Improvements to user interfaces in a cloud world, better automation and orchestration to deal with Big Data, increased openness and new software-defined data services highlight what Commvault is calling a very significant series of announcements.
At Commvault GO 2016, their recent inaugural customer conference, data protection vendor Commvault announced a series of enhancements to their Commvault Data Protection platform. These included modernized user interfaces, improved orchestration capabilities and increased openness.
“We made three major announcements,” said David King, Commvault’s Director of Marketing. “One was the introduction of more modern interfaces. We announced new role-specific user interfaces on HTML5 for data owners and business owners, which are geared for specific needs within the business. These offer a much more personalized set of interfaces. We saw a lot of interest in this at GO.”
These new consoles let users run extensive graphical and visual representations of KPIs, utilization, operational health and other metrics, and allow them to quickly and easily configure, run and monitor their environment.
“Traditionally we provided management capabilities for data centre people and end users,” King said. “However, with the cloud, we needed to provide business owners with specific views for them. It’s a very significant expansion of what we do in this area.”
The second series of enhancements relate to improved automation capabilities that improve orchestration.
“With the dynamics around bi-modal IT, complexity has increased, so we have announced enhanced orchestration capability which simplifies workload management, storage and data access,” King said.
“For example, for an Oracle customer looking to move a database to the cloud, it could be a 19-20 step process and take two weeks. These new orchestration capabilities will put it all in place off a single button push. That’s big for a move to the cloud, as it removes a complex process.”
These capabilities have broad applicability across all applications, simplifying the way customers incorporate the cloud in any aspect of their solutions, from simple backup to cloud, to migrating workloads, to automating data recovery in the cloud.
“We are also extending the openness of our platform and extending its hardware-agnostic nature by opening up some operational APIs,” King said. “We are also introducing new software-defined data services. This will enable customers looking to enable Web-scale solutions, with the data management capabilities we have always provided. Providing native access through software-defined data services will allow customers to take advantage of data management functionality native in storage systems today.”
Commvault also announced some vendor-specific initiatives at the event. These include expanded capabilities for Amazon Web Services beyond virtual machines to include protection of databases, and new backup, migration and data protection capabilities for applications and workloads in Oracle and Azure clouds. Commvault also announced that the newest version of its data platform and software has achieved SAP-certified integration with the SAP HANA platform on IBM Power Systems.
“SAP is a long-time business partner of Commvault, but this is a significant extension of our relationship which extends our technical capabilities around SAP HANA and will better protect, manage and process data running in SAP HANA,” King said.
King also noted the congruence between an established vendor like Commvault holding its first customer event, and the significance of the changes being announced.
“In launching our GO event, we waited to do it at a time that made the most sense for customers,” King said. “This is a time for transformation. It made sense to bring people together now to have a conversation, with the dynamics of the cloud today, and other changes to people’s business models.”
