CommVault’s Simpana product line focuses on Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) of which data protection is one component.
Commvault Simpana has agents for a variety of platforms and applications.
CommVault’s Simpana has a low software-only entry price if features like virtualization, deduplication, and bare metal are not required to protect your environment.
Simpana is ideal for storage specialists who want to focus on backup and integrate multiple storage, networking, and software components in order to stitch together the solution that meets their needs. This approach is the opposite of Unitrends’ value proposition which wants you to focus on your business instead on backup.
Array-based snapshots
In version 10.0, CommVault Simpana added a ContentStore indexing and search capability for stored data.
Primary Disadvantages of CommVault Simpana:
CommVault licensing fees are expensive for growing businesses due to the licensing model – charging on a per-feature, per-client, per-operating system, and the like basis.
CommVault tends to have a lower ROI (Return on Investment) and higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) due to higher operational expenses of putting together, managing, and monitoring servers, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software.
CommVault offers a capacity based license that is extremely expensive.
The non-integrated nature of CommVault Simpana leads to finger-pointing among the server, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software vendors when a problem occurs.
Setting up Simpana for deduplication can be difficult in terms of balancing the software requirements with the hardware and operating system requirements of the system upon which the Simpana software will operate.
Care must be taken when performing source-level deduplication (or for that matter, compression and/or encryption) using Simpana on systems because of the load it places on those systems.
Integrated fixed/rotational archiving is not supported by Simpana.
The enterprise version of Simpana’s critical CommServe component runs on Windows. Putting data protection software on Windows servers dramatically increases susceptibility to malware attacks.
CommVault Simpana’s focus on Information Lifecycle Management makes their core product difficult to use and complicated, thereby increasing the TCO.
Most installs require costly professional services engagements.
Different software packages for laptop/desktop, server, and disaster recovery.
Installation of CommVault is not intuitive and requires previous experience or CommVault professional services
Initial configuration, setup and installation is complex causing time to use delays
