During the last VMworld Europe we met and interviewed Robbie Wright, Commonvault Senior Manager Product Marketing, who was there with the full team in charge of the development of the products of the american company. We had a nice chat with him.

How would you define your product line? Isn’t it reductive to talk about just backup solutions?

Yes, lots of people identify us with backups, but Commonvault’s solution is so broad and advanced that we can define it better by using three terms: data protection, management and compliance. In particular, we believe that the idea of backup itself is obsolete, here at VMworld we are speaking of Workload Portability, the opportunity of transferring the entire workload among different cloud services. The whole infrastructure becomes a single thing for us.

Can your platform manage, for instance, data restore and disaster recovery leveraging cloud services?

Sure, we currently support Azure and Amazon Web Services: we can use these services directly as restore destination in a Disaster Recovery scenario. Our suite fills most needs, and not just for virtual devices: we do support physical endpoints and the protection of 25 different public clouds and more than 300 service providers.

Do you support multi-tenant architecture natively? Can an MSP or cloud provider choose your solutions?

Sure, our Simpana platform has been designed specifically to manage multi-tenant architectures of Service Providers that need to protect data with policies, scheduling and different characteristics for each tenant hosted.
Network management has been specifically planned to support this kind of solution. The various elements of the software, Proxies, CommServe management server, Web Console and the other elements can be placed into different networks and they come with a protection against network attacks.
Less experienced Managed Service Providers and Cloud Providers, by choosing our solution, can leverage our broad documentation to configure properly these services and get protected against several security-related problems.

How does your licensing work? Is it socket or VM based?

Our platform is extremely flexible in terms of licensing: we can handle licences on a per Socket, VM or even on a Storage Capacity basis. Clients can choose the most appropriate licensing according to their own platform and situation.