metallic SaaS backup and Hedvig features

Commvault has launched a software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup product – called Metallic – that covers on-premise, cloud and hybrid workloads. The company – at its Commvault Go event in Denver – has also unveiled new capabilities that come from the recently acquired Hedvig storage software functionality.

Commvault’s new SaaS offering will allow customers to choose backup sources that include on-premise datacentres, cloud-resident data and hybrids of the two. The same applies to targets, which can also be any of those three.

That means Metallic can operate as a cloud-to-cloud backup product. That’s an emerging category driven by customers’ needs for more comprehensive backup capability than is offered in cloud providers’ products natively.

The three levels of Metallic to be made available will be Core Backup and Recovery, Office 365 Backup and Recovery, and Endpoint Backup and Recovery. The three products will all be available on annual or monthly subscription from Commvault partners.

Robert Kaloustian, senior vice-president and general manager for Commvault’s Metallic division, said: “Metallic is fast, secure, reliable and targeted at the most commonly used workloads in the midmarket, with enterprise-grade scalability.”

Meanwhile, Commvault announced a raft of new features for its recently acquired Hedvig storage software product.

These include a container storage interface, which enables customers to use Commvault for the management of Kubernetes, and other container orchestrators.

There is also the addition of erasure coding as a means of data protection. Erasure coding makes multiple (often three) copies of data and distributes it across locations. Should any one portion of the data fail, it can be reconstructed from information held elsewhere in the system.

Commvault has also added support for multi-tenant datacentres, including the ability to manage tenant level access, control, and encryption settings.

Finally, there is multi-datacentre cluster management, alerting and reporting, which will allow customers to administer all their software-defined storage infrastructure from a single location.

Hedvig is software-defined storage with block (iSCSI), file and object storage access that can support virtualised environments (VMware, Hyper-V and KVM) as well as container applications.

Commvault acquired Hedvig in early September, and aims to use its technology as a way of adding more general storage capabilities to the company, which has been best known as a supplier of backup software products.

Commvault already pushes Hedvig as a backup target, but it’s possible the company will use the software-defined storage platform as the basis for convergence with its backup software and appliance product, Hyperscale. These have become a rising section of the market, with products from companies like Rubrik, Cohesity and Arcserve.

Avinash Lakshman, chief storage strategist at Commvault, said the new capabilities “converge many of the latest storage, container and cloud technologies, allowing enterprises to automate manual infrastructure management processes and simplify their multi-cloud environments”.