Backup, Storage, Virtualization

Commvault Metallic launches new Hybrid Cloud Data Protection portfolio including Metallic BaaS for Kubernetes

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Metallic Database Backup and Metallic File & Object Backup are the other new offerings, all built on the Metallic Core Backup & Recovery solution.

Today Commvault is announcing a new Hybrid Cloud Data Protection portfolio with three new Backup-as-a-Service [BaaS] offerings. The highlight, because of the announcement coming with the virtual KubeCon event which starts today, is a new Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup solution. The other two new solutions are Metallic Database Backup, and Metallic File & Object Backup.

“Metallic started a year ago protecting VMs, unstructured data and SQL, but  people have told us that they want more granular entry points,” said Manoj Nair, General Manager of Metallic, a Commvault Company. “So now we have added one for Kubernetes, one for a database model, and one for object storage, all of which are intricately a part of the hybrid journey.”

Commvault has beefed up their Kubernetes support over the last year around both their core Commvault Complete Data Protection and Commvault’s Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform.

“We are now announcing we have made additional Kubernetes improvements around Hedvig, which is part of the constant flow of innovation,” Nair noted. “The  big new part though is now having the Metallic support with the new Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup solution.”

The new Metallic Kubernetes solution is now positioned with the Commvault backup and Commvault Hedvig storage solutions to offer a range of different types of Kubernetes solutions in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, which can be purchased through a consumption model.

“Kubernetes containers and adoption have become de facto for orchestration,” Nair said. “They have become part of customers’ cloud journey. Some use containers for refactoring into microservices, some for DevTest, and some for production. Change is reaching a tipping point. Kubernetes is in a situation where while the Cloud Native Foundation found 23% of enterprises in 2016 were targeting use in production, 84% of them were this year. A lot more are now using it in production.

“The beauty of our portfolio approach is that if they want, Hedvig can be the primary persistent data store, integrated in with snapshotting and lifecycle management,” Nair added. “Another path would be with some apps deployed on prem, but where we aren’t being used for primary storage. We are now a solving full range of solutions, for different parts of the journey, all of it with a single UI. It doesn’t matter if you are using Commvault, Hedvig or Metallic. All of that is fully snapped together. Customers take a lot of broader journeys into the cloud, and shouldn’t have different data siloes. Now they can protect all the different workloads.”

Nair also stressed that Metallic has some uniqueness on this journey.

“Backup as a service is an interesting way to take something to customers where data doesn’t have to have new siloes,” he said. “The unique thing about Metallic BaaS is you don’t have to protect your on-prem in the cloud. It protects without having to back up to the cloud. That allows a more flexible backup as a service, that can protect all these different elements.”

Protected workloads include any CNCF-Certified Kubernetes distribution with validated support for Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Service [AKS], Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [EKS], and VMware Tanzu. This complements Metallic’s comprehensive support for Virtual Machine environments, including Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Native Azure Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solution, and VMware Cloud on AWS.

“It’s also never just containers alone,” Nair emphasized.  “It’s containers plus some managed database or blob storage. The cloud-native app is always a combination, and this is a key part of our hybrid portfolio. We can also protect the blob and the managed database. This is why we are making the Kubernetes part of this free for now. For, the next six months, they can leverage Kubernetes for free for the lifetime of their subscription.”

Specifically, any customer who purchases at least 10 VMs within the Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup product by May 18th, 2021, will receive the Kubernetes Backup component free of charge for the lifetime of their subscription.

“The purpose of offering it free for the trial period is to get the customers to bake Kubernetes in,” Nair said. If it’s free, they are more likely to use it.”