Solving Customer Problems: New Data Protection Features In SP15 – Part 1

For us techies, when it comes to Commvault we are lucky to celebrate at least four times a year. As you probably know, every quarter a new Service Pack (or shall I say, Feature Pack) rolls out from our engineering team and ushers in new functionality.

These feature releases are an iterative approach to solving difficult customer problems, and Service Pack 15 is no exception. In this iteration, which was released March 15, we have added a colossal amount functionality for Cloud and Virtualization, Databases, IntelliSnap, Cloud Apps, Reporting, Machine Learning enabled alerts, Big Data and improvements in simplicity and automation for the core Commvault platform.

Sounds like a lot to take in (and it is), so much so that we will cover the top SP15 features across two separate posts. For a full listing, check out the SP15 Newsletter.

Cloud VMs and Virtualization

Starting in the clouds, we have added support for another cloud platform:

• Support for Alibaba cloud

Our APAC customers will be familiar with Alibaba cloud, which opened its doors in 2009 and currently provides services across 19 regions. With SP15, we have extended the Virtual Server Agent to perform agentless protection of IaaS workloads running in Alibaba cloud.

Live Sync, Commvault’s replication framework for VMs, files and databases has also received several updates, most notably:

• Live Sync
  • Enhanced usability changes in Command Center streamlines configuration and management of replica VMs
  • When replicating Azure VMs, you can now set the option to only create VMs during failover. This saves on compute hour costs with a minimal impact to RTO
  • Azure Managed disk support for Live Sync VMs

Speaking of Azure, there are new enhancements that further extend functionality for IaaS VM protection:

• Azure
  • You can now protect VMs with 8TB managed disks, support for 16 and we expect that 32 TB will available as soon as Microsoft publishes the API
  • Support for backup and restore of Azure Key Vault encrypted VMs

Descending from public to private cloud for a moment, SP15 also adds support for the following:

• VMware
  • NAS transport mode for VMware
  • vRealize automation 7.5 integration and support
  • vCloud Director 9.5 support, including Linux VSA proxies

• OpenStack
  • OpenStack Changed Block Tracking (CBT)

• Citrix Xen
  • Citrix Xen 7.6 support

Databases and PaaS

Commvault has always had a database-rich feature set and SP15 extends that even further:

• Oracle picks a couple of new features
  • Oracle Logical Backup: allows DBAs to use a datapump to export oracle data and automate ingesting it into Commvault
  • Oracle Agentless RMAN backup: Allows data protection of Oracle databases agentlessly while still retaining source-side deduplication and compression

• Microsoft SQL Server received a trio of important features
  • Instant clone ability in Command Center, allowing you to duplicate snapshots and create instant dev/test environments
  • Data masking
  • IntelliSnap support for MSSQL in Azure

• Google Cloud gets PaaS data protection for the following databases:
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL

Commvault HyperScale

Commvault HyperScale gets a refreshed Appliance dashboard, with additions to Hardware and System monitoring.

• Commvault HyperScale
  • Improved dashboard with Hardware and System monitoring

These are just some of the additions in SP15. There are plenty more features added for DB2, SAP, SAP HANA and PostgreSQL.

On Wednesday we’ll complete the rundown of top features, and don’t forget to check out our recently announced support for Nutanix Files.

That’s a wrap for part one of the top new features for SP15. Stay tuned for part two!