U.S. Department of Justice boosts backup throughput 5x with Commvault Cloud

Moving beyond slow, reactive operations

Before DOJ began using Commvault, its backup environment combined Backup Exec and Dell NetWorker. When Oje Alexis joined the team, detailed historical context was limited, but the current environment made the challenges clear: slow backups, inconsistent SLAs, and alerting and monitoring that did not support proactive management.

Long-running jobs and delayed recovery points increased the risk of missing recovery expectations and kept the team focused on reacting to problems. Alexis first prioritized backup performance, then built a broader plan to improve visibility, policy design, storage configuration, and recovery consistency.

The combination of limited monitoring, storage latency, and inefficient data paths made it difficult to isolate issues quickly. Without stronger visibility and repeatable operating practices, the team had little capacity to tune the environment or improve resilience.

“Commvault gives you a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on. You have reports that tell you what’s happening and you can set up alerts.” – Oje Alexis

Turning visibility into targeted action

Commvault Cloud reports and alerts gave DOJ the visibility it needed to understand performance and track backup health. The team automated reporting so exceptions and SLA trends no longer depended on manual checks.

Alexis redesigned storage policies and configurations to align with best practices, separating workloads and data flows where deduplication would not add value. This established a repeatable discipline: identify the issue, isolate the bottleneck, make a targeted change, and validate the result.

After identifying storage latency, DOJ converted backup storage from CIFS to Fibre Channel. For VMware workloads, the team moved to SAN transport to bypass multiple LAN hops. Together, these architecture changes reduced long-running jobs and improved auxiliary-copy performance.

Building proactive operational discipline

Centralized visibility, policy control, and automated monitoring helped the team move from reacting to failures toward continuously tuning the environment. Reports and alerts surfaced emerging issues earlier and made backup health easier to track.

Commvault Cloud helped pinpoint whether constraints sat in storage, networking, or protection design, giving the team evidence to make focused changes. Automated reporting also improved oversight of exceptions and SLA trends.

The result was a more consistent operating model with stronger visibility, faster troubleshooting, and more time for optimization. The team could assess the full data path, address the true source of performance issues, and verify the effect of each change.

“Commvault will outline bottlenecks in the environment, whether they are in the network or storage. That visibility helped us redesign data protection methods to bypass them.” – Oje Alexis

Building consistent recovery readiness at scale

Moving backup storage from CIFS to Fibre Channel increased write performance from approximately 900 GB/hour to 4,500 GB/hour—a 5X improvement. For VMware workloads, SAN transport bypassed the network bottleneck, producing what Alexis described as a “night and day” performance difference.

Recovery times were cut roughly in half, helping the team meet RTOs more consistently for the resources under its protection. Deduplication database backups that had fallen more than two weeks behind now run essentially daily.

Auxiliary-copy performance improved, and the SLA now consistently reaches 100%. Just as important, the team has shifted from reacting to failures and performance issues to proactively monitoring, tuning, and optimizing the environment.

“Instead of being reactive, the team is more proactive. We now have time to make other improvements and optimize the environment.” – Oje Alexis