Metallic also continues its global rollout, with support for nine new EMEA countries, brining the total of countries supported to 23.
David Ngo, Metallic’s CTO
Commvault has announced another package of enhancements to their Metallic Backup-as-a-Service [BaaS] portfolio. They added support for Salesforce and enhanced their support for Microsoft Teams. Both Oracle and Active Directory have been added to Metallic Database Backup. Commvault’s HyperScale X appliance has also been enabled to run in edge mode, to let it be integrated with Metallic as a hybrid solution with scale-out capabilities.
This announcement follows a similar omnibus announcement last quarter around Metallic’s Cloud Storage Service, and HANA and Kubernetes support, as Commvault continues to build out the BaaS offering it first unveiled in the fall of 2019.
“This speaks to the pace of innovation we are maintaining with Metallic, being able to offer this breadth and depth – not just in the SMB and midmarket but also in the enterprise,” said David Ngo, Metallic’s CTO.
Metallic was originally launched as an SMB and midmarket-focused service, but Commvault is now focusing it strongly on the enterprise as well
“When it first came out, it was really all about ease of use – easy to try, easy to buy,” Ngo said “That philosophy remains in place, regardless of sector. Those things are very important to everyone now. There has been broadening of support since the launch because of more adoption of cloud technologies and the acceleration of cloud products because of the pandemic. That has driven enterprise adoption of companies looking at a backup as-a-service model. Commvault knew the enterprise demand would be there. We started with a very focused product set with Office 365, and got requests for more workloads as a service.”
Janet Giesen, VP of Operations for Metallic
“We started Metallic with a mid-market focus because, before the pandemic, we were seeing preference for SaaS delivery more in the midmarket,” said Janet Giesen, VP of Operations for Metallic. “The pandemic changed that. BaaS is a market that’s being defined now. It’s exciting and evolving quickly. We can differentiate from others in the space because we are tried and tested, with truly hybrid capabilities, allowing a lot of those different models that are important for the enterprise, and because we are hosted on Azure.”
The hybrid capabilities have been expanded significantly with HyperScale X for Metallic, which enables the scale-out HyperScale X appliance to run in edge mode and become a backup target for hybrid cloud workloads protected by Metallic.
“Relying on a cloud copy only in an on-prem environment is quite questionable as the data scales,” Ngo said. “If you need to recover a TB-sized Oracle database from the cloud, that can take a long time. It’s a problem with SaaS backups where data is in the cloud only, and on-prem is generally just a cache. We came up with a new term to explain what we do here – SaaS Plus. We can have a SaaS cloud managed service plus capability to have a backup you keep with you, and a virtual air gap. That’s the magic combination. We have had the SaaS plus capability since we launched, but HyperScale X for Metallic extends our ability to scale to higher levels.”
The improved platform support starts with an entirely new one, Metallic Salesforce Backup, which covers the Salesforce Sales, Service, and Financial Cloud. Metallic Office 365 & Teams Backup & Recovery is an enhancement. It builds on Metallic’s existing Microsoft Teams capabilities to include in-place restore of Teams conversations and other data, for more granular recovery of data stored within Teams. All new and existing Metallic Office 365 Backup customers will automatically receive Microsoft Teams functionality as part of their subscription.
Support for Oracle Database and Microsoft Active Directory backup are now offered as part of the Metallic Database Backup solution.
More platform integration is always a good thing for partners, but Giesen said the added geo support is a really big deal. The new countries supported are Austria, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland.
“The geographic expansion significantly helps partners,” she said. “Having the ability to back up data in many different targets worldwide is critical. It means they can support more international corporations’ needs. It also gives us the ability to take on more channel partners, who are now able to participate because we are expanding the ecosystem. The new workloads and capabilities are important for the channel, but the geo expansion is just as important.”
The additional hybrid options are also valuable for partners, Giesen added.
“It gives them the ability to have a more holistic enterprise and data center cloud conversation, and lets them tailor the offering more for customers,” she said. “The ‘mix and match’ subscriptions across a lot of these areas of BaaS is newer for partners, and is being well received.”
