This March, Commvault released the latest and greatest updates for their industry-leading platforms. These new features and enhancements provide even greater value and innovation for our customers.
Continue to read about the latest enhancements made.
Cloud Workload Protection
Amazon/AWS
Amazon EBS volume attach restores now offer customization
You can now customize Amazon EBS volume type, encryption keys, throughput, and IOPS during an Amazon EBS volume restore. You can tune your recovered EBS volumes to meet your security, performance, and cost objectives. You can intelligently recover your instances and volumes with original settings or customize on a per-volume basis. True cyber resilience includes the ability to perform reliable cost-aware recovery testing, which custom EBS volume recovery delivers.
Recover to Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts
You can now recover Amazon EC2 instances to Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts. Dedicated Hosts are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and can also help you meet compliance requirements.
Azure
Adding Crash Consistency to Azure Restore Points
Crash Consistency is a new feature being introduced by Azure to enhance the Restore Point APIs. By enabling crash consistency, Azure empowers applications that do not support VSS snapshots to create synchronized disk points across all managed volumes. This ensures a reliable and consistent restoration of data, improving the overall user experience and minimizing data loss risks.
Disk level customization for full VM restores in Azure
Azure now allows Azure Administrators to customize disk level settings for full VM restores. This means administrators have the ability to change characteristics such as storage accounts and performance metrics when performing a full VM restore in Azure. This provides flexibility and control over the recovered disks, optimizing them to meet specific requirements and enhancing overall performance.
Perform Rule-Based Auto-Discovery and Configuration for Azure PostgreSQL and Azure MySQL
You can automatically discover Azure PostgreSQL and Azure MySQL databases in the Commvault environment based on region, rules, tags, and regular expressions. This simplifies database management and enables newly created databases to be automatically configured for protection.
Enhancements to the Protection of Azure Object Storage and Azure Table Storage, and Azure Object Storage Discovery (Coming in April 2025)
In this release, we have made the following enhancements to the protection of Azure Object Storage and Azure Table Storage, as well as Azure Object Storage discovery:
- If a storage account no longer meets the specified discovery rules, it will be disabled from backup until it meets the discovery rules again.
- If a storage account is deleted in Azure, backup jobs will be disabled to avoid failures.
When creating discovery rules, you can preview what will be included to ensure the rules are set correctly.
- Added more granular controls to filter individual tables with Azure Table Storage backups.
- Fixed an issue that would mark synthetic fulls as failed if there was no data in the incremental jobs between synths.
Cloud Rebuild
Support for Cross-Subscription Recovery of Azure Cloud Configurations (Coming in April 2025)
Customers can now recover an Azure Cloud configuration to a different subscription within the same Azure tenant.
Introducing Cloud Rewind APIs (Coming in April 2025)
Commvault is excited to introduce Cloud Rewind APIs for Azure Cloud Connection, Cloud Assembly, and Recovery. These APIs offer a streamlined approach to managing Azure subscriptions at scale, ensuring efficient protection of your cloud applications.
Backup and Recovery Support for Google Cloud Cross-Projects (Coming in April 2025)
Backup and recovery for Google Cloud Cross-Projects allows you to easily configure backup and recovery of cloud assemblies into alternate destination projects. This feature provides the ability to quickly recover from ransomware attacks and major deployment errors.
Google
Preserve Disk Name During Restore
Commvault Cloud will now preserve disk names when restoring Google Cloud VMs or persistent disks. Previously, the disk name was inherited from the source snapshot. Retaining the original disk name ensures that automated cloud operations continue to function seamlessly for restored VMs.
Protect And Recover Network Service Tier Configuration
Commvault Cloud protects and recovers your configured network service tier on Google Cloud VMs. Network Service Tiers allow you to optimize connectivity between your Google Cloud instances and external systems—choose the Premium Tier for performance or the Standard Tier for cost efficiency. Commvault preserves your network optimization preferences during VM recovery and replication, when selecting your VM’s external IP.
Recover Individual Persistent Disks From Protected Virtual Machines
You can now recover individual persistent disks from a protected Google Cloud Virtual Machine. Persistent disks provide high-performance block storage for any workload. Disk recovery allows you to restore only the disks you require, speeding your recovery time. You can attach your restored disk to a new or an existing Google Cloud VM.
Other
Adaptive Live Browse file-level restore
You can now perform a Live Browse recovery without having to select a preferred access node. Adaptive Live Browse accelerates recovery by autoconfiguring the best access node at runtime. This enhancement streamlines cloud operations by removing manual processes from file-level recovery.
Adaptive Live Browse is available during guest file recovery from Amazon, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Broadcom VMware Virtual Machines.
VM Conversion to AWS and Azure Now Supports Resource Tagging
You can now add, remove, update, and delete resource tags applied to compute instances created during multi-cloud VM conversion. Previously, there was no way for customers to apply resource tags during migration. Now, Amazon EC2 instances and Azure virtual machines can have resource tags customized during recovery, replication, and migration activities. This enables you to leverage your existing tag-based automated operations and security operations in cloud, ensuring efficient and secure cloud operations.
HotAdd recovery for large volumes
With the HotAdd recovery feature, customers can restore large volumes quickly and efficiently. This feature utilizes HotAdd technology to improve restore performance, making it easier to recover data from large file systems.
Network-Optimized Backups for Kubernetes
The Kubernetes agent has been upgraded to enhance backup performance and reliability, especially for large objects such as persistent volumes. Now, backup data flows directly from the Commvault worker pod to MediaAgents and optionally to Cloud Storage via the Storage Accelerator. This reduces the load on the Kubernetes API server and increases reliability of backup operations.
