tashka2000 - Fotolia
Commvault joins the hyper-converged backup wave with Hyperscale
Hyperscale Software and Hyperscale Appliance bring Commvault backup software in a reference architecture/software product or as a pre-configured server/storage box
Commvault is the latest backup supplier to provide data protection software in hyper-converged infrastructure form.
The Commvault Hyperscale Software and Hyperscale Appliance, launched this week, marry compute and storage in a scale-out appliance with Commvault backup software.
Commvault Hyperscale Software comes as a software product for use on server hardware from Fujitsu, Cisco, Lenovo, HPE, Super Micro, Huawei and Dell EMC.
The Commvault Hyperscale Appliance is built on Fujitsu hardware. The compute operating environment is virtualised Red Hat Linux, while its scale-out file system is provided by the Red Hat Gluster OS.
The products provide customers with Commvault data protection software in a hyper-converged form factor – in other words, combined server and storage that can be scaled out grid-fashion to many nodes.
Nigel Tozer, EMEA director of solutions marketing at Commvault, said there is “no theoretical upper limit” to the number of nodes, with capacities in the petabyte range possible.
With this move, Commvault adds to the trend of backup products increasingly being sold as part of a hardware configuration, such as those from Rubrik and Cohesity.
Read more on backup hardware
- Scale-out flash backup appliance maker Rubrik plans backup and archive analytics on-premise and in cloud.
- Property firm Colliers replaces NetApp converged stacks with hyper-converged infrastructure. Secondary storage and backup from Cohesity replaces tape and supports Nutanix performance tier.
Going back a few years, backup appliances arose that combined backup software in a hardware form factor.
Those were mostly an SME play, with limited scalability. Now the advent of hyper-converged allows appliances to be linked together scale-out style and provide capacities more suited to enterprise environments.
Tozer said: “We see backup moving away from the traditional environment of backup software and complex storage. And if you want traditional backup to work on a grid for fault tolerance, disaster recovery and so on, you end up with ‘lumpy’ systems, with big lumps of compute and storage.”
The Commvault Hyperscale Appliance will come in a range of preconfigured sizes from 32TB to 80TB. Those capacities were described as “usable storage”, so are likely to mean after data reduction. Tozer also said there would be “a bit of flash”, but didn’t give details.
As with Commvault’s data protection platform, functionality includes the ability to back up and restore between on-premise and cloud environments, virtual and physical server backup, and analytics.”
