
Commvault Shift.. there is a movement in the industry
So I have been meaning to get this post up for a little while and I thought if anything I would get some of it up. There are a few reasons to why I have not been getting round to something but again that is a post for another day!
I have loved blogging and writing about the industry for many years and sometimes it is great when you just have one of those famous AHA moments. For me this happened at the SHIFT event and I have still been trying to get some of those bits together. I still have fond memories of similar events and I was lucky enough to have some of those same people in the room I did previously.
Commvault has come on leaps and bounds throughout its history but a few things stuck with me from my day in London. Yes at the core they are a backup and protection provider but for me as a technologist they are doing so much more in the industry.
The biggest thing announced was Clean Room, honestly this is a great feature as you can instantiate a full clone or parts of your infrastructure within a safe siloed environment inside Microsoft Azure. The beauty of this is you do not need additional kit and it breaks away many of the other elements too as it brings up some of the networking and just enough for you to peak into the environment and verify if everything as you expect. The other nice thing here is if it is not then you can easily ‘rewind’ like a tape to another point quickly and easily check again.
With the tools at hand if you have already started to move into a new environment because the infection or attack was so bad you can select which files that you want and only restore those if required. Some of the other tools within the suite also try to help prevent reinfections by looking at the heuristics of the file and if this has changed too much it will quarantine this back to where it felt this was a last known good.

One thing that I dug into during this session was well who pays for the cost of getting bits in and out of Air Gap Protect…. well to my shock and onto the AHA moment number 1 was well that is already included when you purchase the service nothing else to account for on top! I do want to validate this but that certainly can help with tests and restores. It also ensures you can test and only pay for the infrastructure you use providing you a new level of confidence.
The second AHA was the power to also use this as a migration tool, even from the image above you can see some elements of this. But the restore point can be outside of Clean Room, it is preferred to be Azure but it does not have to be. The underlying engine can convert between formats! That great repatriation suddenly has become easier or an ability to move to another cloud of your choice. Of course here there may be fee VPNs, ExpressRoutes etc but for me having that choice is great as it can help fend any vendor lock in.
I am going to finish this post here today as I really want to dive in deeper but I will close it off with a video where I had a few questions to close off the day.

