Commvault Extends SaaS-Based Data Protection Platform to Kubernetes

Commvault during the online KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 conference announced it has extended the platforms supported by its Metallic software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing backup and recovery to include Kubernetes.

Manoj Nair, general manager of Metallic for Commvault, says as organizations shift toward SaaS platforms to manage data protection, it’s clear they want to employ the same platform to back up virtual machines and Kubernetes versus having to deploy and manage a separate platform.

Commvault, to encourage IT organizations down that path, will make the Kubernetes Backup component of its Metallic VM & Kubernetes Backup service available for free to any organization that purchases 10 or more virtual machine subscriptions by May 18, 2021, for the lifetime of their subscription.

The Mettalic SaaS service has already been validated to support for Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and VMware Tanzu. The platform also supports Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Native Azure Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solution (AVS) and VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS.

Nair says with more IT teams working from home to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are relying more on cloud-based platforms to manage IT. Those IT teams are also being tasked to reduce recovery times to minutes as organizations become more dependent on stateful cloud-native applications to drive digital business transformation initiatives, he notes.

The Mettalic platform can be accessed either via a graphical user interface or incorporated into DevOps workflows via an application programming interface (API) as different IT teams within the same organization see fit, says Nair.

In addition, Nair notes IT teams need tools that make it easier to migrate data across virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters residing both inside and out of cloud computing environments.
Commvault in addition to its Metallic SaaS platform also provides IT teams with access to data protection appliances that can be deployed on-premises. Commvault last year also acquired Hedvig, a provider of a software-defined data storage platform that also supports Kubernetes.

As the amount of data stored on Kubernetes clusters starts to increase, more attention is starting to be paid to finding ways to protect that data. While Kubernetes clusters are designed to be highly resilient, there’s still plenty of opportunity for data to be lost whenever a cluster might fail. Data residing on Kubernetes clusters is not immnune to ransomware attacks, which Nair notes are easier to thwart when a pristine copy of the data on a Kubernetes cluster also resides in the cloud.

Regardless of the data protection approach, the days when IT teams had the luxury of allocating hours, sometimes even days, to backup and recovery are at an end. Application owners expect IT teams to be able to recover from any disruption instantly. As such, the requirements of a data protection platform for modern application environments have fundamentally changed once and for all.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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