Announcing The Commvault HyperScale™ X Appliance

By Pavan Bedadala

1 + 1 > 2, sometimes. With so much of elementary math tutoring under my belt during the last few months with my first grader, you would wonder how I can make such a simple math mistake. My statement was made in a different context; when two powerful technologies are merged, the resulting solution can be much more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Announcing Commvault HyperScale™ X Technology – which brings Commvault HyperScale and Commvault Distributed Storage together – an intelligent data management solution built on the Commvault Distributed Storage scale-out file system delivered as an integrated appliance. At Commvault, we take pride in not only building great technologies, but also creating a symbiosis between them and thereby creating well-defined, integrated and intelligent solutions. This release marks the beginning of a journey that these technologies are going to make, together.

So, what is new with Commvault HyperScale X?

• Commvault Distributed Storage meets hyperscale

Built on a truly hyperscale architecture, Commvault Distributed Storage provides software-defined storage that uses modern distributed system techniques to meet all of your primary, secondary and cloud data needs. Together with the power of Commvault Distributed Storage, HyperScale X now provides unmatched scalability, security and resiliency to accelerate an organization’s digital transformation journey to hybrid cloud, container and virtualized environments. It brings improved resiliency to Commvault HyperScale X offering better protection in the event of concurrent hardware failures. Commvault Distributed Storage provides cost-optimized scale-out – allowing storage expansion one node at a time – avoiding overprovisioning costs.

• Simple gets simpler

Commvault HyperScale Software simplifies various facets of data management and the Commvault HyperScale X Appliance takes simplicity to the next dimension. You can now drive HyperScale X deployments end to end without ever leaving the web installer, and advanced network resiliency configurations are enabled through a simple toggle switch in the installer. The Commvault Command Center™ HyperScale dashboard allows monitoring of all HyperScale-specific storage from a single central console. When it comes to monitoring the health of hardware components, review them right from the dashboard view and receive notifications should components fail.

• Do more with your Appliance

Commvault HyperScale X appliances are offered in two sizes – small and large. The HS 2300 has three 1U rack servers (3U total) and starts from as low as 48 TB raw capacity, while the HS 4300 has three 2U rack servers (6U total) and can scale all the way up to 504 TB of raw capacity. The appliances are designed to drive better performance and scale while at the same time allowing customers to utilize the appliance for additional use cases such as migrating workloads to cloud, performing live recovery of virtual machines for DR and dev-ops use cases, running analytics workloads for sensitive data governance and performing file storage optimization.

• Channel partnership with Arrow

Commvault HyperScale appliances provide integrated experience to users with Commvault acting as single point of contact for support and maintenance of software and hardware. This integrated experience is made possible through trusted and reliable partnerships Commvault has made. Commvault HyperScale X now marks the beginning of a new partnership with Arrow. With Commvault HyperScale X, Commvault now moves to a 100% channel-only strategy for HyperScale business. This means partners are now at the heart of HyperScale operations simplifying the supply chain and logistics while offering value-added services and support for hardware maintenance and parts replacement. Global operational abilities of Arrow also mean that Commvault HyperScale X continues to be available and supported worldwide while allowing Commvault to focus on what it does best, continue to innovate and disrupt the data management industry.

Ok, so how does the above features help you manage data intelligently?

• Scalability

Scale big or scale small? The choice is yours – Commvault HyperScale X excels at both.

You can scale big deploying petabytes of storage with Commvault HyperScale X, with the same ease and performance as the smallest deployment. By scaling to petabytes of storage in a single deduplicated storage pool, you can utilize storage optimally without data fragmentation.

You can scale small as well, by adding storage in single node increments, as low as 10 TB at a time. This flexibility allows you to expand storage smartly avoiding overprovisioning. Regardless of the scale, manage all the storage from one console – the Commvault Command Center – which reduces administrative complexity.

• Resiliency

Risk of a failure or downtime to a single server within a data center is increasing more than ever before for a few reasons – increasing usage of commoditized hardware especially in hyperconverged scale-out systems and increase in malware or ransomware attacks resulting in server downtime for extended periods. A true scale-out platform must maintain business continuity until such a failure condition is addressed. However, scale-out platforms are prone to downtime when a second failure happens before the first failure is resolved. With Commvault HyperScale X and Commvault Distributed Storage, resiliency of the platform gets even better and smarter. The Commvault Distributed Storage file system smartly chooses the appropriate resiliency technique after an initial failure such that an additional subsequent failure does not compromise the data consistency.

• Security

Commvault HyperScale X provides additional safeguards to stored data by preventing unauthorized access to it. Once data is written, unauthorized applications or users are prevented from tampering with the data. It also intelligently monitors your backup environment to detect suspicious file activity and alert users in the event of an attack to help mitigate against ransomware attacks.

• Performance

Scale-out systems in general drive better performance by parallelizing read and write operations across nodes and drives. Commvault HyperScale X achieves optimal backup and restore performance by intelligent and automated load balancing of data across all nodes such that maximum possible nodes and drives are engaged for reads and writes. As more nodes are added to the system, the solution scales linearly to meet RPO and RTO objectives for any installed capacity.

• Flexibility

One size does not fill all; flexibility is the key when applying HyperScale to solve data management needs.

Commvault provides several options for intelligent data management – Commvault® Backup and Recovery for pure backup and archive use cases of various workloads, Commvault® Disaster Recovery for protecting workloads against disasters and ensuring business continuity, Commvault Complete™ Data Protection, which bundles both Backup and Disaster Recovery, and the Commvault Activate™ portfolio of products for data governance, eDiscovery and compliance, and file storage optimization. Choose the best solution for your data management needs and Commvault HyperScale X provides an integrated experience.

Looking to spread IT infrastructure costs as op-ex versus cap-ex? HyperScale X appliances are offered on flexible subscription terms whereas Commvault data management software is available as perpetual or subscription; choose as appropriate to your situation.

• Hybrid cloud mobility

Commvault’s industry-leading depth of coverage across cloud providers enables the seamless migration of data across cloud locations. Commvault HyperScale X simplifies implementation of hybrid cloud data mobility by allowing users to extend data copies to cloud targets for long term retention and recover on demand, all from the integrated appliance. Commvault HyperScale X appliance acts as an accelerator for both backups and restores from the cloud, reducing cloud costs with zero infrastructure requirements in the cloud or on-premises.

• Instant Recovery of virtual machines

Instantly recover virtual machines to maintain data availability and business continuity, without waiting for the data to be restored to the destination hypervisor. If virtual machines are to be restored for a short-term use – for disaster recovery testing, or a dev-ops use case, or application validation – then mount the virtual machines directly from the appliance without ever fully restoring the data.

Summing up, this is a feature-packed next generation refresh to our Commvault HyperScale Technology. While this post cannot possibly cover in detail the gamut of capabilities that Commvault HyperScale X brings to the table, please watch out for more posts in this space for deep dives into each of the topics covered today.