Commvault Hyperscale™ Appliance

Summary

Commvault’s HyperScale™ Technology is an on-premise scale-out storage solution that offers integrated data protection and data management, available as a turnkey appliance or through certified reference architectures with leading hardware providers. Commvault HyperScale leverages the breadth and depth of the Commvault data management platform which has been in the industry for over two decades and continues to be rated as one of the top data management products in the industry.

Product Mission

The migration of many workloads to the public cloud is leading to a transformation in enterprise IT. And while some workloads are ripe for migration to the public cloud, a good portion of workloads continue to remain on-premises. Companies are striving to provide cloud-like capabilities on-premises. The rise in private clouds has met the desire for an integrated solution that allows them to have computed, storage, and application services with unprecedented elasticity, scale, resiliency, availability.

But for many companies, the most important problem is not building a complete internal private cloud, but rather to find a way to affordably store the ocean of data that is arriving from numerous sources. The scale-up storage arrays and SANs were designed to deliver high performance for a crucial subset of data used by mission-critical applications. It quickly breaks the bank to attempt to store machine data, server logs, images, IoT sensor data, and dozens of other types of data on a scale-up storage infrastructure.

Putting all of this data in the public cloud has implications for ongoing costs and for how the data can be used and transferred from place to place. Many organizations like the idea of having their own scale-out storage infrastructure on-premises. But the most common example of that, the Hadoop File System, is a file system for analytic-level, second-tier storage. It was not designed to be a fully managed, enterprise quality file system.

Commvault’s HyperScale Appliance is a system designed to meet the need for a truly scalable storage architecture to an enterprise running an on-premises scale-out infrastructure. By adding the HyperScale Appliance to your storage portfolio, companies create the right place to put a growing class of machine, IoT, and otherwise big data that can scale out rather than scaling up. Additionally, it allows companies to capture data from all sources used for many different workloads and centralize it for greater efficiency, utilization, and management. One of the key strengths of the HyperScale appliance is that it inherits data protection and data management capabilities from the Commvault platform.

To understand what Commvault is attempting to achieve with the Commvault’s HyperScale Appliance, it is vital to make a distinction between a file system and a data management platform. The Commvault HyperScale Appliances are not just file systems but comprehensive data management platforms that allow the data stored to be governed and managed using Commvault’s enterprise-class capabilities. In this way, the problems associated with data lakes that become data swamps are avoided. You can tell what you have stored, who is using it and can move the data or archive it as needed.

The Commvault HyperScale Appliances are a hyper-converged data management solution built upon Commvault’s industry-leading technology that tightly integrates server, storage, and full lifecycle data management into a single platform across the data center and the cloud. The entry point for the HyperScale Appliance is affordable for mid-sized customers and can easily scale to multiple petabyte installations.

The Commvault HyperScale capabilities are offered two ways:

  • As an integrated appliance solution built, sold, and supported by Commvault.
  • As Commvault HyperScale Software running on hardware from leading technology companies for which Commvault has published and certified reference architectures.

Business Benefits

In terms of core capabilities, the HyperScale Appliance provides:

  • Seamless scalability: The ability to start small and scale dynamically, with simple hardware expansion options.
  • Implementation choices: The elimination of lock-in and the ability to lower costs because functionality can be implemented as an integrated hardware appliance or as a software layer on numerous different types of hardware.
  • Modern product lifecycle: The product can be updated and expanded incrementally avoiding large-scale fork-lift upgrades associated with older enterprise systems and scale-up storage infrastructure.
  • Flexible pricing: Pay as you grow through a subscription model
  • OpEx savings: The integrated appliance structure means that there is less need for a specialist to babysit and tune the storage and that operations are streamlined and cost less.
  • Comprehensive data management: All your data managed across primary, secondary and cloud tiers from one single pane of glass.
  • Protection: Built-in resiliency and security ensure your data is safe.
  • Broad platform support: Support for over 200 platforms (applications, databases, hypervisors, OS, cloud providers, storage arrays, etc.) for broadest workload coverage.
  • Smooth lifecycle management: You can deploy, manage, and support your data architecture with less disruption.

Product Capabilities

Technology Architecture

Just like cloud providers or Hadoop clusters, Commvault’s HyperScale Appliance uses commodity hardware to implement a scale-out architecture to readily deliver cost-effective, cloud-like data management services or secondary storage.

Building on the established Commvault ecosystem, the HyperScale appliance provides a unified data management platform and scale-out architecture to support applications, databases, VMs, and public cloud providers needed by enterprises to successfully deliver data management services to their end-users. It combines all four Gartner recommended elements of a Hyperconverged Infrastructure, including:

  1. Consolidation of computing, storage, and the network
  2. Virtualization of the physical layer
  3. Built on commodity hardware
  4. Single, unified management platform

Key Capabilities

Here are some key capabilities of the solution:

  • Broad array snapshot integration: Commvault offers the industry’s broadest support for integrating with and exploiting storage hardware platform snapshots, with support for over two dozen of the leading storage arrays.
  • Instant data access: Restore-less access to data copies by users and applications using standard interfaces from all managed copies including cloud copies.
  • High-performance deduplication: Partitioned deduplication on high-speed flash storage with distributed processing across multiple nodes for optimal performance to meet RPO/RTO needs.
  • Scalability without disruption: Companies can add capacity or performance whenever they need it, with an easy scale-out architecture. This significantly lowers costs in the long-term, as you’re only paying for what you’re using.
  • Daily administration: A simple intuitive graphical user interface designed for an IT generalist to quickly monitor performance, set data protection policies, and enable self-service capabilities.

Product Use Cases

The Commvault HyperScale Appliance can support a wide variety of use cases. Here are some of the most common:

  • Simple data protection: reduce the time and effort your staff spends managing, patching, and supporting traditional, build-your-own data protection point products. Also, greater end-user efficiency is achieved through automation and self-service capabilities.
  • Consolidate multiple point products: streamline your data protection environment with a single, unified solution to protect, manage, and use your data wherever it exists; from end-points to on-premises and into the cloud.
  • Greater scalability and availability: deliver cloud-like agility and resiliency for on-premises data and applications through Commvault software and a scale-out infrastructure. Together it eliminates the cost, complexity, and risk of forklift upgrades.

Author: Dan Woods

My mission: Find technology for Early Adopters. Follow me on Twitter @danwoodsearly and on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/danwoodsearly/. I am a CTO, writer, and consultant. For tech vendors, I help explain their technology. For users, I help find, select, and deploy new solutions that have explosive business value. I love to speak and share ideas.