Commvault Cloud Platform
API support for Multi-geo Customers (Coming in April 2025)
Multi-geo customers can now easily route API requests to the desired geo (ring) through the API gateway utilizing a single API service account.
Create S3 Storage as Local Storage for On-prem Workloads (Coming April 2025)
Users can now easily configure S3 local storage as the primary backup destination for their on-premises workloads directly from the backup configuration wizard.
Access Token Support via Commvault API Gateway
Commvault Cloud now supports API-based configurations using Access Tokens instead of usernames and passwords. This enhancement streamlines the authentication process, offering improved security and convenience for end customers accessing API services.
Assess the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Hyperscaler Resources for VM Backups Using Commvault Cloud
The new Cost Assessment dashboard offers a comprehensive view of cost savings you can realize by backing up your virtualized workloads with Commvault Cloud. The dashboard provides a comparative summary of storage costs between Commvault Cloud and other cloud-native vendors, enabling you to make informed decisions and optimize your cloud resource usage.
Introduced Usage Report for Cloud Rewind Subscription (Coming in April 2025)
Commvault is excited to introduce the Usage Report for Cloud Rewind subscription. This report allows you to conveniently view daily and hourly subscription usage directly from the Commvault Cloud SaaS Command Center.
On-Prem Protection
Backup and Restore Proxmox VE VMs
Commvault now protects VMs that are hosted in the Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE). This feature allows Proxmox administrators to automate the process of backing up their VMs while helping enable data integrity and continuous availability by quickly restoring VMs in case of hardware failure, software issues, or accidental data loss.
Proxmox support in SaaS
With Proxmox support in SaaS, Commvault users can now configure Proxmox VE directly through the SaaS portal without needing assistance. This empowers users to easily manage their Proxmox VE environment, improving efficiency and allowing for quick adjustments as needed without the need for technical intervention.
Azure SQL and Azure Managed Instance enhancements
Backups create a temporary application-consistent copy of the Azure SQL and Azure SQL Managed Instance database for exporting the data. By default, the copy database is created with the same pricing tier as the source database. You can now choose the pricing tier to be used for the copy database by configuring the Azure SQL purchasing model in the subclient properties window.
By default, for databases residing inside an elastic pool, the copy is created inside the pool. However, when you configure a pricing tier, the copy is created with the chosen pricing tier, outside the elastic pool. This allows you to control the resources assigned to the database copy, which in turn can help you reduce Azure costs. Azure SQL Managed Instance restore performance has been improved by about 30%.
Recovery Orchestration
Auto Recovery Trial in Commvault Cloud SaaS Control Plane (Coming in April 2025)
Auto Recovery ensures that your critical data and systems are automatically replicated to a secondary site in the event of any unforeseen disruptions. With this service, you can have peace of mind knowing that your valuable information will always be safe and quickly recoverable, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. Customers can now test Auto Recovery with 10VMs, 1-month trial subscription. This new feature allows customers to evaluate the service, test its features, and make an informed decision before purchasing.
Periodic Replication Support in Auto Recovery SaaS (Coming in April 2025)
Now Auto Recovery as a Service feature offers periodic replication support, allowing customers to protect their data and applications at hourly Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in case of a disaster. With options like hot site and warm site, customers can ensure high availability of their systems. Compatibility with various platforms like VMware, Azure and Hyper-V offers flexibility in choosing the right infrastructure for their needs. Customers can create recovery groups from existing VM groups, perform recovery orchestration using existing backup copies, and conduct point-in-time recovery at both the recovery group and VM levels, with the flexibility to choose the recovery point for test failover and failover.
Restoring File Server (Network File Shares) Files into Azure Cleanroom (Coming in May 2025)
You can now restore files from file servers (Windows and NAS) into Azure Files. This facilitates recovery of both virtual machines and file servers into an Azure Cleanroom environment. The restored files can be mounted to the respective VMs based on the original configuration, ensuring easy accessibility of the files. This provides a seamless and efficient way to restore and access important files in the Azure Cleanroom environment.
SaaS Applications and Active Directory
Active Directory Forest Recovery
Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition enables organizations to quickly recover from catastrophic ransomware attacks and irreversible forest corruption. Commvault Cloud orchestrates the full forest recovery of Active Directory, restoring domain controllers in parallel to minimize downtime and disruption to the business.
Domain controllers can be restored to new VMs to confirm any artifacts of ransomware are eliminated.
Critical AD hygiene steps—like seizing FSMO roles and adjusting the RID pool—are automatically handled at the appropriate points during the recovery to help ensure that the restored directory is free from corruption.
The runbook view gives you full control of the forest recovery plan and simplifies the task of regular disaster recovery testing.
The topology view visually illustrates the domains and domain controllers, enabling you to better understand your AD architecture and make informed decisions about the forest recovery process.
Storage Solutions
Air Gap Protect for AWS – Early Access
Air Gap Protect is a fully managed storage service for your clean backups, both frequent access and infrequent access. Air Gap Protect in AWS is built on Amazon S3, with industry-leading security, scalability, and performance. Your backups are immutable by default, for protection against accidental or malicious deletion. Commvault keeps your backups always encrypted with SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS encryption. Manual configuration is not required for Air Gap Protect. Commvault takes the operational burden of provisioning and securing your critical backups from cyber threats and bad actors.
Whether you're looking to upgrade your existing data protection system or deploy new technology to help protect your organisation against the latest cyber threats, COOLSPIRiT has the expertise and solutions you need to keep your organisation's data safe and secure.
Our GUARDiAN range of products make the perfect choice for protecting the lifeblood of your business. Learn more here.
To find out more, contact our expert team today at hello@coolspirit.co.uk or call 01246 454222.
