At Commvault Go, the data protection vendor introduced a revamped user interface with machine learning-powered analytics and smarter storage usage reporting.
Commvault will put artificial intelligence and machine learning to work in its new Command Center product due later this year.
The Commvault Command Center, scheduled to launch in December 2018, is a new web interface with strategic dashboards for recovery, storage, operations and appliances.
The Commvault web interface uses AI and machine learning to provide better predictive analyses when generating reports. The upgrade will be available to customers across all products in the Commvault portfolio.
The console will handle workloads such as autonomous operations, recovery readiness and cloud migration. The Commvault web interface will also support alerting through voice, text, email and Amazon Alexa.
Chris Van Wagoner, chief strategy officer at Commvault, said the Command Center goes well beyond the vendor's current reporting features.
"We have used the HTML capabilities so that unlike static reports, this is using the ability of HTML to link to underlying data sets," Van Wagoner said at the Commvault Go user conference in Nashville, Tenn., where the vendor introduced the Command Center. "Reporting within the interface was shifted much more from telling you what happened to giving you an outcome."
The software under the hood of the Commvault web interface calculates and makes adjustments to ensure user-defined outcomes and objectives are met. Van Wagoner said because Commvault's Complete Backup & Recovery flagship product routinely gathers data, it's the perfect system to implement machine learning.
What we're doing today is using machine learning to understand how much data you're backing up during every day of the week.
Chris Van Wagonerchief strategy officer, Commvault
"Before, we had this idea of how much used and free space is available in your backup repository, and it used a very simple, linear projection of your consumption," he said. "What we're doing today is using machine learning to understand how much data you're backing up during every day of the week. It gets much smarter in terms of projecting what the usage is going further, because it understands your operations at a much deeper level."
Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said ESG's research indicates AI- and machine learning-derived analyses to help users make decisions may become common in data management applications like the Commvault web interface.
"My research shows that's a major disruptor coming up in the next few years," Bertrand said about AI. "I believe that's where the market is going. I think it's very key for vendors to do this."
