Commvault Connections 2022

So it has certainly been a busy few weeks and I am still digest all the information but I took some time to invest into understanding some of what Commvault’s portfolio was looking like on the ‘Investing Wisely’ track.

But what was Commvault Connections? It was their interactive and virtual cloud data management conference, which was in the U.S. Wednesday, November 2nd and internationally on November 3rd. The Connections conference provided IT leaders with the insights and best practices they need to Innovate with confidence today and tomorrow. During the event there were feature keynote speakers, a customer panel, and numerous technical and partner sessions that share our vision, technology roadmap, and best practices with our data-minded customers, prospects, partners, and industry influencers.

So what drew me to the ‘Investing Wisely’ track. Well quite simply as a technologist we know innovation may be priceless but peoples budgets are not endless. This allowed me to get up to speed with finding the right balance of gaining value from what data you have whilst still managing your costs to protect it on your journey to the cloud.

Many of you will be thinking wait, why I am doing this still as I said I am a technologist and the landscape is ever changing and it helps to keep abreast of all vendors and technologies as who even knew about ransomware until a few years ago.

Session 1:- More Data, More Risk? Introducing Our Latest SaaS-Delivered Data Service

This was hosted by Shai Nuni – (Vice President of Worldwide) and Robert Fowler – Product Manager and within the first minute Shai resonated with me straight away. He said something that I have always tried to express and that is without your data how can you business function. I am always tried to stress no matter how cool we can build things data is king and without it many business would not be able to operate.

The biggest challenge with all this data is the fact it is usually unstructured and our most common option is just to throw more storage at it

This is where archiving and being efficient comes in, but again how to we manage this data or consolidate all these silos.

This is where the Metallic file and object archive can help by using key data such as file size and last accessed time to model business decisions to automate information life cycle management. This way you only retain the data you need it for as long as you need it and place this in the most optimal storage solution.

The modelling tools will also even help you with what if scenarios to show you potential spaces savings, data insights can help operation teams with more granular controls over their costs. Of course everything is shown via audit controls.

To get this up and going you deploy a small gateway and connect this to your data storage in your desired location such as on premise or cloud and the system then starts to analyse the data

Below is an example of the What-If report

Session 2:- Embracing the Power of Automation

This session was covered by Vidya Shankaran – Field Chief Technical Officer, Commvault & Jeff Crum – Senior Director, Product and Solutions Marketing

This session once again opens up with a great topic of how to do more with less and also avoiding the dreaded technical debt!

It was interesting to hear the comprehensive plugins with the product of which work with SIEM as the eyes and ears that can even trigger infrastructure to be created

It also great to see that this is becoming an industry standard of using tags to limit data gaps to automatically protect work loads without stopping the agility of the business or developers

I do love the automated run books with the continuous reporting, I am sure this will keep many internal and external auditors happy

I do want to somehow have a look at this but the automated remediation of sensitive data seems interesting and the way this may help with GDPR requests such as being able to redact data.

It was also great to see how the platform can size itself based on workload demands or growth rather than setting up and waiting for the grown paying for resources that are not yet needed

I would also be keen to get to try this with the way the data is there and ephemeral resources are there which help increase availability but allow a quick burst rather than paying for full resources or persistent copies.

Session 3:- Navigating Cost Optimization & Risk Mitigation in the Cloud Era 

In my final session I watched Cesar Cid de Rivera – Vice President, International Sales Engineering & Vincenzo Costantino – Senior Director.

As always I do love a good statistic slide!

For me it was a shock to see these numbers as I usually hear a different narrative but multi cloud is here to stay!

To me a perfect summary here is many CFOs these days will decline a hardware refresh as they prefer OPEX over CAPEX despite what these systems may support for the business.

I did chuckle here as again its nice to see a vendor say it… most outages are caused by human error! But they can help with the below with templates to match your strategy

Also its nice to see a dashboard showing you VM bloat and its cost within the cloud world

This same dashboard can help show potential saving by moving data tiers.

The next below dashboard was a great way to understand your data visually, even down to digging into the potentially sensitivity of this data and how it may create risk to your business.

It is also nice to see the easy different ways you can consume this even using your own hardware

I know I would also want to try this out as maybe this can help customers migrate data back from clouds or other providers to what the business now needs today

The last slide summaries this so so well, it provides business with choice by leveraging what they may already have and the freedom to go where the business needs. Providing a common data management and protection platform its not just backup and recovery, it aids with security and compliance along with data insights.

For me I would love to hear from customers being able to use this as a migration platform, I know many who now want to get out of the cloud lock in and back on premise without the need to refactor.