Commvault Metallic File & Object Archive

Commvault Metallic File & Object Archive is a new Archive-as-a-Service offering.

Archive vs Backup

It’s important to distinguish between archive and backup, where Commvault have most of their existing business. A backup is there to safeguard against data loss after an unwanted event, be that a hardware failure, cyber-attack, or even an accidental deletion. An archive is different - this is where data is not frequently required (and may never be actually required at all) but the business needs to retain it. Perhaps that retention is for legal or compliance purposes. It could be old data, or perhaps source material which has since been distilled into a published report or research paper. Archiving is all about saving money on your storage whilst ensuring that data is kept as long as it might be needed.

The What, When, and How of Archiving

That supporting or historic unstructured data often takes up the majority of a storage environment, and whilst most enterprise storage solutions will offer some form of tiering, it can be hard to take it as step further. To do this you need to know what to move beyond that “cold tier” storage to an archive solution, when to do it, and how to find and retrieve it when you do want to bring it back

The new Metallic File & Object Archive aims to answer all these questions. You can answer the what and when using dashboards to model disk vs archive usage (and potential cost savings) using parameters such as file modification dates and size. This is then used to create a plan to implement, and to visualise the historic data that will be archived.

Data can easily be discovered and retrieved thanks to the Metallic search and recall functionality. Data is tagged as it is archived, allowing for detailed searches of that metadata to locate archived files or objects.

As-A-Service

As with the other products in the Metallic portfolio, File & Object Archive is offered as a service model, offering the simplicity of a Software-as-a-Service solution. There’s rapid deployment, no updating or patching, reduced management, and no Capex expenditure which helps keep both the IT and finance departments happy.

The choice of storage to connect to this system is up to you, both at the primary level and the archive tier. The Metallic solution links the two, orchestrates the data moves in both directions, and provides a cloud-based control plane for configuration and administration.

The source NAS is connected up to a Metallic Gateway and also a low-cost (per TB) archive environment, either on-premises or using public cloud archive storage. If your archiving policy works and there’s no major recalls from archive then current public cloud prices are just a couple of pounds/dollars/euros per terabyte for that storage.

In terms of licensing, Metallic is priced based on the total data (measured in Front-End Terabytes) being managed across the NAS and the Archive storage. This should provide reasonably predictable billing to customers, as long as they are aware of their current storage use and understand their own expected data growth.

Metallic File & Object archive was originally announced at the Commvault Connections event in 2022 and is now generally available. More info on this product can be found online at metallic.io

In addition to my standard Declaration/Disclaimer please note that whilst this text was not provided by Commvault this is a sponsored post.