Commvault and Oracle Partner to Deliver Metallic on OCI

So it’s been a while since I have reviewed a backup product. To be honest its also been a while since I last posted. I can get into that in another post but life has been super manic and the firehose of knowledge still has not stopped flowing.

During the pandemic two major things have happened in the industry one being the rapid migration to the cloud but also the rise in cybercrime in many forms. Many businesses have had to perform the migrations with pressures to deliver due to constrained resources, hardware replacement taking months at the time of writing or simply trying to keep up with the changing times. From this stance not much has also changed with the fact technical debt racks up much quicker and many tools that worked well previously may no longer work in this cloud based or Kubernetes driven environments.

Many customers are now also adding in multiple clouds and also hypervisors to try and keep up with demand along with different data storage and retrieval. I know sometimes backup is the last thing on their mind as many are learning other new tools first to manage all this.

So first of all what is new, Commvault has expanded its strategic partnership with Oracle to include Metallic DMaaS on Oracle Cloud (OCI).

• Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup – including for OCI VMs and OKE
• Metallic Database Backup – including for Oracle and Oracle RAC
• Metallic File & Object Backup
• Air-gapped ransomware protection with storage flexibility – including Metallic Recovery Reserve™ on OCI – a simple managed cloud storage service for recovery

What I do also want to cover is some of the history as I as not aware of this product before but Commvault introduced Metallic in 2019, as it’s DMaaS portfolio – bringing the best of data protection to the best of SaaS.

More on the company history can be found here: https://metallic.io/why-metallic

Metallic is part of the Commvault Intelligent Data Platform and provides SaaS delivered data protection, including

• Metallic Backup-as-a-Service, offering protection for SaaS applications including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce; protection for endpoints; and protection for hybrid cloud workloads including Virtual Machines, File Systems, Databases, and containers
• Metallic eDiscovery, offering granular search and export capabilities for Office 365 and endpoint data to help satisfy regulatory compliance requirements
• Metallic Recovery Reserve, built on Microsoft Azure and delivering secure and scalable cloud storage for your backups

So how does this partnership look like from a high level, the great thing here is there are many tools to try and ensure that you have the coverage you need.

So what does it cover then? Well it seems to protect most platforms, For me it’s great to see AVS and VMC AWS but also the SaaS Apps such as Office 365 and Salesforce. What would you do if someone deletes a load of data in your CRM or a disgruntled works removed an entire SharePoint site. It also nice to see a good amount of storage targets that are supported. It also looks good as they are not disparate solutions delivered by the same company.  With the Power of AND, both customer-managed and SaaS-delivered solutions are managed together, seamlessly, delivering the efficiency of the cloud while also providing rapid on-prem recovery for mission critical workloads.

And yes why would a be writing about this, well I know customers who also need to use other technologies to de-risk rather than tying into one provider especially in the financial sectors. For me it’s nice to know what is out there so I may have an idea what my customers may also be implementing when we are having conversations.

So how can you integrate this with your current workloads or better yet protect what you are not today. For me the first most obvious one is a tape replacement, I know this may sound conversional in this day and age as to be fair tape in some instances can still be great bang for buck but I have seen way to many times people just dumping data into S3 like buckets which of course can have its own problems. A post for another day but I believe Metallic a great way to start to archive off into the cloud correctly. Some of their stats show they are already protecting 65+PB of data with a 33% YOY growth.

There are a few other things to note in their architecture too. They way they have this platform designed for ingress is that the data is air-gapped to also protect you from ransomware and of course encryption is built in. You can do this by selecting Metallic Recovery Reserve on OCI.

By adding support for protecting OCI workloads and writing to OCI Storage, Metallic’s data protection now spans OCI VMs; Oracle Databases; and Oracle Container Engine. Additionally, Oracle Linux is available to over 400,000 Oracle enterprise customers and the more than 100,000 customers who have relied on Commvault technology and are looking to leverage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to protect their mission-critical data. As a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, Commvault will jointly market and sell Metallic DMaaS with Oracle in an alliance that will accelerate Metallic’s global expansion efforts. Metallic DMaaS is available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace if you want to get started quickly.

With this news Metallic is now the only DMaaS solution that protects across Azure, AWS and Oracle cloud which I can not wait to test out and see what I can go and how data could be protected and migrated across the clouds.

I also know from my customer days data privacy laws mean companies are required to keep specific data within identified geographical regions. With availability across all commercially available OCI regions, Metallic allows customers to select the OCI region in which they store and restore their data, to ensure compliance.

So where from here, for me I am going to reach out and get a free trial. You can also do the same by going here https://metallic.io/trial

I want to add to this post but ideally I want to show how it can perform some of these functions across data sets and platforms! Let me know if there is a feature you want me to deep dive on

One thing I am interested in actually is also the endpoint backup and how this compares to other providers out there and could I use this to replace what I currently have.

I should say some features are still in the works such as VMWare to VMWare on OCI of which would provide users another way to restore into the cloud.

I am personally quite excited to see where this goes as I know Oracle did always listen to the virtual community feedback especially when I did the bloggers days with them.

Note : I have been compensated for this post and commentary. All the thoughts and opinions in the post are mine and not linked to the company or the current company I am working for