Commvault unveils Hyperscale X, Hedvig container support

Commvault has made good on its promise of releasing a Hedvig-integrated product.

Commvault on Tuesday launched the next generation of its Hyperscale appliance line -- Hyperscale X. The new backup appliances integrate the scale-out software-defined storage technology of Hedvig, which Commvault acquired in September 2019. It offers data protection for virtualized environments, databases and containers and can scale out and grow as needed. The Hedvig software gives Hyperscale X greater ability to restore from failed nodes than previous Hyperscale devices.

Hyperscale X is available in two models: 2300, with 25 TB to 88 TB of capacity, and 4300, which has 151 TB or 264 TB of capacity.

Although it uses Hedvig technology, Hyperscale X is a backup appliance, not primary storage. It is managed through Commvault Command Center. The Hedvig SDS application remains available as a separate product from Commvault.

Commvault's chief product officer Rajiv Kottomtharayil said Commvault currently has no plans to go into primary storage with Hyperscale. However, the possibility of storage use cases, such as file archiving and virtual machine storage, is being considered.

Commvault also deepened Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform's container support. It now can handle point-in-time recovery via snapshots for containers, as well as volume migration and replication. Hedvig also provides policy automation, allowing admins control over the frequency of snapshotting and migration operations.

Many businesses are still in early stages of container deployment, but vendors and analysts are certain it will take off. As part of that deployment, more businesses are putting critical data in container environments, prompting data protection vendors such as Zerto, Asigra and Veritas to develop ways to back up containers. Hedvig's new capabilities go beyond backup and delve into the Kubernetes data management market currently occupied by vendors such as Portworx and Kasten.

"The interest in containers is absolutely ramping up," Commvault chief marketing officer Chris Powell said. "They know it's coming."

Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said Commvault is following industry trends with Hedvig's deeper container support and the launch of Hyperscale X. Containers and data management are hot topics right now. He said many of the newer backup vendors, including Actifio and Cohesity, differentiated themselves from traditional backup vendors with converged secondary storage, which unifies backup, archiving, replication and other tasks on a single platform. Commvault followed that path when it launched Hyperscale in 2017 using Red Hat Gluster as a scale-out file system. Hedvig software replaces Red Hat Gluster in Hyperscale X, and that will become the flagship Hyperscale product."They're reacting to the reality of the market," Bertrand said of Commvault. "I see them as a very serious contender going after the new kids on the block."

Along with the Hedvig-based products, Commvault decoupled its Disaster Recovery software from its Backup & Recovery application. The products are now sold separately, although they also can be bought together as Commvault Data Protection.

Don Foster, vice president of storage solutions at Commvault, said this separation came about because other data protection vendors have similar standalone offerings for DR, and Commvault's managed service provider partners wanted DR as a separate product. This would allow customers who only want DR to avoid having to buy the entire backup and recovery offering. Foster added that this isn't a new approach, as the components within the Commvault Activate suite -- file storage optimization, data governance and e-discovery and compliance -- were always sold separately.

Commvault had developed a reputation of having a large and complex portfolio of tools that don't necessarily work together, which it tried to fix by consolidating down to four products in July 2018. Bertrand said at this point, it's not a bad idea to spin off portions of those products to target a specific need if the market opportunity arises, which is what's happening with DR.

"A lot of people want to solve problems with the best tool they can get, but they also don't want to have too many tools," Bertrand said.

Bertrand added that it could be a way to generate more entry points into the rest of the Commvault suite, as it's not unthinkable for a customer who just wants DR to eventually look at backup as well.