Across Every Cloud: The NetApp And Commvault Alliance

By Nigel Tozer

In my 12-year tenure at Commvault, NetApp has been an ever-present technology partner, with integration deepening as both companies have expanded our respective value propositions around data. An alliance with NetApp makes perfect sense for both parties: we have complementary portfolios, a shared channel and pretty much the same list of major technology vendors that we count as key alliances.

Last autumn, NetApp and Commvault further strengthened our relationship with a new global reseller agreement, allowing NetApp to sell Commvault Complete™ Backup and Recovery and Commvault Orchestrate™. For this reason, I thought it would be worthwhile examining the joint value we deliver to our customers and align it to the three key pillars that underpin NetApp’s “Data-Driven” message. A swift visit to NetApp’s website will reveal that the first of these is “Across every cloud,” which is where I’ll begin in this first blog in a series of three.

Data driven in the cloud

Over the last few years, NetApp has been beavering away at getting its Data ONTAP system into the cloud, to deliver the data portability, availability, performance, application compatibility and management that people love about Data ONTAP in their data centre. And just like on-premises, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides snapshot data protection for data in AWS and Azure.

Just like on-premises, Commvault complements this by protecting VM/workloads natively in the cloud and can back up Cloud Volumes ONTAP data. As part of the backup process, the data can be indexed, deduped and encrypted, and moved from primary cloud storage to lower cost storage; it can be aged to cold storage tiers in AWS and Azure*. This is great for reducing cloud billing costs and is quick to setup with automated policies.

Backups make all the difference where cloud availability doesn’t help, such as data corruption, human error, geo-outages and for governance or regulations.

Cloudy with a chance of workloads

The sharper-eyed among you reading this will notice I said “data” with regard to Cloud Volumes ONTAP, rather than VMs or apps. NetApp cloud data can be directly replicated from their FAS/AFF arrays on-premises, which again is enormously valuable from an availability standpoint. But what about getting secondary or backup data into the cloud? Or migrating workloads for other use cases?

Again, this is where Commvault helps enormously. Commvault can back up data and workloads (from snapshots it manages) from NetApp and third-party arrays, dedupe and encrypt it, and efficiently send it to the cloud for offsite storage. There it can be topped up and recovered, VMs/workloads too, for functions such as migration, disaster recovery (DR) or dev/test. That top-up feature (we call it LiveSync) can provide DR SLAs from just a few minutes upward, depending on your business needs.

Protecting the data fabric – everywhere

Today’s businesses cannot afford downtime, yet threats from cyber-attacks, human error and cloud outages are real, not to mention the increased risk of natural disasters. Natural disasters used to be more a factor of where you’re located, but due to climate change, even traditionally “safe” locations are now subject to unpredictable and extreme weather conditions that can cause significant issues.

With these risks, combined with the complexity of a modern digital business and an IT skills shortage, it’s no surprise that more and more organisations are looking to simplify operations. This is where the capabilities, integration and partnership between NetApp and Commvault can pay a real dividend.For these, and many other commercial considerations, it’s reassuring to know that Commvault can protect the Data Fabric everywhere: Edge to Core to Hybrid Multi-Cloud. If you’d like to know more, learn more about Commvault’s alliance with NetApp, or ask your NetApp reseller for more information.